New Year’s Resolution: Make Clinton’s dream for women, girls a reality

Women_of_Courage_DCGH115.JPG ADVANCING RIGHTS: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (left) and first lady Michelle Obama (right) present the International Women of Courage Award to Ann Njogu of Kenya, March 10, 2010, at the State Depart´ment in Washington. Njogu was honored for her campaign to curb gender and sexual violence in East Africa.   Â

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was supposed to be back at work in Washington this week, after coming down with a stomach virus early last month, then falling and suffering a concussion. Instead, she was hospitalized Sunday with what doctors say is a blood clot related to her concussion.

The former New York senator, 65, had long planned to step down in Barack Obama’s second term, and the president has nominated Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to succeed her.

That hasn’t stopped the anti-Hillary crowd from suggesting she was faking illness to avoid taking heat for lax security at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where the U.S. ambassador and three others died after an attack last fall.

With Clinton’s life potentially in danger, her critics may take a breath — particularly those in Congress who helped cut funds for embassy security. Now they seem to want U.S. diplomats to hide in armed fortresses — the opposite of what Clinton promoted with a more open, “expeditionary” diplomacy.

More significantly, Hillary Clinton made the advancement of women a centerpiece of her agenda at State, insisting that women’s issues be integrated into all levels of policy and planning. She was an advocate for women and girls long before she declared in Beijing in 1995 as first lady that “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights — once and for all.”

This may not be the glitziest foreign policy. Reducing maternal mortality in childbirth, getting girls to school, promoting milk cooperatives and microcredit are not big-budget items. But they reap vast dividends as they take root in cultures that traditionally dismissed, oppressed or abused women. Clinton’s goal of installing a million “clean” cookstoves alone could save the lives of countless women and children.

Overcoming tribal and cultural sexism is not for the faint-of-heart — particularly when religion gets stirred into the mix. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, Taliban insurgents play on cultural prejudices to attack girls going to school and female health workers immunizing children. Honor killings, sexual mutilation and other violence, denial of civil rights and political marginalization are slow to give way in the developing world. Even in India, the world’s most populous democracy, nearly one-third of women in a 2010 poll said they had experienced sexual harassment — though only 1 percent reported attacks because the police typically dismiss the complaint or side with the attackers.

Change is coming. The death on Saturday of a 23-year-old university student from injuries received in a gang rape in Delhi last month has provoked angry protests and soul-searching. The determination of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan to recover and return to school after she was nearly killed by attackers in October will likely inspire more women and girls to stand up for their rights.

When they do, they will be living out the dream Hillary Clinton has nurtured for decades. As the secretary of state seeks to win her own health battle so she can embark on the next chapter of her remarkable life in this new year, may her dream move ever closer to reality.

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