Unfinished business: Who will speak for the women of the world now?

The fact that women in the United States have yet to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling is because of deeply ingrained gender bias and pervasive structural gender inequalities. As David Rothkopf, the editor of Foreign Policy, once wrote, “the under-representation of women in positions of power is proof not so much that men still dominate the top of the pyramid as it is of a system of the most egregious, widespread, pernicious, destructive pattern of human rights abuse in the history of civilization.”

No one has fought as long and as hard to address human rights abuses that women around the world face as Hillary Clinton.     

{mosads}In 1995, in Beijing, at the watershed Fourth World Women’s Conference, her clarion call that “women’s rights are human rights” galvanized the human rights discourse and revitalized the international women’s human rights movement.

Her rallying cry helped to ignite new laws, policies, and programs on gender equality around the world. In celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Beijing Conference and the Beijing Platform of Action in 2014, Clinton recalled the spirit of the Beijing Conference when she defined women’s empowerment as the unfinished business of the 21st Century.

Whatever missteps she made on the campaign trail, it is hard to identify any other global leader who has done as much for women around the world as Hillary Clinton. At my law school, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, principled young women and men ask how they can build on the transformative spirit that Clinton brought to her global leadership.

They ask, “How do we preserve prior gains and sustain Clinton’s legacy?” My peers around the world ask, “Who will speak for women around the world now?” Perhaps Hillary Clinton herself said it best when she said in 2014, recalling her own universal and urgent clarion call to action in 1995: “keep telling the world over and over again that women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights — once and for all.”

The recent elections have reinforced her remarks that the “advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century and not just for women but for everyone.” Clinton’s greatest legacy for women in the world is the way in which she reframed gender equality under law and practice as a national and global security issue.

At the TEDWomen Conference in December 2010, she made the case that women’s empowerment is a security issue: “The subjugation of women is, therefore, a threat to the common security of our world and to the national security of our country.”

As Secretary of State, Clinton had a powerful platform to change the discourse and transform foreign policy by making women’s issues central to foreign policy. Investing in women and girls was a moral imperative as well as smart national security policy.

By making women’s issues integral to foreign policy, she was actualizing what she had promised during her confirmation hearings in 2009 when she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “I want to pledge to you that as secretary of state I view [women’s] issues as central to our foreign policy, not as adjunct or auxiliary or in any way lesser than all of the other issues that we have to confront.” 

Clinton went on to make women and girls a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and tasked the U.S. to address structural gender discrimination around the world. In March 2012, she put in place the seminal Secretarial Policy Guidance on Promoting Gender Equality to Achieve our National Security and Foreign Policy Objectives. The policy requested embassies and bureaus to actively support leadership initiatives for women in local and national government, civil society, and international and multilateral forums.

This policy augmented the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security that President Barack Obama promulgated in December 2011. In launching this first United States National Action Plan for Women Peace and Security, Clinton made a plea to countries and communities in conflict to not only include women in peace processes but to  make gender pivotal to peace and transitional justice:    

“Excluding women means excluding the entire wealth of knowledge, experience, and talent we can offer. So the United States will use the full weight of our diplomacy to push combatants and mediators to include women as equal partners in peace negotiations. We will work with civil society to help women and other leaders give voice to the voiceless. And we will also help countries affected by conflict design laws, policies, and practices that promote gender equality so that women can be partners in rebuilding their societies after the violence ends. 

Hillary’s pledge was one that acknowledged that for peace to endure, women need to be engaged and empowered. Her vision foreshadowed the now clear evidence that when women are at the table and when gender considerations are built into peace-building, there is a greater chance that peace will prevail and that democracy is strengthened.

True to her promises, for Clinton, women’s issues were not auxiliary or token issues to be dabbled with. These were her “signature issues” of foreign policy and vital to the achievement of every foreign policy goal. It has been well documented that just in the first five months as Secretary of State, she referenced women 450 times in speeches. For Clinton, women’s empowerment around the world was the cause of our time. “Transformation of the role of women is the last great impediment to universal progress,” she declared. The State Department’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review included her charge: “We are integrating women and girls into everything we do… in all our diplomacy with other governments…in our work on conflict and crisis.”

She made institutional changes that she hoped would alter the balance of power at the State Department and for women around the world by creating a seminal position, the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, which is charged with integrating gender across the work of the State Department, and appointing Melanne Verveer, one of the most lauded champions for international women’s human rights, as the inaugural ambassador.    

In so many poignant and powerful ways Clinton made women and gender issues a centerpiece of her diplomacy. In many of her visits abroad, she conducted town hall meetings with women’s groups, from micro-credit groups to women in village councils and grassroots activists and survivors of domestic violence. Her piercing insights to the challenges that women faced around the world made her the perfect and powerful ally to protect these women and the groups and causes they represented against any hostile state action.

Clinton was acutely aware that her presence with these women helped to build common cause with their challenges, thereby embracing and elevating women around the world as her partners in transforming traditional gender roles. As she said: “It’s a constant effort to elevate people who, in their societies, may not even be known by their own leaders. My coming gives them a platform, which then gives us the chance to try and change the priorities of governments.” In many of her visits she made women’s issues her priority and her passion. When she visited South Africa, she spent more time with a women’s housing project than she did with the president and other power brokers.

Clinton’s vision of smart power was a deeply feminist vision, one in which women’s equality was seen not just as a bedrock principle of U.S. foreign policy but of the U.N. Security Council. She fought to redefine sexual violence as a weapon of war, a global policy imperative. In 2009, she co-sponsored Security Council Resolution 1889 to combat sexual violence in armed conflict. In the U.N., she asked that the Security Council act as the moral conscience of the world to support women and thereby “uphold the legitimacy of the United Nations.”

Apart from major peace and security policy, Clinton addressed issues that were intimately and yet powerfully transformative in the home and in public like the launch of an alliance that worked on clean cookstoves in developing countries to solve the problem of traditional cookstoves and open fires that pollute the air that women and children breathe, causing respiratory illnesses that kill and disable thousands of women and children.

Clinton chose to align herself and the U.S. with some of the toughest battles women face, including the battle against child marriage, one of the most consequential challenges facing girls and women and made this effort, a good governance and development priority, but most of all a deeply personal priority. She once said, “The United States will intensify our diplomacy and development work to end child marriage, and it’s a personal commitment of mine. 

Clinton was unequivocal in her unwavering support of women’s rights globally. As a presidential candidate, her campaign platform focused on “promoting women’s rights around the globe.” She is the only candidate for president in the history of the U.S. with the vision to include women’s rights around the world as a major campaign issue. The United States’ commitment to equal opportunities for women nationally and around the world is what makes America great. The way a nation treats women is the signifier of a nation’s greatness.    

Rangita de Silva de Alwis is associate dean of international affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She served as the director of the Women in Public Service Project launched by Secretary Clinton in partnership with the Seven Sisters Colleges in 2011.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.