Hillary: ‘Here We Are...In a Country Where There Is Growing Pushback Against Women’s Advancement and Progress’
2016 presidential nominee offers downbeat assessment
In her address before the first Clinton Global Initiative meeting in six years, former first lady and one-time Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lamented the backwards trajectory of women's rights in the United States today.
Clinton spoke Monday before those gathered for the Clinton Global Initiative, her husband, former president Bill Clinton's post-presidential endeavor to improve the world.
This is the first meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative since 2016. Through 2016, the foundation had raised an estimated $2 billion from U.S. corporations, foreign governments and corporations, political donors, and various other groups and individuals.
“I don’t know about you, but when people ask me how I am these days, I often say, ‘Well, personally, I’m great. I’m just worried about everything.’ As my dear friend, secretary Madeleine Albright used to say, ‘I’m an optimist who worries a lot.’ And I’m sure that some of you can relate to that,” the 2016 Democratic nominee and former secretary of state said. “And when Madeline and I traveled to Beijing in 1995 and I declared that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, it never occurred to me that the statement would continue to be controversial more than 25 years later. But here we are, in a world and in a country, where there is growing pushback against women’s advancement and progress.
“As the tide shifts toward more authoritarianism, more nationalism, more populism, very often the first targets for leaders who are promoting that kind of demagoguery are women and our rights,” Clinton added. “Now, the pandemic exacerbated this. It pushed women out of the workforce. It unraveled decades of hard-fought progress. And then the Supreme Court revoked our rights when it overturned Roe v. Wade. The impact of that decision on women’s lives gives us a lot to worry about, but it’s part of a bigger challenge that we face.
“Our country seems in many ways to be retreating from trying to figure out how to have a big, inclusive, pluralistic democracy. And it saddens and even angers me that my granddaughter may grow up in a world where she has fewer rights than my daughter did. But it also motivates me to keep fighting,” she said.
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