Ritu Sharma, president of the anti-poverty group Women Thrive Worldwide, said she already sees the results of Clinton’s efforts in the bureaucracy. When Sharma’s staff recently attended a meeting about a new agricultural aid program, she said, one State Department official joked, “We have to integrate women — or we’re going to be fired.” – Clinton Puts Spotlight On Women’s Issues
Hillary Rodham Clinton is putting her star power to historic use when it comes to women’s issues around the globe. However, not even Lawrence Wilkerson quite understands the importance of what Clinton is doing: “You might be right, in the narrow sense of women in that country or region need to be empowered, but you’re saying something inimical to other U.S. interests.”
Women’s rights are harmful to other U.S. interests? Typical short-sided patriarchy.
If the U.S. is ever going to inspire a real shift in countries around the world that have histories of keeping women down, it will take someone of Clinton’s star power backed by a president who clearly gets the importance of women to a country’s stabilization. This includes a nation’s priorities that take focus when women are involved in policy. Clinton knows this is the foundation of progress of any developing nation.
However, supporting women’s rights, but also standing against sexual violence, rape and honor killings, to name just three horrific practices around the world, in no way precludes engaging these same countries on economic, environmental, national security and other matters on separate tracks. It’s the act of talking tough, while doing what’s practical and can get done at the same time.
There is no reason to stay silent while heinous crimes are perpetrated against women. Mr. Wilkerson is simply wrong.
Via the Washington Post:
Clinton is not the first female secretary of state, but neither of her predecessors had her impact abroad as a pop feminist icon. On nearly every foreign trip, she has met with women — South Korean students, Israeli entrepreneurs, Iraqi war widows, Chinese civic activists. Clinton mentioned “women” or “woman” at least 450 times in public comments in her first five months in the position, twice as often as her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice.
Clinton’s interest in global women’s issues is deeply personal, a mission she adopted as first lady after the stinging defeat of her health-care reform effort in 1994. For months, she kept a low profile. Then, in September 1995, she addressed the U.N. women’s conference in Beijing, strongly denouncing abuses of women’s rights. Delegates jumped to their feet in applause.
“It was a transformational moment for her,” said Melanne Verveer, who has worked closely with Clinton since her White House days.
Ms. Verveer is the State Department’s first global ambassador for women’s affairs.
Covering Clinton’s Africa trip from afar, there has been plenty of news made and insults delivered (including intentional slights), even as Clinton travels into war torn parts of the Congo, talking about sexual violence and rape in a way that no other secretary of state has dared to do before.
Championing the rights of women, while exposing the dangers women still face in countries around the world, has been Hillary’s cause for over a decade, as her roles as first lady, then secretary of state, have shown.
What Clinton offers to women of the world is the ultimate foundational meaning of feminism; something that goes well beyond America’s borders and the notion of the right’s silly “post-feminism” rhetoric, or for that matter, younger women on the left that think feminism is no longer valid. Preferring instead a short-sided vision that ends at our coasts and borders.
Amidst Clinton’s outreach towards women and condemnation of violence against them, however it manifests, is the dueling realization that diplomatic engagement on other issues, even amidst half measures towards human rights, must continue.
To some that’s a conflict, which is maybe why Mr. Wilkerson sees women’s issues as less important when seen through the prism of Pakistan, for instance. But what is clearly evident in countries that succeed is that women are respected, valued and made a central part of the country’s focus, which happens only when archaic and ingrained cultural practices that target women are challenged. Clinton’s heroic mission to challenge these practices and continue what she started over a decade ago in China was in full view in Africa.
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