A Celebration of Women™

is elated and honored to Celebrate the Life of one of North America’s most profound activist. She has been a lawyer, a mother, a sister, a wife, a woman politician and female change maker in history. Her efforts in areas of education, healthcare and human rights are endless; always working diligently for positive change, stating that ‘women’s rights are human rights’. 

She is regarded as the most openly empowered presidential wife in American history, save for Eleanor Roosevelt. 

This woman may hold a legacy as the founder of the ‘children’s rights movement‘, devoting always a part of her adult life to creating positive change for children and women; working through healthcare, her work promoting nationwide immunization against childhood illnesses and her encouragement of older women to seek a mammogram to detect breast cancer.

The women of our world fondly refer to this powerhouse as the ‘Woman of Firsts!’ 

 
 
 

WOMAN of ACTION™

 

 

Hillary Diane Rodham (Clinton)

 

In her words at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing , 

“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 Diane Rodham was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.  She was raised in a United Methodist family, first in Chicago and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois. Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham (1911–1993), was of Welsh and English descent; he managed a successful small business in the textile industry. Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell (1919–2011), was a homemaker of English, Scottish, French Canadian, French, and Welsh descent.

Hillary grew up with two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony.

Mementos of Hillary Rodham’s early life are shown at the William J. Clinton Presidential Center.

As a child, Hillary Rodham was a teacher’s favorite at her public schools in Park Ridge. She participated in swimming, baseball, and other sports. She also earned numerous awards as a Brownie and Girl Scout.

She attended Maine East High School, where she participated in student council, the school newspaper, and was selected for National Honor Society.

For her senior year, she was redistricted to Maine South High School, where she was a National Merit Finalist and graduated in the top five percent of her class of 1965.

Her mother wanted her to have an independent, professional career, and her father, otherwise a traditionalist, was of the opinion that his daughter’s abilities and opportunities should not be limited by gender.

Raised in a politically conservative household, at age thirteen Rodham helped canvass South Side Chicago following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she found evidence of electoral fraud against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964.

Rodham’s early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anticommunist), who introduced her to Goldwater’s classic The Conscience of a Conservative, and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw and met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in Chicago in 1962, a man who at the age of thirty-five, was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

Wellesley College years.

In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science.

During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans; with this Rockefeller Republican-oriented group, she supported the elections of John Lindsay and Edward Brooke.

She later stepped down from this position, as her views changed regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.

In a letter to her youth minister at this time, she described herself as;

“a mind conservative and a heart liberal.”

In contrast to the 1960s current that advocated radical actions against the political system, she sought to work for change within it. In her junior year, Rodham became a supporter of the antiwar presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy.

Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rodham organized a two-day student strike and worked with Wellesley’s black students to recruit more black students and faculty.

In early 1968, she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association and served through early 1969; she was instrumental in keeping Wellesley from being embroiled in the student disruptions common to other colleges.
 

A number of her fellow students thought she might some day become the ‘First Woman President of the United States’.

To help her better understand her changing political views, Professor Alan Schechter assigned Rodham to intern at the House Republican Conference, and she attended the “Wellesley in Washington” summer program.

Rodham was invited by moderate New York Republican Representative Charles Goodell to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s late-entry campaign for the Republican nomination. Rodham attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami.

However, she was upset by the way Richard Nixon’s campaign portrayed Rockefeller and by what she perceived as the convention’s “veiled” racist messages, and left the Republican Party for good.

In 1969, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, with departmental honors in political science. Following pressure from some fellow students, she became the first student in Wellesley College history to deliver its commencement address.
 
Her speech received a standing ovation lasting seven minutes.

She was featured in an article published in Life magazine, due to the response to a part of her speech that criticized Senator Edward Brooke, who had spoken before her at the commencement. She also appeared on Irv Kupcinet’s nationally syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New England newspapers.

That summer, she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthy conditions).
 
 
Yale Law School and postgraduate studies

Rodham then entered Yale Law School, where she served on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action.

During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center, learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973).

She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free legal advice for the poor.

 

“Much of what I believe, and much of what I have worked for at stake in this election, is directly related to my time at the law school.” — Hillary Clinton, in an early October 1992 speech at Yale University.

