Hillary Clinton: Women & Public Leadership

It is now my very great personal pleasure and honor to present Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. It is such a personal privilege for me to be here once again at Rutgers and to be part of this vibrant, exciting, extremely rewarding life of this great university and to be invited to participate in the 50th anniversary of the Eagleton Institute of Politics and the 35th anniversary of the Center for American Women and Politics. I love the theme, politics matter. And today I'm going to try to persuade those who may not yet be convinced that politics matters not only in the ways that we traditionally think of it, passing laws, electing people to office, but that in effect it matters at the very core of who we are as a people, the values that drive our political discourse, that really represent our society and the direction that we are headed. I want to thank President McCormick for his welcome and I'm very appreciative that he took time out at a moment of great concern for the leaders of our universities to be here. I want to thank my longtime friend, Ruth Mandel. We do go back many years over many cups of coffee talking about the aspirations, the ideals, the opportunities available to women and girls. And I want to also acknowledge and thank Debbie Walsh who has assumed the leadership of the Center and continues its great work. I want to say a personal word wishing a speedy and complete recovery to my friend and former colleague, Governor Corzine, someone with whom I have the greatest of friendships and for whom I am deeply admiring. And I know we all wish him the very best. You know, in the space of just a few weeks, two of America's great universities have found themselves in an unwanted spotlight. Today, we all share in the immense grief of the students, faculty, administrators, families and community of Virginia Tech. The resilience that they're demonstrating in the wake of this horrific tragedy is extraordinary. And at noon today, there will be a national moment of silence where all of us can come together and make sure that we send our wishes, our prayers, our hearts to those who have been so grievously affected. Today, coincidentally, marks the eighth anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School. I will never forget when Bill and I visited with the students and faculty and families there after that terrible incident where once again we saw the worst of human depravity matched by courage, love and compassion. For reasons of an entirely different sort, Rutgers too was forced into the news this past month. Not for the great achievements of your faculty and your students, not for their academic and athletic expertise, but because you became at the vortex of a debate about how we should see one another, how we should listen to one another, how we should respect one another. I was so moved by the extraordinary grace and dignity of the coaches and the athletes that I wanted very much to meet Coach Vivian Stringer. And I had that opportunity earlier this morning to meet with her and Coach Mary Ann Stanley and to talk about not only what they and their team had been through and what this university had confronted, but what are the lessons for all of us to learn. Before I met Coach Stringer, all I knew is that she was one of the greatest coaches in basketball history. The first in men's or women's basketball to take three different schools to the Final Four. And, of course, in this past season we've gotten to know Coach Stringer much better. We've seen her extraordinary performance as a coach and that of her team on the basketball court, and that only added to her legendary status in basketball. But we know more now about what an extraordinary woman and leader she is. She and her players have shown us the difference between bravery and bravado. They have reminded us with eloquence and passion about the promise of this country and especially the promise of our young people and particularly the promise of our women. These players and their coach have taken a truly ugly moment and transformed it into a transcendent one. That's real leadership. And I'm not going to rehash the comments that Coach Stringer and the players so aptly characterized, but I do want to call to mind the examples of these young women. You know, it's one thing for Coach Stringer or Coach Stanley or President McCormick or someone like me to stand up and confront what too often happens in our society, the degradation and demeaning of women and people of color based on sexual orientation and ethnicity and religion. You know, people can turn that off. They can tune it out. It's kind of expected. But let's instead draw from the examples of Katie and Mati and Essence and Didi and Rashida and Maya and Epiphany and Brittany and Kia and Heather. They are living human markers of our progress in this country and how far we have come and how much further we have to go together. The Scarlet Knights are not just exceptionally gifted athletes. They're good students preparing to be the kind of citizens we want young people to be. They have overcome the pressures and obstacles thrown in the path of so many young women and young men in today's culture. And they've managed, literally and figuratively, to keep their eyes on the ball. Over and over, we've seen their grace under pressure. They didn't give up when their season got off to a bad start. They didn't give up when they were