Hillary Rodham Clinton’s
Historic Speech at U.N. 4th World Conference on Women Plenary Session
Mrs Hillary Clinton’s Speech on international women’s Right which was delivered
5 September 1995, at Beijing, China which holds good even today;
Over the past
25 years, I have worked persistently on issues relating to women, children, and
families.
Over the past
two and a half years, I've had the opportunity to learn more about the
challenges facing women in my own country and around the world.
I have met
women in South Africa who helped lead the struggle to end apartheid and are now
helping to build a new democracy I have met women in India and Bangladesh who
are taking out small loans to buy milk cows, or rickshaws, or thread in order
to create a livelihood for themselves and their families. I have met the
doctors and nurses in Belarus and Ukraine who are trying to keep children alive
in the aftermath of Chernobyl.
Women's Play a Dominant Role in Everybody's Life
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.
I want to speak
up for mothers who are fighting for good schools, safe neighborhoods, clean
air, and clean airwaves; for older women, some of them widows, who find that,
after raising their families, their skills and life experiences are not valued
in the marketplace; for women who are working all night as nurses, hotel
clerks, or fast food chefs so that they can be at home during the day with their
children;
Empowering Women's Rights
Our goals
through 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.
Tragically,
women are most often the ones whose human rights are violated. Even now, in the
late 20th century, the rape of women continues to be used as an instrument of
armed conflict. Women and children make up a large majority of the world’s
refugees. And when women are excluded from the political process, they become
even more vulnerable to abuse.
Will Fight for Women's Rights Endlessly
- 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.
Women must
enjoy the rights to participate fully in the social and political lives of
their countries, if we want freedom and democracy to thrive and endure. It is
indefensible that many women in nongovernmental organizations who wished to
participate in this conference have not been able to attend -- or have been
prohibited from fully taking part.
In USA, we recently celebrated the 75th anniversary of Women’s
Suffrage. It took 150 years after the signing of our Declaration of
Independence for women to win the right to vote. It took 72 years of organized
struggle, before that
happened, on the part of many courageous women and men.
Now it is the
time to act on behalf of women everywhere. If we take bold steps to better the
lives of women, we will be taking bold steps to better the lives of children
and families too. Families rely on mothers and wives for emotional support and
care. Families rely on women for labor in the home. And increasingly,
everywhere, families rely on women for income needed to raise healthy children
and care for other relatives.
As long as
discrimination and inequities remain so commonplace everywhere in the world, as
long as girls and women are valued less, fed less, fed last, overworked,
underpaid, not schooled, and subjected to violence in and outside their homes
-- the potential of the human family to create a peaceful, prosperous world
will not be realized.
Let every woman is treated with respect and dignity, every boy and girl is loved and cared for
equally, and every family has the hope of a strong and stable future. That is
the work before you. That is the work before all of us who have a vision of the
world we want to see -- for our children and our grandchildren.