In the summer of 1970, she was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman’s Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale’s Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. There she researched migrant workers’ problems in housing, sanitation, health and education.

Edelman later became a significant mentor.

Rodham was recruited by political advisor Anne Wexler to work on the 1970 campaign of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Duffey, with Rodham later crediting Wexler with providing her first job in politics.

In the late spring of 1971, she began dating Bill Clinton, also a law student at Yale.

That summer, she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. The firm was well known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes (two of its four partners were current or former Communist Party members); Rodham worked on child custody and other cases.

Clinton canceled his original summer plans, in order to live with her in California; the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school.

The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.

 
Clinton first proposed marriage to her following graduation, but she declined.

They were finally married on On October 11th, 1975, (who at the time was also a law professor at the University of Arkansas) in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Shortly after their marriage, the couple moved to the state capital, Little Rock, where Bill began his political life.

She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973, having stayed on an extra year to be with Clinton.

Rodham began a year of postgraduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center.
 
 
Her first scholarly article, “Children Under the Law”, was published in the Harvard Educational Review in late 1973. Discussing the new children’s rights movement, it stated that “child citizens” were “powerless individuals” and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but that instead courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis. The article became frequently cited in the field.

Marriage and family, law career and First Lady of Arkansas

From the East Coast to Arkansas

During her postgraduate study, Rodham served as staff attorney for Edelman’s newly founded Children’s Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children.

In 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal. Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard Nussbaum, Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for impeachment. The committee’s work culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974.

By then, Rodham was viewed as someone with a bright political future; Democratic political organizer and consultant Betsey Wright had moved from Texas to Washington the previous year to help guide her career; Wright thought Rodham had the potential to become a future senator or president. Meanwhile, Clinton had repeatedly asked her to marry him, and she continued to demur. However, after failing the District of Columbia bar exam and passing the Arkansas exam, Rodham came to a key decision. As she later wrote, “I chose to follow my heart instead of my head”.

She thus followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, rather than staying in Washington where career prospects were brighter. He was then teaching law and running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in his home state. In August 1974, Rodham moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and became one of only two female faculty members in the School of Law at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She gave classes in criminal law, where she was considered a rigorous teacher and tough grader, and was the first director of the school’s legal aid clinic. She still harbored doubts about marriage, concerned that her separate identity would be lost and that her accomplishments would be viewed in the light of someone else’s.

Early Arkansas years

Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton lived in this 980 square foot (91 m2) house in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Little Rock from 1977 to 1979 while he was Arkansas Attorney General.

Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton bought a house in Fayetteville in the summer of 1975, and Hillary finally agreed to marry. Their wedding took place on October 11, 1975, in a Methodist ceremony in their living room. She announced she was keeping the name Hillary Rodham, to keep their professional lives separate and avoid apparent conflicts of interest and because “it showed that I was still me,” although her decision upset their mothers.

Bill Clinton had lost the congressional race in 1974, but in November 1976 was elected Arkansas Attorney General, and so the couple moved to the state capital of Little Rock.

There, in February 1977, Rodham joined the venerable Rose Law Firm, a bastion of Arkansan political and economic influence. She specialized in patent infringement and intellectual property law while also working pro bono in child advocacy; she rarely performed litigation work in court.

Rodham maintained her interest in children’s law and family policy, publishing the scholarly articles “Children’s Policies: Abandonment and Neglect” in 1977 and “Children’s Rights: A Legal Perspective” in 1979. The latter continued her argument that children’s legal competence depended upon their age and other circumstances and that in serious medical rights cases, judicial intervention was sometimes warranted.

An American Bar Association chair later said, “Her articles were important, not because they were radically new but because they helped formulate something that had been inchoate.”

Historian Garry Wills would later describe her as “one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades”, while conservatives said her theories would usurp traditional parental authority, allow children to file frivolous lawsuits against their parents, and argued that her work was legal “crit” theory run amok.

In 1977, Rodham co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a state-level alliance with the Children’s Defense Fund. Later that year, President Jimmy Carter (for whom Rodham had been the 1976 campaign director of field operations in Indiana) appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation, and she served in that capacity from 1978 until the end of 1981.