trailing with a minute to go in the NCAA semifinal or when the championship game didn't go their way. And they didn't give up when they were called names and insulted on the airwaves. So although they didn't win the NCAA championship, they won the hearts and minds of the American people with dignity and grace. My office alone received tens of thousands of email messages expressing support for the team, and I'll be sending those messages along to them. Sixty years ago, Jackie Robinson, not too far from here, put on a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform and broke into the major leagues. He endured insults and threats from people who didn't want him to succeed, but he did. And in every major league baseball park this last Sunday, there were tributes to number 42, a man called the bravest person in sports. Now anyone who watches young athletes compete today or listens to them or other young people talk about their dreams can attest that we've broken down so many barriers and obstacles. So I hope when we think back on the events of the past few weeks here at Rutgers, we think about this campus and the example it has set for our country, for standing up for what is right, for saying enough is enough, for urging that we turn a culture of degradation into a culture of empowerment, for saying that while we, of course, must protect our right to the freedom of expression, it should not be used as a license or an excuse to demean and humiliate our fellow citizens. Now the sad truth is that marginalization like that happens all too often. You know it happens every day, in ways large and small, in places public and private. We've all seen it and we have all heard it. When women and girls are objectified and devalued in popular culture, when a young black man can't get a cab at night, when a Muslim American is a victim of a hate crime in the aftermath of 9-11, when a gay person is harassed at school or in the workplace. It even happens in a broader context, when people are silenced because they don't adhere to a particular ideology or set of religious beliefs, when they're ignored because they're too poor or considered too old or too young to have any political clout, when individuals or groups are pushed to the margins socially, economically and politically. It's as if their actions, their accomplishments, their very lives become invisible, as if they just don't matter. You know that doesn't just hurt those who are on the receiving end. I think it hurts all of us. It certainly hurts our American identity. It hurts our progress as a nation trying to live up to our ideal of equal opportunity for all and our belief that we were all created equal before God. You know, I don't believe that a nation can flourish if it leaves people out or leaves one group behind. I've been privileged over the last 15 years to travel around the world, particularly during the eight years of my husband's presidency, to represent our country and to see how often women were not even seen. They were truly invisible. They performed the work. They bore the children. They cared for the home and the family. But they were invisible. We know that we have come so far in our country because of our values, because of the structure of laws and beliefs, because of our Constitution. And even in my own lifetime, I have seen the changes that have taken place. Women of a certain age who played sports, as young people might have an inkling of what I'm talking about. When I was growing up, girls were only allowed to play half-court basketball. Now, what that meant was you had six people on a team, you had three on offense, you had three on defense, and you couldn't cross the center line. And in the version that I played outside of Chicago, you could only dribble three times. Now, we invented a kind of fancy move called a juggle. You know, that meant you dribbled three times, then you threw the ball up in the air and you tried to catch it yourself. Now, I'd like to see the Scarlet Knights try to play basketball like that. I was struck when I was talking to Coach Stringer that she remembered half-court basketball, too. We were told by our coaches and our teachers back in those days that people just didn't think women's hearts were strong enough to play full-court basketball. And now we can see with great admiration that indeed, not only their hearts, but their strength and their spirit are certainly ready to be competitive. By the time I was an adult, things had progressed somewhat, but there were still schools I couldn't apply to, scholarships I could have never received, jobs that basically had no women wanted on the door. One of the funny things that I recall is competing in a mixed doubles tennis tournament about, oh, a long time ago. Now, I was hardly a tennis star by any means, but my partner was very skilled. And together we made it to the final, and at the end we got the runner-up trophy. And I still have that trophy because the trophy was a classic trophy. The male tennis player was huge. The woman player was like this. And my partner looked at it, burst into laughter, and said, you've got to keep this. This is a classic. Well, nobody sat around thinking, let's make a trophy that for the mixed doubles tournament basically says the man was two or three times more important than the woman. It was just how people thought in those days. And the marginalization wasn't conscious, it just happened. Well, today, thankfully, we're beyond a lot