#TBT: Hillary Clinton's iconic speech on women's rights

In 1995, Hillary Clinton gave this famous speech at the World Conference for Women.  Here's how the event changed women's lives all around the world.

Transcript

00:00What do you mean that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all?

00:18There are a lot of young people who weren't around at that time, you know.

00:22There are a lot of millennials who have no idea what happened in Beijing.

00:31U.S.C.A.

00:34U.S.A.

00:37U.S.C.A.

00:40U.S.A.

00:43U.S.A.

00:46U.S.A.

00:49U.S.A.

00:52Obviously, in the world, it's much more about human rights than it is about human rights in general.

00:56And I think it's the lives of women, including families.

00:59I cannot overemphasize the importance of the Beijing Declaration and its transformational

01:21impact on the world's thinking about the role of women in society, in politics, in

01:29the economy.

01:38It laid out a vision of how we need to change so many things that impact the lives of women.

01:48Access to education, access to health services, reductions of military spending so that you

01:54could actually allocate resources to the most important things, the need for women to have

02:00a seat at the table, political participation, leadership, reproductive rights, a range of

02:07issues that really matter to women.

02:24There are a huge range of issues where there hasn't been significant progress, and that

02:29ranges from things like women's political participation.

02:34For example, 75% of parliamentarians all over the world are still men.

02:39Less than 10% of the heads of government in the world are women.

02:44And when you look at businesses and you look at private sector corporations, there are

02:49very few that are headed by women.

02:52We need to do a lot better when it comes to women's economic empowerment.

02:56Women still do not have, in many parts of the world, access to land rights, access to

03:02collateral, access to financial resources to run and start businesses.

03:09And when it comes to violence against women, the numbers have actually worsened after the

03:15pandemic.

03:26What was true then about where we needed to work, what we needed to change, sadly, many

03:54of those agenda items are unfinished items.

03:57It is a north star for us because it lays out exactly the issues that we need to focus

04:06on and what we need to do to get there.