From mid-1978 to mid-1980, she served as the chair of that board, the ‘first woman to do so’. During her time as chair, funding for the Corporation was expanded from $90 million to $300 million; subsequently she successfully fought President Ronald Reagan’s attempts to reduce the funding and change the nature of the organization.

Following her husband’s November 1978 election as Governor of Arkansas, Rodham became First Lady of Arkansas in January 1979, her title for twelve years (1979–1981, 1983–1992). Clinton appointed her chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee the same year, where she secured federal funds to expand medical facilities in Arkansas’s poorest areas without affecting doctors’ fees.

In 1979, Rodham became the first woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm.

From 1978 until they entered the White House, she had a higher salary than that of her husband.

During 1978 and 1979, while looking to supplement their income, Rodham made a spectacular profit from trading cattle futures contracts; an initial $1,000 investment generated nearly $100,000 when she stopped trading after ten months.

The couple also began their ill-fated investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation real estate venture with Jim and Susan McDougal at this time.
 

 
On February 27, 1980, Rodham gave birth to a daughter, Chelsea, her only child.

First Daughter Chelsea Clinton has transformed from a shy girl peeking out from behind her father’s coattails to a lovely bride to be, ready for her marriage this week to college sweetheart Marc Mezvinsky. Here is a look back at the mutual admiration society between father and daughter.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, wife Hillary Rodham, 33, and week-old baby daughter Chelsea, born on February 27, 1980.
 

In November 1980, Bill Clinton was defeated in his bid for reelection.

 
Later Arkansas years

Governor Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton attend the 1987 Dinner Honoring the Nation’s Governors with President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan.

Bill Clinton returned to the governor’s office two years later by winning the election of 1982. During her husband’s campaign, Rodham began to use the name Hillary Clinton, or sometimes “Mrs. Bill Clinton”, to assuage the concerns of Arkansas voters; she also took a leave of absence from Rose Law to campaign for him full-time.

As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was named chair of the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee in 1983, where she sought to reform the state’s court-sanctioned public education system. In one of the Clinton governorship’s most important initiatives, she fought a prolonged but ultimately successful battle against the Arkansas Education Association, to establish mandatory teacher testing and state standards for curriculum and classroom size.

In 1985, she also introduced Arkansas’s Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youth, a program that helps parents work with their children in preschool preparedness and literacy.

She was named Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983 and Arkansas Mother of the Year in 1984.

Clinton continued to practice law with the Rose Law Firm while she was First Lady of Arkansas. She earned less than the other partners, as she billed fewer hours, but still made more than $200,000 in her final year there. She seldom did trial work, but the firm considered her a “rainmaker” because she brought in clients, partly thanks to the prestige she lent the firm and to her corporate board connections. She was also very influential in the appointment of state judges. Bill Clinton’s Republican opponent in his 1986 gubernatorial reelection campaign accused the Clintons of conflict of interest, because Rose Law did state business; the Clintons deflected the charge by saying that state fees were walled off by the firm before her profits were calculated.

From 1982 to 1988, Clinton was on the board of directors, sometimes as chair, of the New World Foundation, which funded a variety of New Left interest groups. From 1987 to 1991, she chaired the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, which addressed gender bias in the law profession and induced the association to adopt measures to combat it.

She was twice named by the National Law Journal as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America: in 1988 and in 1991.

When Bill Clinton thought about not running again for governor in 1990, Hillary considered running, but private polls were unfavorable and, in the end, he ran and was reelected for the final time.

Clinton served on the boards of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Legal Services (1988–1992) and the Children’s Defense Fund (as chair, 1986–1992). In addition to her positions with nonprofit organizations, she also held positions on the corporate board of directors of TCBY (1985–1992), Wal-Mart Stores (1986–1992) and Lafarge (1990–1992). TCBY and Wal-Mart were Arkansas-based companies that were also clients of Rose Law. Clinton was the first female member on Wal-Mart’s board, added following pressure on chairman Sam Walton to name a woman to the board. Once there, she pushed successfully for Wal-Mart to adopt more environmentally friendly practices, was largely unsuccessful in a campaign for more women to be added to the company’s management, and was silent about the company’s famously anti-labor union practices.
Bill Clinton presidential campaign of 1992

Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1992

Hillary Clinton received sustained national attention for the first time when her husband became a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1992.