of those obstacles and barriers. We have women and girls across our country competing in sports from rugby to auto racing, entering careers in medicine, law, music, education, business. But the changes did not happen overnight. And they didn't happen by accident. They happened because politics matters. They happened because of laws that were passed that codified women's rights, that enabled women to play on a level playing field. There were so many markers along the way, because it wasn't just about women, it was about breaking down all of the barriers on discrimination, on race and ethnicity, religion, and everything else that shrunk the human potential to a manageable size and then pushed it to the sidelines. Brown v. Board of Education, which opened the doors of schools, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, all of which put into place the legal structure to end racial segregation and discrimination, at least on paper, in the law books. Title IX, which cracked the door of opportunity, the Equal Pay Act, which had the revolutionary idea that men and women who work in the same jobs should be paid the same wages. These changes happened because there was finally a critical mass of people who said, you know what, this is not right. Parents who said, you know, my daughter shouldn't have to walk by that school that is so well equipped to go to a school that is not. Parents who said, you know, I love watching my son play sports, how about letting my daughter play sports at a highly competitive collegiate level. Husbands who said, you know, you're working the same job as your male co-workers, why isn't your check the same? People all of a sudden began to realize that there was work to be done. We couldn't just expect things to evolve. We had to take matters in our own hands, and we did. We went through a lot of questioning and soul-searching and raw political debate. People put themselves on the line. We challenged attitudes. We questioned cultural norms. We confronted conventions that were rooted in history and had pervaded over time without really being taken to task. And we confronted the use and abuse of power by individuals who use their status or their station to demean others, to exploit our common values for profit or political gain. So we need to remind ourselves that politics still matters. We are not in a post-political age. There is no such thing. I'm thrilled to have so many elected officials here today from across New Jersey, including two former governors, Governors Byrne and Governor Florio. And people like us who go into public life believe, obviously, we can make a difference or we would never subject ourselves to the process, which is a little bit like running the gauntlet. And we believe that we can help other people have a better chance for the kind of future we want for our own children and grandchildren. So we battle it out. We make that incremental progress. Maybe it's sometimes two steps forward, one step back. But we do it because we believe it matters, and there is so much evidence on our side. We're living at a time, though, when our biggest institutions, from government to the media to major corporations, have the power to shape and reshape our attitudes toward each other, our images of each other, and our very values themselves. And what messages are being sent? What message does it send when our airwaves are used to demean and degrade? What message does it send when women in the workforce still make 70 cents to the dollar for the same job as men and women of color make 67 cents to the dollar? What message does it send when CEO salaries are rising but the minimum wage hasn't gone up in a decade and average wages are flat? What message does it send when 47 million Americans have no health insurance and when families with insurance policies can't get their medical care paid for? What message does it send when a young soldier who has risked his or her life in Iraq or Afghanistan comes home and can't get adequate medical treatment or the compensation that he or she is due? What message does it send when hardworking students from middle class families can't afford to start, continue, or complete college while student loan officials and companies reap financial benefits? What message does it send when we keep paying more and more at the pump when oil companies are enjoying record profits? What message does it send when the Supreme Court decides that women's health doesn't matter? Now that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has retired and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her colleagues can be outvoted by a majority of five to four who take the radical step of denying women the fundamental right to make decisions regarding their own bodies and health. What is the message here? I think the message is that those in power can still marginalize those with less power. Be they women, minorities, working people, consumers, middle class families, soldiers, senior citizens, or students. I know from personal experience that the balancing act that we have to do in our lives is often very difficult and there aren't governmental solutions. Back in the 1980s when I was practicing law I chaired an American Bar Association panel on women in the law, looking at all of the ways that women in the law were trying to adjust to the rigors of law practice and balancing family and life. I traveled around the country talking to women who were lawyers or