Happy Women’s History Month?

Issue 2840 — March 3, 2025

On the third day of #womenshistorymonth, I’m reflecting on promises fulfilled and unfulfilled of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. I attended it in Beijing in 1995.

If you were there, drop a comment below. I would love to know your thoughts and experiences.

I was in the room where it happened 30 years ago. Two rooms where it happened, actually.

The experience was life changing. World changing. But that was then.

I noticed UN Women is doing a 30-year review. So though the actual anniversary will be in September, I had a flood of memories of that momentous event and the elevated hopes that propelled the agenda coming out of it.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was the First Lady of the U.S. in 1995, recounts in a 2020 Atlantic article how she wrote the iconic speech in which she came to make the famous declaration that stirred the 40,000 women attending the U.N 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing and/or the ancillary Non-Governmental Organization conference in the suburb of Huairou, and made first-page headlines globally:

“Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.”

It was a bold statement on its face and the fact that it was made by the First Lady gave it singular force.

It felt at the time like a seismic shift in thinking about women that had the potential to change the world forever. It must have had the same earthshaking effect on people that 19th century suffragists had on cultures that had never imagined women voting before they started advocating for it.

But winning is always a fragile bird.

Just as we’ve seen that 105 years after women won the right to vote and the law was written into the U.S. Constitution, the Equal Rights Amendment is still not in the Constitution and some factions within our country are working to suppress everyone’s right to vote.

So we relearn the lesson: just when we think the fight for equality is over, we find that a new battle has begun nearby.

So it was and is with that groundbreaking conference.

I was privileged to be in the auditorium at the UN 4th World Conference on Women on September 5, 1995, when Hillary Clinton first delivered that “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” message. I had a press pass that enabled me to be in the official delegates’ auditorium and I’d been asked by the Arizona Republic to write about my experience at the conference. This gave me access to a number of behind the scenes events.

The speech was an incredibly uplifting moment. Though the Chinese government tried to quash media carrying the speech, the women in the room and those who were standing outside close enough to hear it on the sound system were moved to tears of recognition when Clinton spoke of the plight of women globally, and of joy that a leader of the free world had the courage to speak up and articulate a new vision for women.

Yes, declaring that women have rights and they are inseparable from any other human rights — that was a bold statement on its face. And it was controversial and politically risky because it flew right in the face of human rights violations that Clinton fully intended to skewer with her words.

Those eleven words became the ideas that more than anything else framed the agreements that came out of the conference and would ultimately be signed onto by most of the world’s nations.

Women’s rights exist and they are human rights. Novel idea.

The next morning, I was in the room where Clinton delivered basically the same speech at the NGO conference. That was quite a different scene than the orderly official meeting in an elegantly appointed auditorium in Beijing.

Thousands of women and a few men, including my husband Alex, stood in the rain and mud at 5 am to wait for a 9 am door opening. We were so close together that we formed a colorful canopy of umbrellas outside an auditorium that would hold the few hundred of those of us fortunate enough to get in.

Clinton was late to arrive and the crowd was getting restless. So at one point, a woman named Shirley May Springer Stanton from Anchorage, Alaska went onto the stage and started singing a cappella. The song she sang had the refrain “gonna keep on moving forward, never turning back, never turning back.” Pretty soon the whole auditorium joined her and the room reverberated with the song that expressed our hopes that true equality would come when women’s rights were understood as human rights.

Fast Forward 15 years

The most shocking insight I gained a decade-and-a half after the Beijing conference, when I researched and wrote my book No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, is that while we have with great effort changed many laws and opened so many doors, and though it is true that some external barriers of policy and implicit bias remain, it is now women’s own culturally learned ambivalent relationship with power that holds us back because it keeps us from having intentions to lead at the level that would bring gender parity to power, pay, and position. We have to use our power for equal rights to be meaningful.

So I have been teaching women for the last two decades to embrace their power to claim their rights and more importantly to act upon them intentionally.

Breaking the Silence

In her NGO speech, Clinton included this “Poem to Break the Silence.” It had been given to her by a young woman from Delhi.

“Too many women in too many countries speak the same language of silence. My grandmother was always silent, always agreed. Only her husband had the positive right, or so it was said, to speak and to be heard. They say it is different now. After all, I am always vocal, and my grandmother thinks I talk too much. But sometimes I wonder…When a woman fights for power as all women would like to, quietly or loudly, it is questioned. And yet, there must be freedom if we are to speak. And yes, there must be power if we are to be heard. And when we have both freedom and power, let us not be misunderstood. We seek only to give words to those who cannot speak — too many women in too many countries. I seek only to forget my grandmother’s silence.”

“That is the kind of feeling that literally millions and millions of women feel every day,” Mrs. Clinton said—and you had to imagine she spoke from experience.

But now I reflect that the young girl who gave Clinton that poem knew ahead of her time that “there must be power if we are to be heard.”

There must be power if we are to lead effectively.

There must be power if we are to have true equality.

The lesson we must revisit as we look at the results of the groundbreaking 4th World Conference on Women 30 years later is this:

Power unused is power useless.

Happy Women’s History Month? That’s up to us.

Do let me know your thoughts.

GLORIA FELDT is the Cofounder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker, a global expert in women’s leadership development and DEI for individuals and companies that want to build gender balance. She is a bestselling author of five books, most recently Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. Honored as Forbes 50 Over 50, and Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Find her @GloriaFeldt on all social media.