If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks delivered at the Fourth World Conference on Women, September 5, 1995
Standing before representatives from 189 nations, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered these remarks at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, on September 5, 1995. The attendees gave her a thunderous ovation.
“Women’s rights are human rights,” was immediately embraced as an international rallying cry for gender equality. The sentiment, “women’s rights are human rights,” existed before the First Lady’s speech, but never had been voiced so prominently to a global audience. American Rhetoric ranks her speech as 35th out of the 100 most significant American political speeches.
The speech almost didn’t happen. The conference itself was fraught with controversy. Press, politicians, and the public all aired strong opinions. All debated, “Should she even go?”
Hillary Clinton did attend the conference and the rhetoric regarding women's role in global life was reshaped by her words in Beijing.
On December 16, 1991, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly charged the Commission on the Status of Women to select a site for the Fourth World Conference on Women. The Commission had launched the conference series in 1975, with Mexico City as its first locale and had held subsequent conferences in Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985).
The UN stipulated that the next site could not be held in the same region as previous conferences. Austria and China offered to hold the 1995 conference. Seeking an Asian locale, the Commission accepted China’s offer to host in Beijing from September 4th to 15th. China viewed the women’s conference as a valuable opportunity to repair their international image after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
On December 16, 1991, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly charged the Commission on the Status of Women to select a site for the Fourth World Conference on Women. The Commission had launched the conference series in 1975, with Mexico City as its first locale and had held subsequent conferences in Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985).
The UN stipulated that the next site could not be held in the same region as previous conferences. Austria and China offered to hold the 1995 conference. Seeking an Asian locale, the Commission accepted China’s offer to host in Beijing from September 4th to 15th. China viewed the women’s conference as a valuable opportunity to repair their international image after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
The conference would build upon the political agreements achieved at the three previous world conferences, as well as consolidate 50 years of legal advances for women’s equality. The UN asked member states to form delegations to send to the conference. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, chaired the U.S. delegation, with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton appointed as honorary chair.
The choice of China as the host nation for the conference sparked intense criticism. Critics noted the incongruity of advocating for women in a country with widespread human rights abuses, including its one-child policy that forced abortions and sterilizations. Foreign relations between China and the United States were also at a very low point, triggered not only by human rights violations but disagreements over Taiwan and nuclear proliferation.
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton viewed the conference as a potentially potent platform for placing women’s issues at center stage. She considered her attendance critical as First Lady of the United States to attract international press attention to women’s issues worldwide. Writing in her autobiography, she reflected:
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 on their behalf.
Living History, Hillary Rodham Clinton, pg. 299.
The conference’s topics aligned with her concerns on rights for women and children. Women’s rights were treated as an issue outside basic human rights. International conventions protecting human rights too often ignored female civilians and children, treating their rights as an aside. The First Lady sought to inextricably tie human rights to women’s rights.
In the United States, her attendance was hotly debated. Those on the right labeled the conference as “anti-family” and “anti-American,” and those on the left cited concerns over human rights violations. Some members of Congress threatened to block funding for the delegation’s visit.
Representative Bob Barr wrote a letter to President Clinton, criticizing his support for the First Lady’s attendance at the conference. President Clinton directly responded to his letter, rebutting his claims and emphasizing the importance of her attendance.
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton worked with her Deputy Chief of Staff, Melanne Verveer, and the President’s staff to assemble a diverse delegation. They also extensively strategized on how to best advocate for women’s rights without appearing to validate the actions of a country with flagrant human rights abuses.
The speech needed to strike a delicate balance. Although eager for the First Lady to visit the country for the prestige, China’s government was also nervous about her speaking at the conference. If she directly rebuked China for its human rights abuses, she could severely damage the already frayed relations between the United States and China. If she did not address them, her visit would be seen as a major victory for the Chinese government in ignoring their human rights record.
The team also carefully curated who would comprise the delegation. The delegation would represent individuals across a spectrum of political, ethnic, and religious identities to curb domestic accusations of a radical feminist agenda. Then a sudden crisis erupted, threatening the First Lady’s decision to go: China’s arrest of Harry Wu.
A native of China, Harry Wu was a well-known activist committed to exposing China’s human rights violations. In 1960, Wu was imprisoned in a Chinese labor camp for 19 years, where he was starved, beaten, and witnessed the deaths of his fellow prisoners. After his release, he eventually immigrated to the United States for a visiting scholar position at the University of California at Berkeley.
Wu’s life became public when he exposed his firsthand experience of atrocities in Chinese labor camps to several U.S. media outlets. Throughout the 1990s, he routinely returned to China to covertly collect evidence of the brutal torture prisoners endured.
On June 19th, 1995, Wu was arrested for espionage and stealing secret documents after entering China from Kazakhstan. His arrest was not made public until July 8th, then it instantly broke into an international story.
A public outcry for his release ensued. Renewed opposition mounted to the First Lady’s attendance at the conference, and public opinion remained divided. Doubts escalated within the executive branch on whether she should attend.