paralegals or legal secretaries and I understood their stories. You know, when you wake up in the morning, you're supposed to be in court and your child has a fever of 102 degrees and the child care center is closed or the babysitter is too sick to come to work. Or when the little mental bell that goes off in every mother's head goes off when school lets out and you wonder whether your children are safely in after school care or have made their way home and gotten in that door and locked it behind them. Women at all levels of society not only worked to balance their families and careers but they didn't really have much help. And then we passed the Family and Medical Leave Act. Then states began to pass paid parental leave for many people in mostly larger corporations. And all of a sudden we saw that what we believed were just very personal problems that we somehow had to work out for ourselves actually had broad resonance in the larger society and that maybe there were some ways we could help each other. Well, we know that from the Eagleton Institute's research that women who serve in state legislatures and in Congress have actually helped to shift the debate more into what I call the real world, the reality-based politics that really takes a hard look at what we need to do together to make it possible for each of us to live up to our God-given potential. And in so many ways the norms have changed. You know, on Capitol Hill 20 years ago you weren't allowed to wear a pantsuit on the floor of the United States Senate or the United States House of Representatives. I would not have lasted very long in either of those bodies until my colleague, Senator Barbara Mikulski, said, Why? That doesn't make any sense. Let's change the rules. But it always takes somebody to say that. You know, if you look back on all of our history and the struggles that were required to get us to where we are, ask yourself how many Americans would still be invisible and on the margins if it hadn't been for the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the labor organizers, plaintiffs and lawyers who took on cases like Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, candidates who took stands and elected officials who worked to implement their convictions about how much better we could be. And all of the people who every day stand up for what they believe. Maybe it's just arguing with some faceless corporation because you haven't been treated right. Or maybe it is banding together with fellow students or people in your neighborhood against some kind of environmental degradation. But so many people whose names will never be in the history books have exercised their rights as Americans to refuse to be invisible, to get themselves off the margins, to make it clear that they weren't going to put up with being mistreated, ignored, and relegated to some second-class status. Well, what Vivian Stringer and the Scarlet Knights did was to break a stereotype. And you know how powerful stereotypes can be. Lots of times we don't even know we hold them. It's almost like a reflex. They were standing on the shoulders of all those who had gone before. You know, the brave women and few brave men who gathered in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 who had the absolutely radical, beyond imagination idea that women should have equal rights to men. And they wrote something called the Declaration of Sentiments. And in it they listed all of the changes they would like to see in society. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, they were there on the forefront. For so were women and men that, you don't know their names, but they just decided they'd had enough. You know, they walked to the meeting. They got into carts and drove to the meeting. And it still took from 1848 to 1920 before women had the right to vote. But generation after generation, there were those who would not give up. On every important advance in human history, the United States has been in the lead. So that now we just take it for granted, but at the time it truly was revolutionary. So what will we do now in the 21st century to advance the cause of human rights, to get more and more of our fellow Americans and people around the world to be seen, to make them visible to the media, to corporations, to ourselves, to governments? How will we decide what our contribution to this continuing effort to create a more perfect union will be? You know, as we make this journey, we find ourselves not just fighting to change laws, because we have a lot of laws in the books. Laws that certainly embody institutional change that need to be enforced. Tuesday is Equal Pay Day. And I'll be at a big rally at the Capitol to call for some additional legislation to make it even more possible to enforce the anti-discrimination laws in the workplace. I've introduced legislation called the Paycheck Fairness Act. And you know, we had a hearing about it in the Senate last week. And as I was talking about it, a lot of people were saying, you know, that's so old. That's so 20th century. You know, it's over. You pass the law. Now if there's differences between men and women being paid unequally, that's because women take time out for children. It's because women like to work part-time. It's because women don't always have exactly the same qualifications. I said, well, you know, we've done a lot of studies about this, independent studies. A lot of universities have looked at this. And