Before the New Hampshire primary, tabloid publications printed claims that Bill Clinton had had an extramarital affair with Arkansas lounge singer Gennifer Flowers.

In response, the Clintons appeared together on 60 Minutes, where Bill Clinton denied the affair but acknowledged “causing pain in my marriage.”

This joint appearance was credited with rescuing his campaign. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton made culturally disparaging remarks about Tammy Wynette and her outlook on marriage, and about women staying home and baking cookies and having teas, that were ill-considered by her own admission.

Bill Clinton said that in electing him, the nation would “get two for the price of one”, referring to the prominent role his wife would assume. Beginning with Daniel Wattenberg’s August 1992 The American Spectator article “The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock”, Hillary Clinton’s own past ideological and ethical record came under conservative attack. At least twenty other articles in major publications also drew comparisons between her and Lady Macbeth.

First Lady of the United States.

Role as First Lady

When Bill Clinton took office as president in January 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the First Lady of the United States, and announced that she would be using that form of her name. She was the first First Lady to hold a postgraduate degree and to have her own professional career up to the time of entering the White House. She was also the first to have an office in the West Wing of the White House in addition to the usual First Lady offices in the East Wing.

She was part of the innermost circle vetting appointments to the new administration, and her choices filled at least eleven top-level positions and dozens more lower-level ones.

FLASH FORWARD First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton laughs with Anne Roosevelt, grand daughter of Eleanor Roosevelt, while touring Eleanor Roosevelt’s sleeping porch during a July 17, 2000, during a visit to the former first lady’s Val Kill Cottage in Hyde Park, NY.

The visit is part of the ongoing “Save America’s Treasures” program, the preservation of historic and threatened landmarks. Photo: BEBETO MATTHEWS, Getty Images / AFP

She is regarded as the most openly empowered presidential wife in American history, save for Eleanor Roosevelt.

 
 

The Clinton family arrives at the White House on Marine One, 1993.

Some critics called it inappropriate for the First Lady to play a central role in matters of public policy. Supporters pointed out that Clinton’s role in policy was no different from that of other White House advisors and that voters were well aware that she would play an active role in her husband’s presidency. Bill Clinton’s campaign promise of “two for the price of one” led opponents to refer derisively to the Clintons as “co-presidents”, or sometimes the Arkansas label “Billary”.

The pressures of conflicting ideas about the role of a First Lady were enough to send Clinton into “imaginary discussions” with the also-politically-active Eleanor Roosevelt. From the time she came to Washington, she also found refuge in a prayer group of The Fellowship that featured many wives of conservative Washington figures.

Triggered in part by the death of her father in April 1993, she publicly sought to find a synthesis of Methodist teachings, liberal religious political philosophy, and Tikkun editor Michael Lerner’s “politics of meaning” to overcome what she saw as America’s “sleeping sickness of the soul” and that would lead to a willingness “to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium.”

Other segments of the public focused on her appearance, which had evolved over time from inattention to fashion during her days in Arkansas, to a popular site in the early days of the World Wide Web devoted to showing her many different, and frequently analyzed, hairstyles as First Lady, to an appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine in 1998.

Along with Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, she was a force behind the passage of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in 1997, a federal effort that provided state support for children whose parents could not provide them with health coverage, and conducted outreach efforts on behalf of enrolling children in the program once it became law.

She promoted nationwide immunization against childhood illnesses and encouraged older women to seek a mammogram to detect breast cancer, with coverage provided by Medicare.

She successfully sought to increase research funding for prostate cancer and childhood asthma at the National Institutes of Health. The First Lady worked to investigate reports of an illness that affected veterans of the Gulf War, which became known as the Gulf War Syndrome.

Together with Attorney General Janet Reno, Clinton helped create the Office on Violence Against Women at the Department of Justice.

In 1997, she initiated and shepherded the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which she regarded as her greatest accomplishment as First Lady. In 1999, she was instrumental in the passage of the Foster Care Independence Act, which doubled federal monies for teenagers aging out of foster care.

As First Lady Clinton hosted numerous White House conferences, including ones on Child Care (1997), on Early Childhood Development and Learning (1997), and on Children and Adolescents (2000). She also hosted the first-ever White House Conference on Teenagers (2000) and the first-ever White House Conference on Philanthropy (1999).

