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Hillary's History: What the Media Overlooked

HOURS AFTER Sen. Hillary Clinton's memoir, Living History hit the bookstores, the media saturated the airwaves with her reaction to her husband's confession about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Readers are obsessed by the details of her personal life and that's what most reviewers have also emphasized. But what this fascination with gossip fails to emphasize is that her real legacy as first lady was using her enormous prestige to help redefine women's rights as human rights.

After her efforts to reshape national health policy failed, she was blamed for the backlash that swept in many conservative Republicans in the midterm 1994 elections, and gave rise to Newt Gingrich and his "Contract with America. " As a result, Clinton knew she could no longer assume a public role in shaping domestic policy.

So she moved her political passions onto the global stage. In her book, she writes, "I had been working on women's and children's issues in the United States for 25 years and, although women in our own country had made gains economically and politically, the same could not be said for the vast majority of women in the world. Yet virtually no one who could attract media attention was speaking out on their behalf."

As she traveled to different continents, Clinton hoped to "stress the correlation between women's progress and a country's social and economic status." In Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, Pakistan and Thailand she met women's groups who were already redefining such "customs" as wife beating, genital mutilation, dowry deaths and honor killings as human rights crimes.

For the most part, the American media ignored or trivialized what she did and said in these distant countries. We saw photographs of her and Chelsea riding atop an elephant, but we didn't read that she had denounced crimes against half of humanity. We saw pictures of her in elegant Indian saris and colorful African robes, but we didn't know that she had advocated micro-loans to advance women's economic independence.

During these exhausting travels, Clinton's words and presence helped publicize an international movement that sought to transform existing global policies on development, population control and human rights so that they would address the needs and rights of women and children.

By 1995, when China hosted the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women, Clinton was ready to use her prestige to advance women's rights as human rights. "What do you want to accomplish?" asked Madeleine Albright, who would soon be appointed secretary of state. "I want to push the envelope as far as I can on behalf of women and girls," answered Clinton.

And she did. In Beijing, she delivered a daring 21-minute speech that has since turned into a manifesto for women's human rights. "I believe that on the eve of a new millennium," she began, "it is time to break our silence. It is time for us to say . . . that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights."

She then spoke about the need to promote education, health care, economic independence, legal rights and political participation for all women. "If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference," she said, "let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all."

When she finished, delegates leaped to their feet and gave her a standing ovation. It was a speech that could not be ignored. The next day, the New York Times editorialized that the speech "may have been her finest moment in public life."

So far, reviewers and the media have ignored this historic chapter in her life, which is extensively described in her book. Yet this is the real living history of her life as our first lady.


This article first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and is reprinted with permission.