yes, that's all true. There are differences in women's lives and the choices that we make. But there's about 20% of the discrimination that cannot be explained by anything other than just old-fashioned, blatant discrimination. Where for whatever reason, male employees are paid more for doing the same job. There's a lot of lawsuits that raise this up. But you know what happens? As Coach Marion Stanley found out, if you're the one who says, wait a minute, this is not fair, boy, that's a courageous stand to take. Because you know, a lot of employers will actually fire you for trying to find out whether you're being paid equally to other employees doing the same job. So we still have work to do. But it's not only changing laws, we've got to change attitudes. We've got to not only fight to make discrimination illegal, we've got to make it unacceptable. And make no mistake about it. So much of what we hear in our popular culture, even those who purvey it would deny this, it is discrimination, plain and simple. It is people waking up with those stereotypes in their head and feeling they can say anything about certain people. So it's up to us to decide, what are we going to do? What is our call to action? How do we use the new means of communication on the internet? How do we use MyFace or Facebook? What's it called? MySpace? Facebook? That's right. My daughter will kill me. How do we use all this instant messaging? How do we create a different approach to the cultural challenges that we confront? I'm really asking all of you. Because this will be much more your struggle than mine. It will be much more about whether young people in America today say, look, we want to go beyond all the laws. We want to figure out how we can take a stand against bigotry and prejudice, demeaning and degrading stereotypes, and how we make it socially unacceptable. I know that people want to be part of something bigger than themselves. That's why university communities are so important. And it's why to take this moment in time that Rutgers confronted is a real opportunity. What will it mean? Will it just be something that everybody forgets about now that the season is over and the semester is nearly done? Or will we be able to build on this? Well, I hope, obviously, the answer is we can build on it. That maybe we think of some ways to use all of the communication that goes back and forth in the flick of a mouse or a blackberry to get people to say to themselves, you know, I want to be part of saying no. I don't want to just leave it to the Scarlet Knights and to Coach Stringer. I want to be part of a new citizen movement. I want to be able to say, you know what, we don't need laws to treat each other with respect. We don't need a government to tell us how to behave. That would be interfering with our individual rights. We don't want that. But we just want to do it on our own because we know it's the right thing to do. I think that the coach and the team would tell you that we don't always get our opportunity to pick the time we're called upon to act. Sometimes history intervenes, and we have to act whether we had ever planned or thought about it before. What was so moving and impressive is that the coach and the team seized that moment. They could have just said, ah, forget it and walk away from it. They could have said, you know, we hear those things in music. We hear it on, you know, radio. We hear it on cable. We hear all that. We're not going to even respond. We won't dignify it. It would have been a perfectly justifiable reaction. But when do we finally say enough? When do we finally have our moment of reckoning and really ask us, ourselves, what we're going to do to change the culture in which we live? I think that this moment is that opportunity. You know, I've encouraged women to compete in sports and academics and business and law and politics. I've raised money for women who ran for office. I've campaigned for them. I never thought I would run myself. And then when people started talking to me about it back in 1999, I thought that it was kind of an absurd idea. I was perfectly prepared to do maybe some more teaching like I had done in the past, maybe some more writing like I had done, but I wasn't really thinking about running for office. And then I was in New York City for an event with Billie Jean King, someone who was very pleased that finally after all these years, Wimbledon decided to pay the women champions the same amount of money as the men champions. And we were at a school in New York City, and we were on a stage promoting women in athletics, promoting Title IX, which has made such a difference. And there was a banner of the title of an HBO special about women in athletics called Dare to Compete. It was the name of the documentary. And I was introduced by the captain of the basketball team, and I went up to the podium, and she was much taller than me. So I went to shake her hand, and she leaned over, and she whispered in my ear, Dare to Compete, Mrs. Clinton, Dare to Compete. You know, I really, it just took my breath away, because I thought, well, you know, maybe I'm not running because I'm actually afraid to compete. Maybe I know that if I get out there, all those slings and arrows are really going to come in even greater numbers than they have. And, you know, I'm just not sure that I want to do that. And then I got to thinking, you know, I really care about what happens on all of these matters, from health