Clinton traveled to 79 countries during this time, breaking the mark for most-traveled First Lady held by Pat Nixon. She did not hold a security clearance or attend National Security Council meetings, but played a soft power role in U.S. diplomacy.

A March 1995 five-nation trip to South Asia, on behest of the U.S. State Department and without her husband, sought to improve relations with India and Pakistan.

Clinton was troubled by the plight of women she encountered, but found a warm response from the people of the countries she visited and a gained better relationship with the American press corps.

The trip was a transformative experience for her and presaged her eventual career in diplomacy.

In a September 1995 speech before the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing,

Clinton argued very forcefully against practices that abused women around the world and in the People’s Republic of China itself, declaring “that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights“.

Delegates from over 180 countries heard her say: “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.”

In doing so, she resisted both internal administration and Chinese pressure to soften her remarks.

She was one of the most prominent international figures during the late 1990s to speak out against the treatment of Afghan women by the Islamist fundamentalist Taliban. She helped create Vital Voices, an international initiative sponsored by the United States to promote the participation of women in the political processes of their countries.

Her strong advocacy for children continues in the Senate. Some of Hillary’s proudest achievements have been her work to ensure the safety of prescription drugs for children, with legislation now included in the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act, and her legislation to help schools address environmental hazards. She has also proposed expanding access to child care. She has passed legislation that will bring more qualified teachers into classrooms and more outstanding principals to lead our schools.

Hillary has been a powerful advocate for Women in the Senate.

Her commitment to supporting the rights guaranteed in Roe v. Wade and to reducing the number of abortions by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies was hailed by the New York Times as:

“frank talk…(and) a promising path.”
 
 
 
Those Who Know Hillary Rodham Clinton Best Look at Her Spiritual Center.
 
Hillary is one of the original cosponsors of the Prevention First Act to increase access to family planning. Her fight with the Bush Administration ensured that Plan B, an emergency contraceptive, will be available to millions of American women and will reduce the need for abortions.

Hillary Clinton’s encounter with Mother Teresa began, it just so happens, at the National Prayer Breakfast, way back in 1994. That year, the keynoter was a special guest: Mother Teresa. Nearly 3,000 packed a huge room. Near the dais were the president and first lady — the Clintons.

Unlike in typical years, where the keynoter sits among the assembled waiting for others to finish speaking, Mother Teresa appeared from behind a curtain only when called to the platform, and then slowly hunched toward the microphone. She began talking about Jesus and John the Baptist in their wombs, about their mothers, and how the “unborn child” in the womb of Elizabeth—John—leapt with joy, heralding the arrival of Christ as Mary neared Elizabeth, a moment known as “The Visitation.”

Mother Teresa next spoke of love, of selfishness, of a lack of love for the unborn—and a lack of want of the unborn because of selfishness. Then, the gentle sister made this elite group uncomfortable: “But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because Jesus said, ‘If you receive a little child, you receive me.’ So every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus.”

After an awkward silence, the entire ballroom erupted in a standing ovation that seemed to last minutes. It felt even longer to the embarrassed Clintons (and Al and Tipper Gore), who remained seated and did not clap.

Undeterred by the Clintons’ coldness, the tiny, aged lady was only warming up. Abortion was, said Mother, “really a war against the child, and I hate the killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that the mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? … This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

Hillary Clinton was shaken. But it wasn’t over.

After the talk, the weak nun persisted, taking the matter directly to the first lady. As Clinton recalled, “[S]he wanted to talk to me. Mother Teresa was unerringly direct. She disagreed with my views on a woman’s right to choose and told me so.”

Mother Teresa said something that resounded with Hillary. She offered an olive branch: “Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Give me the child. I’m willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.” She said, “I will tell you something beautiful. We are fighting abortion by adoption.”

That was something Hillary could applaud. She made clear that while she supported legalized abortion, she preferred more adoptions as an alternative.

The nun told the first lady she had placed over 3,000 orphaned babies into adoptive homes in India, and informed the first lady of her goal of establishing a home in Washington, D.C.

She invited Hillary to India for a tour, and Mrs. Clinton obliged.

She became the first First Lady of the United States to be a candidate for elected office.