In an oral history with the Miller Center for Public Affairs, Deputy Chief of Staff Melanne Verveer recounted the building tension in the weeks before the conference:
Harry Wu is in prison and nobody knows what's going to happen vis-a-vis her going. Madeleine Albright is going. The delegation has already left for Beijing.
Verveer recollected a phone conversation she had with the First Lady, quoting her as arguing:
I'm going. Get me a visa. I'm going as my own person. I'm a person. I don't have to go as First Lady. I've done this before and if any of you want to go with me you can decide to go on your own.
Verveer continued:
We, of course, got hysterical, laughing at the thought of her even filling out a visa, but aware of the fact that--It was so symbolic of the exasperation of working a whole year, meeting with people all over the United States to get ready for this, and now literally looking like she's not going to get to go.
In August 1995, China convicted Wu on espionage charges. Instead of imprisoning him, China expelled Wu from the country as punishment. With the Wu controversy settled, National Security Advisor Tony Lake asked President Clinton for final approval for the First Lady to attend the conference.
During a family vacation in Wyoming, the First Lady and the President discussed the pros and cons of her visit. She recounted:
He supported my view that once Wu had been released, the best way to confront the Chinese about human rights was directly, on their turf.
Living History, Hillary Rodham Clinton, pg. 301.
On August 25, 1995, the White House press secretary released a statement, announcing First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton would attend the conference. Attention now turned to what she would say there.
As she flew to China aboard an Air Force jet from an event in Hawaii, the First Lady and her team continued to edit and refine her speech. Already facing enormous pressure, her speech would be the keynote address at the conference.
The First Lady recounted telling Madeleine Albright that,
I want to push the envelope as far as I can on behalf of women and girls.
Living History, Hillary Rodham Clinton, pg. 302.
Together, they worked on strengthening the speech’s emphasis on the cruelties of violent conflicts and war on women and girls. Her team also focused on placing a higher emphasis on defining and affirming human rights.
The First Lady arrived at the China World Hotel on September 5th, 1995 at 1:15 a.m.. In just a little over 12 hours, she would be delivering her headlining speech at the conference’s plenary session – the finishing touches still underway.
Aware that the Chinese government was watching their every move, Verveer recounted: “We'd walk around that hotel room late at night, in a circular fashion, in hopes that the cameras in the ceiling weren't able to catch what was on paper as we were making some final changes.”
The First Lady arrived at the Beijing International Conference Center at 11:15 a.m., one of roughly 17,000 participants at the conference. She first delivered a speech for a smaller session that focused on women and health security just before noon. Later that afternoon, it was finally time for her to deliver her speech in the Plenary Hall.
Conference Director Gertrude Mongella introduced First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to an audience of an estimated 1,500 delegates from around the world. After untold hours preparing for this moment, the First Lady described one aspect that she was unprepared for: stony silence.
That was a curveball that I hadn’t anticipated: as I spoke, there was no response to my words, and I found it difficult to get into a rhythm or gauge the crowd’s reaction because the pauses in my English sentences and paragraphs didn’t coincide with those in the dozens of other languages the delegates were hearing.
Living History, Hillary Rodham Clinton, pg. 304.
Sitting in the audience, Verveer reiterated: “It's not like an American audience, where you get applause if they like it and some grunts if they don't--just nothing. I remember Lissa [Muscatine] saying to me something like, ‘She's not delivering this right.’ It was just so tense.”
The First Lady then reached the core of 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.
If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.
Hillary Clinton, Remarks to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, September 5, 1995.
Her concise litany of injustices against women broke the crowd’s silence. Applause and cheers reverberated throughout the hall. While China was not directly named, it was clear which violations she cited were a direct condemnation of its government. The Chinese government immediately cut her speech from the closed-circuit television in the conference hall and censored it nationwide.
In the United States many editorials across the country praised her speech. The New York Times wrote: “Mrs. Clinton demonstrated that a clear and forthright speech makes a far more powerful point than staying home in sullen protest.” Quoted in USA Today, former political prisoner Harry Wu said: “Hillary Clinton’s speech in Beijing should make all Americans proud. She clearly, and forcefully, reminded the world about the real meaning of human rights.” Those still critical of the First Lady’s attendance noted that since the speech was censored in China, it failed to help Chinese women.
The conference had a profound effect both internationally and in the United States. “The Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action,” was adopted unanimously by 189 countries. The Platform for Action created a framework for advancing women’s equality by setting strategic objectives and actions. President Bill Clinton created the President's Interagency Council on Women to carry out the plan developed by the Platform for Action.
2006-0198-F Segment 4: This collection consists of records regarding conferences and events attended and hosted by the First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The key events in this collection consist of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Vital Voices, Beijing +5, and the Early Childhood Development Conference. A majority of the records consist of planning materials, speech drafts, travel arrangements, and budgets for the events.
