Hillary Clinton and the Fight for Women’s Rights

At the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Plenary Session, Hillary Clinton made a powerful speech that addressed women’s rights worldwide. Clinton’s speech was a call to action for people all over the world to change the status quo of how women are abused and denied their rights and liberties because of gender. (Hart, p284) Throughout her speech, Clinton makes references to women of various cultures in order to unite all women as a gender and eliminate the idea of race and nationality. At the beginning Clint says that “however different we may be, there is far more that unites us than divides us.”(1995) Immediately Clinton engages the audience as a whole instead of focusing on a particular group of individuals. She addresses the fact that all people have to help change the abuse and repression of women’s rights worldwide. I thought this was an inspiring aspect of her rhetoric on how women’s rights are human rights and we as the human race can not deny a gender their rights if we hope to prosper and flourish. She makes her statements powerful because she describes the various abuses of women rights to abuses of human rights and gives very vivid and at times violent depictions of atrocities that take place everyday. Another very influential feature of Clinton’s speech is that she doesn’t only paint a dark picture of the evils commented against women but offers a message of hope. She does so by talking about the struggle women in America had to achieve women’s suffrage. “It took 150 years after the signing of our Declaration of Independence for women to win the right to vote.” (Clinton, 1995) A statement such as this gives hope to the struggle of women worldwide to achieve the respect and protection of their rights and freedoms.

Clinton, Hillary R. The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. China:Beijing, 1995. Retrieved from www.americanrhetoric.com on November 26th, 2006.

Hart, R.P., & Daughton, S.M. (2005). Modern rhetorical criticism (3rd ed.). (pp. 283-295) Boston: Pearson Education.