When New York’s long-serving United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced his retirement in November 1998, several prominent Democratic figures, including Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, urged Clinton to run for Moynihan’s open seat in the United States Senate election of 2000.

Once she decided to run, the Clintons purchased a home in Chappaqua, New York, north of New York City, in September 1999.

Initially, Clinton expected to face Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of New York City, as her Republican opponent in the election.

However, Giuliani withdrew from the race in May 2000 after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and having developments in his personal life become very public, and Clinton instead faced Rick Lazio, a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives representing New York’s 2nd congressional district.

Throughout the campaign, opponents accused Clinton of carpetbagging, as she had never resided in New York nor participated in the state’s politics before this race. Clinton began her campaign by visiting every county in the state, in a “listening tour” of small-group settings.

During the campaign, she devoted considerable time in traditionally Republican Upstate New York regions. Clinton vowed to improve the economic situation in those areas, promising to deliver 200,000 jobs to the state over her term. Her plan included tax credits to reward job creation and encourage business investment, especially in the high-tech sector.

She called for personal tax cuts for college tuition and long-term care.

The contest drew national attention. Lazio blundered during a September debate by seeming to invade Clinton’s personal space trying to get her to sign a fundraising agreement. The campaigns of Clinton and Lazio, along with Giuliani’s initial effort, spent a record combined $90 million.

Clinton won the election on November 7, 2000, with 55 percent of the vote to Lazio’s 43 percent.

She was sworn in as United States Senator on January 3, 2001.

In mid-November 2008, President-elect Obama and Clinton discussed the possibility of her serving as U.S. Secretary of State in his administration, and on November 21, reports indicated that she had accepted the position.

On December 1, President-elect Obama formally announced that Clinton would be his nominee for Secretary of State.

Clinton said she was reluctant to leave the Senate, but that the new position represented a “difficult and exciting adventure”. As part of the nomination and in order to relieve concerns of conflict of interest, Bill Clinton agreed to accept several conditions and restrictions regarding his ongoing activities and fundraising efforts for the Clinton Presidential Center and Clinton Global Initiative.

The appointment required a Saxbe fix, passed and signed into law in December 2008. Confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began on January 13, 2009, a week before the Obama inauguration; two days later, the Committee voted 16–1 to approve Clinton. By this time, her public approval rating had reached 65 percent, the highest point since the Lewinsky scandal. On January 21, 2009, Clinton was confirmed in the full Senate by a vote of 94–2. Clinton took the oath of office of Secretary of State and resigned from the Senate that same day.

 
She became the first former First Lady to serve in the United States Cabinet.

Throughout her tenure, Clinton has looked towards “smart power” as the strategy for asserting U.S. leadership and values, combining military strength with U.S. capacities in global economics, development aid, and technology.

She has also greatly expanded the State Department’s use of social media, including Facebook and Twitter, both to get its message out and to help empower people vis-à-vis their rulers.

And in the Mideast turmoil, Clinton particularly saw an opportunity to advance one of the central themes of her tenure, the ’empowerment and welfare of women and girls worldwide’. For example, Samar Mohammad Badawi (born c. 1977–1981) is a Saudi Arabian human rights activist. She and her father, who physically abused her for 15 years, filed court cases against each other.

Badawi’s father accused her of disobedience under the Saudi Arabian male guardianship system and she charged her father with adhl, for refusing to allow her to marry. Badawi was imprisoned under a warrant relating to the disobedience charge on 4 April 2010, released on 25 October 2010 after a local and international support campaign, and her guardianship was transferred to an uncle. The Saudi Arabian NGO Human Rights First Society described Badawi’s imprisonment as “outrageous illegal detention”.

Badawi filed a Grievances Board lawsuit against the Ministry of Municipal and Rural affairs for the rejection of her registration for the 2011 municipal elections. She participated in the 2011–2012 women driving campaign by driving regularly since June 2011 and helping women drivers with police and court procedures. In November 2011, she and Manal al-Sharif filed charges in the Grievances Board against the Saudi Arabian General Directorate of Traffic for rejecting their applications for drivers’ licences.

On 8 March 2012, Badawi was given an Award by the United States Department of State for her contributions to Women’s Rights.
 
