First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was invited to the Divinity School as the final speaker in a semester-long symposium "Women: Finding and Raising Your Voice," sponsored by the Divinity School Women's Center and the Yale Committee on Social Ministry. The event, open only to members of the Divinity School community and the media, provided Clinton with an intimate setting in which to share her thoughts on the ways women have struggled to move beyond boundaries in their lives. The visit was Clinton's first to the Divinity School: During her time as a student at Yale, she said, "I hung out on the other side of town."
Clinton began her talk by reflecting on the importance of religious faith in her own life. Noting that she was raised in a Methodist church-going family, she said that her religion has been "a major part" of her life since childhood. She recalled how her youth minister exposed her and her peers to the world beyond their Illinois suburb by initiating exchanges between their church and the inner-city churches in Chicago whose members were primarily African American or Hispanic. She also described how the same minister took the group to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak about civil rights. The youth minister "was constantly challenging us and telling us that we had to stretch, that if we were going to be Christians we had to understand what that meant in the fullest possible sense," she recalled. "I certainly remember clearly the challenges that I faced in trying to put that into action."
As she has traveled the world, the First Lady said, she has observed firsthand how women -- often with the support of religious institutions -- have challenged conventional boundaries and given "voice" to their concerns. She spoke about a woman in Santiago, Chile, who described herself as a "caged bird set free" when she was given a loan from a microcredit enterprise funded by a religious institution so that she could buy a sewing machine. She also talked about women who were once homeless squatters in South Africa and who are now building houses and slowly forming a community on land they bought, also with the assistance of a religious institution. In Senegal, Clinton said, she visited with women -- and men -- who have traveled from village to village to enlist support for a ban on female circumcision. Their combined voices, said the First Lady, have resulted in the president of Senegal's advocacy for ending the ancient practice. And in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Clinton said, she has met with both Catholic and Protestant women who, for the first time, are "crossing sectarian lines" in support of the peace agreement in their country because "they are tired of seeing their husbands and their fathers, their sons and their nephews, gunned down."
"We are truly seeing a revolution sweeping across the world about the roles and voices of women," Clinton told her audience. "In every corner of the Earth that I have visited, I have met with women ... and have listened to their voices as they have told me the stories of their transition from being someone who did not believe she had much worth to being someone who understood the contribution she could make to her own life, her family and even her community." In fact, she said, the "increasing respect for women's voices" in the past 50 years "may well be -- along with technological change -- one of the two most important developments in human history that we have seen in a very long time."
During her talk, Clinton stressed that the education of girls and women is "the most important investment any nation can make today." She added, "It's not just to acquire knowledge but to imbue with self-confidence women who for generations have been told they don't amount to much, they don't mean anything, they are expendable."
The changes that women bring about as they use their voices almost always cause confusion in the societies impacted by them, said Clinton. During the 1996 presidential election, for example, some political commentators characterized the focus on issues such as education for children, early child development, day care and the Family Leave Act as "the feminization of politics," Clinton noted. "But for me, it was the humanization of politics," she commented. "Don't fathers worry about finding a safe place to leave their children while they're at work? Don't sons want to ensure that elderly parents have adequate health care in the later stages of life?"
Clinton used a biblical passage from the Book of Isaiah as a call to empowerment for anyone who feels "voiceless." "Shout out, don't hold back, lift up your voice like a trumpet," the First Lady quoted from the scripture.
Following her talk, Clinton responded to questions from Divinity School students on issues ranging from how women should deal with demeaning male colleagues (Clinton advised using humor to point out ignorant or "out of line" behavior) to how her own faith has helped her ("My faith and those who support me in my faith are essential to my getting up and going on every day," she responded).
-- By Susan Gonzalez
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