2006-1301-F: This collection consists of records related to microcredit and microdevelopment, as well as correspondence between the Clinton White House and microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus. This collection consists of correspondence, memoranda, background materials on various microcredit institutions and initiatives, notes, clippings, articles, reports, publications, and lists. These records include correspondence between First Lady Hillary Clinton and Muhammad Yunus as well as correspondence between the Clinton White House and Yunus’ Grameen Bank. This collection has not yet been digitized. Please view the finding aid.
2012-0094-F: This collection consists of records related to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Development, Equality, and Peace (FWCW) held in Beijing, China on September 5 – 14, 1995. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton led the United States’ Delegation, and gave a speech on September 5th entitled “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights.” This collection consists of background papers, memoranda, speech drafts, correspondence, email, cables, newspaper articles, and publications. The collection consists of records regarding individuals who should be selected to represent the United States, the First Lady’s attendance, and the Administration’s Position concerning sending a U.S. Delegation to the Beijing Conference. The majority of the records in this collection request consist of National Security Council (NSC) cables. These communications, contain read-outs of meetings with the ECOSOC and preparatory committees in advance of the Conference, information about other countries’ delegations, discussion of the logistical issues, press materials, reports on Platform for Action implementation, and materials for the Beijing Plus Five meeting.
2012-0181-F: The collection consists of records from WHORM (White House Office of Records Management) Subject File HU, Human Rights. The Subject File is a primary category containing information pertaining to human rights and civil rights, citizenship, segregation, ideologies and voting rights, and includes communications from the public expressing views about such matters. Subdivisions within the Subject File include genocide, civil disturbances, ideologies, equality for women, and equality in education and employment. There are also subdivisions for ethnic origin groups, such as Arab-American, Asian-American, African-American, Eastern European-American, Hungarian-American, Greek-American, Irish-American, and others. The records in this collection include memoranda, correspondence, reports, articles, and publications. Six diskettes were processed electronically and included in a single disk at the end of the collection.
2015-0352-F: This collection consists of early drafts of the First Lady’s remarks to the World Health Organization Forum on Women and Health Security in Beijing, China on September 5, 1995. The collection contains materials used for researching, writing, and scheduling this speech. These materials include draft remarks and background materials such as correspondence, notes, position papers, press releases, publications, previous remarks, reports, and talking points.
Bibliographic Resources
- Clinton, Hillary Rodham. Living History. Simon & Schuster, 2003.
- Clinton, Hillary Rodham. “Power Shortage.” The Atlantic, 24 Sept. 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/hillary-clinton-womens-rights/615463/
- Henry, Sarah. “Harry's War.” Los Angeles Times, 17 Nov. 1996, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-11-17-tm-65412-story.html
- “Melanne Verveer Oral History.” Miller Center for Public Affairs, 16 Sept. 2004, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/melanne-verveer-oral-history
- Suettinger, Robert. Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of U.S.-China Relations, 1989-2000. Brookings Institution Press, 2004.
- “World Conferences on Women.” UN Women – Headquarters, UN Women, https://www.unwomen.org/en/how-we-work/intergovernmental-support/world-conferences-on-women
Students should review the “Women's Rights are Human Rights” exhibit before completing any of the following assignments. Students may work in groups or individually.
Option 1
Government officials and members of the public opposed First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton being part of the delegation to the United Nations Fourth Conference for a variety of reasons. Each student or team will be assigned one of three positions: opposing her attendance, due to concerns over human rights violations by the Chinese government; opposing her attendance, due to perceptions that the conference agenda was “anti-family” and “anti-American;” or supporting her attendance.
All students should analyze the following documents found within the exhibit: letter from Representative Barr to President Clinton; letter from a member of the public; and an internal memo from Eric Schwartz to Anthony Lake then present oral arguments in favor of their assigned position.
Following the presentations, students should vote on whether or not the First Lady should attend the conference by a show of hands, paper ballots, an online ballot or poll, or a four corners exercise with the fourth corner being for undecided voters. After the vote, students should review the memo sent by Anthony Lake to President Clinton requesting approval for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to attend the conference.
Extension Activity/Informed Action Component:
Using the documents from the exercise as examples, students should write a letter or memo to the current President or another federal government official related to international relations.
Option Two
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton declared that “women’s rights are human rights” in her 1995 address to the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women. She mentioned “the 75th anniversary of women's suffrage” in the United States and that 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.”
The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention is considered to be the start of the women’s suffrage movement. Attendees affixed their signatures to the Declaration of Sentiments, a document that included rhetoric inspired by the Declaration of Independence. It stated that “all men and women are created equal” and demanded women “have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”
In December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly. It set out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt played an instrumental role in drafting the document and served as the first Chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights. (For more information about her role, visit the Roosevelt Presidential Library .)
Each student or team should review one of these three key declarations, identify rights that are guaranteed, and compare these to the rights First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton called for in her speech. The class can then create a Venn diagram to illustrate the overlap of the four documents.
Extension Activity/Informed Action Component:
Students should create a Declaration of Student Rights for their classroom or school.