I know a lot of Hillary supporters refer to her speech at the UN Women's conference in Beijing in 1995. So, today, I decided to take a closer look at the whole speech, especially in the context of Senator Obama's remark on abortion and the need to respect the anti-choice position (just like we should respect and understand anti-LGBT positions). Again, remember, this speech was delivered 13 years ago, on one of these trips that Hillary took where she just shook hands with officials and watched little girls dance (snark). The audio is embedded below, otherwise, I selected a few excerpts (the full text is here, with video as well).
As usual, with Senator Clinton, this is a substantial speech. It's not just all touchy-feely. It's about real social conditions and real policies. And in addition, Hillary did not spare anyone in that speech. She was not conceding to misogyny, and preaching the respect for the "other side".
"There are some who question the reason for this conference. Let them listen to the voices of women in their homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces. There are some who wonder whether the lives of women and girls matter to economic and political progress around the globe. Let them look at the women gathered here and at Huairou -- the homemakers and nurses, the teachers and lawyers, the policymakers and women who run their own businesses. It is conferences like this that compel governments and peoples everywhere to listen, look, and face the world’s most pressing problems. Wasn’t it after all -- after the women’s conference in Nairobi ten years ago that the world focused for the first time on the crisis of domestic violence?"
In other words, no Kos theory of "let us elect Democrats and you ladies will benefit indirectly." Women's issues have to be addressed AS gender issues and not as just by-products of larger socio-economic and political mechanisms. Any discussion of social and economic policy has to take gender as a foundational factor.
"What we are learning around the world is that if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish. If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations do as well. That is why every woman, every man, every child, every family, and every nation on this planet does have a stake in the discussion that takes place here."
And here again is where even progressives often get it wrong. It is not a case of "if we put in place progressive policies, women will do better", the correct causality is "women-targeted policies will improve EVERYBODY's living conditions." And, incidentally, there are ample statistics to support every point that HRC is making here regarding education, literacy, health, poverty and violence.
"The great challenge of this conference is to give voice to women everywhere whose experiences go unnoticed, whose words go unheard. Women comprise more than half the word’s population, 70% of the world’s poor, and two-thirds of those who are not taught to read and write. We are the primary caretakers for most of the world’s children and elderly. Yet much of the work we do is not valued -- not by economists, not by historians, not by popular culture, not by government leaders."
Again, I am always amazed at HRC's capacity to pack enormous amounts of accurate information in a few sentences but these few sentences just want to make you go "yeah, she gets it!". The invisibility of women, the lack of recognition for the second (and third) shift, the systematic devaluation of women's work (paid or unpaid), the lack of economic attention to the informal economy (where most workers are women) as legitimate economic activity (something against which Yunus also fumed). The bottom line is, the world economy rests on the backs of women, and especially women of the Global South, women of color, indigenous women, who fuel the economic growth of the fast-growing economies of the South without social, economic or political recognition. But certainly not for lack of activism in all these domains. Cases in point...
"At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth, raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries. Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or treated. They are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by poverty and economic deprivation. They are being denied the right to go to school by their own fathers and brothers. They are being forced into prostitution, and they are being barred from the bank lending offices and banned from the ballot box."
What she is discussing here is a theme that runs through her campaign (and that she emphasizes in her current campaign): she wants to make the unprivileged visible to all (especially the select attendees of a UN conference); and not just visible in an abstract, overgeneralized fashion, but in a very specific way that reflects the plurality of conditions of the world's women, which is why she later states "We need to understand there is no one formula for how women should lead our lives." There is no relativism here but a recognition that feminists' struggle are different. The social structure of privileges make is so that white middle class highly educated feminists from the Western countries are more likely to have a bullhorn to make themselves heard than women from the Global South. So, we should be careful with policy prescriptions that do not take different feminist agendas into account.
"Our goals for this conference, to strengthen families and societies by empowering women to take greater control over their own destinies, cannot be fully achieved unless all governments -- here and around the world -- accept their responsibility to protect and promote internationally recognized human rights. The international community has long acknowledged and recently reaffirmed at Vienna that both women and men are entitled to a range of protections and personal freedoms, from the right of personal security to the right to determine freely the number and spacing of the children they bear. No one -- No one should be forced to remain silent for fear of religious or political persecution, arrest, abuse, or torture."
Emphasis mine (with big applauses on the audio). And this one is non-negotiable. There is no alternative viewpoint that deserves respect, Senator Obama. There is one acceptable viewpoint, the one delineated above, the one that treats women as full social participants, the one that sees women as moral agents, as autonomous beings capable of making their own decisions. There is no other acceptable position. And if some people don't like it, like Elton John said, the hell with them. And then, comes these statements, each of which got major applause, the emphases are HRC's in her speech:
"It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.
It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution for human greed -- and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice should no longer be tolerated.
It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.
It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.
It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own relatives.
It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.
It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will."
And note the swipe at China. Can anyone deny that this woman will face down dictators and other rogues and prevail?
"Let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all."
YES! No compromise! No wishy-washy fauxgressive Kumbaya! Progressivism IS feminism, without qualifications.
Cross-posted at the Global Sociology Blog
Note: my own writing on gender and globalization, see here.