 
Clinton topped the 2012 list compiled by Gallup, with 21 per cent of those surveyed naming her as the woman they most looked up to this year.

It is the 11th straight time that Clinton has topped the annual poll, and the 17th altogether

– a first for Gallup.

The result “further solidifies her position as the most often named Most Admired Woman in Gallup’s history – a total of 17 times going back to her first year as first lady in 1993”, the polling company said.

 

Moreover, she viewed women’s rights and human rights as critical for U.S. security interests.

 
The Clintons and health care: It was their issue, their passion and their failure in the ’90s. This time around, both President and Secretary Clinton worked behind the scenes to get it done, giving pep talks and campaign speeches and, in Hillary’s case, calling one stubborn Democrat as the clock ticked down to Sunday’s vote.

It ended with a hug, Hillary Clinton’s arms thrown out exuberantly to congratulate President Obama once the bill passed. The White House made sure to snap a picture and posted it online. But Hillary, and even Bill, were kept out of the spotlight for nearly all of the debate. … Bygones indeed seem to be bygones.

In 2008, some of the nastiest attacks between Clinton and Obama were over health care.

After John Edwards dropped out, she said ‘she was the only candidate who cared about universal health care’.

Hillary’s trip to Finland, Latvia and Russia, scheduled for June 27-30, will make her the first secretary of state in U.S. history to reach the magic 100 mark. Finland will be country number 99. Latvia, where she’ll visit a week from Thursday, will be number 100.

In June 2012, Clinton visited her 100th country during her tenure, setting a mark for secretaries of state. (Time magazine wrote that “Clinton’s endurance is legendary.”)

As early as March 2011, she indicated she was not interested in serving a second term as Secretary of State should Obama be re-elected in 2012; in December 2012, following that re-election, Obama nominated Senator John Kerry to be Clinton’s successor. She has also indicated she has no interest in running for president again.

In December 2012, Hillary was hospitalized for treatment of a blood clot of her right transverse venous sinus, a vein within the head that allows blood to drain from the brain. Her doctors had discovered the clot during a follow-up examination for a concussion trip to Europe. The blood clot, which caused no immediate neurological injury, is being treated with anticoagulant medication, and her doctors said she was expected to make a full recovery.

She had previously required anticoagulant treatment in 1998 after developing a blood clot in her leg, which she later attributed to her “nonstop flying around the country” as First Lady (long airplane flights are known to slightly increase the risk of developing clots). Her recovery from the concussion and treatment for the thrombosis led to postponement of her testifying to Congress on the September Benghazi matter.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has returned to work after spending a month recuperating from a series of ailments.

Mrs Clinton was discharged from a New York hospital on Wednesday, where she had been treated for a blood clot between the skull and the brain.

In December, she fell and suffered a concussion after she became dehydrated as a result of a stomach virus.

Mrs Clinton, 65, is due to stand down before President Barack Obama formally begins his second term on 20 January.

Cheers

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry has been nominated to replace her as America’s top diplomat.

A crowd of state department officials greeted Mrs Clinton with a standing ovation as she returned to work on Monday.

She was also presented by her staff with a tongue-in-cheek gift of protective headgear in the shape of a football helmet emblazoned with her department’s seal.

Mrs Clinton convened a meeting of senior staff, the first such gathering since last month, when she fell ill after a trip to Europe and had to cancel a planned visit to North Africa and the Middle East.
 
 
Hillary Clinton’s First 2016 Campaign Ad? (Nov. 30, 2012 – CSPAN)

 
 

Appointed secretary of state at the start of Mr. Obama’s first term, in January 2009, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health has been under intense scrutiny because she is considered a strong candidate for the Democratic nomination for president should she decide to run in 2016.

 
Hillary Clinton has launched a semi-mysterious new website now that she’s returned to life as a private citizen. The site, hillaryclintonoffice.com, contains nothing but a big picture of Clinton in front of a blue background and an expandable contact form allowing site visitors to reach out to Clinton for scheduling requests, media inquiries and whatever else they might want to speak to her about.

 

A Celebration of Women™

we say; ‘Stay healthy, be safe and keep Taking Action‘.

 

 

Brava Hillary!

 
BOOKS BY or ABOUT Hillary Rodham Clinton