care to education to energy policy, obviously now to war and peace and America's standing in the world and so much else. So I decided to dare to compete. And it's been humbling. It's been challenging. It's been fulfilling. And I'm very grateful to the people of New York for giving me this chance. But it sure hasn't been easy. You know, I've been called some names I'd be embarrassed to repeat in public. I've learned that my hairstyles and fashion choices provide endless fodder for public discussion and dissection. You know, sometimes I'll walk by and see somebody on TV talking about what I'm wearing, and they will have imbued it with great meaning. She chose that color to send a certain message. I'll say, I did? You know, I've been told to smile more. I've been told to smile less. I've been told to speak more loudly. I've been told to speak more softly. I've been told to not speak very much at all. You know, I think most of us know that if you put yourself out there, it's going to cause a reaction. But I'm asking each of you to think about the ways you can put yourselves out there. Out there on behalf of the kind of society we want for you. This could be one of those defining moments for your generation. Because you are the first generation to come of age when social boundaries and conventions are constantly challenged by technological advances. You know, everybody now has a cell phone with a camera. And it doesn't take a minute to get it on YouTube. So we're living in a totally different world where, you know what, the boundaries have shrunk if they exist at all. And it really matters how we treat each other. How we see or don't see each other. Earlier we were talking about how Rutgers has a chance to be the leader of this teachable moment in our country. In effect, to devise almost a pledge. You know, we call it the Rutgers Pledge. And see whether we can spread it across the country. You know, asking, will you be willing to speak up and say enough is enough when women or minorities or the innocent and the powerless are marginalized or denigrated? Will you try to assert leadership in this dangerous and still imperfect world that we inhabit? Will you say there's no place, if there ever was, there certainly isn't now, for disrespectful language or bigotry to be seen as funny and clever to put somebody else on the margins? This is one way to define leadership in our own lives. But we all have to be willing to take that challenge. And there are risks associated with it. You have to accept that you can't play in this game of life if you aren't willing to get off the sidelines. You have to dare to compete. So I hope with the leadership from Rutgers that the students here will set an example that will spread across America and maybe the world. Just think of all the problems we have today that are because people won't see each other. They refuse to acknowledge the humanity of the other. An amazing thing happened this week that didn't get any press that I saw. But after the tragedy at Virginia Tech, the new leadership of the forming government in Northern Ireland sent a joint statement. Reverend Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness together expressed their regrets to the government and people of the United States for the tragedy at Virginia Tech. Fifteen years ago, my husband gave a visa. Gave a visa that many people said shouldn't be given to Jerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein. It was opposed by people in our government, people in the British government, people in the Irish government. And Bill decided to give that visa to see whether there was any chance for peace. He and I made a number of trips together and separately, working with people in Northern Ireland. And I remember the first time I had a meeting in Belfast where women from the Protestant and the Catholic communities came together. They had never been in a room together before. And when I asked one of them, what do you worry about the most? She said, I worry that my husband will not come home alive. Then I asked a woman from the other tradition, what did she worry about? She said, I worry that my son will not come home alive. They didn't believe they would ever see each other as fellow human beings sharing a small space in God's creation. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes leadership. You are the true promise of America. And I know you can create a better future, not only for yourselves, through your own hard work and effort, your ambition and motivation. But for your families, for your communities, and for your nation. That is really my call to action today. Because we have to set the example in America. We have to let people who are riven by sectarian and religious and racial and tribal disputes that go back to history that none of them know anyone who's lived through it so long ago. And begin to tell them too, they have to overcome that history, those stereotypes, that degradation and marginalization and quit making the other invisible. Now I would call on all of us to just participate in this moment of silence. In honor of those who lost their lives at Virginia Tech. Those who were injured and struggling to recover. The faculty and students and families and community that was so horrifically affected. And when this moment of silence ends, I hope each of us will think about how we can, in our own way, be a messenger for change and for a better world for us all. Thank you and Godspeed.