Hillary Clinton: What’s she’s done right, and wrong, for women

In response to a recent Gallup poll finding that Hillary Clinton is the most admired woman in the United States, the Oregonian has a commentary about some of the strong stances that Clinton has taken on behalf of women in her role as Secretary of State:

Late last month, at Georgetown University, in language not particularly diplomatic for a secretary of state, Clinton warned: “Recent events in Egypt have been particularly shocking…. This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform, and is not worthy of a great people.” 

After her speech, asked a question about different cultural standards, she responded: “There are certain actions that are beyond any cultural norm. Beating women is not cultural, it’s criminal, and it needs to be addressed and treated as such.”

. . . 

In September, Clinton told the Women and the Economy Summit in San Francisco, “When it comes to the enormous challenge of our time — to systematically and relentlessly pursue more economic opportunity in our lands — we don’t have a person to waste, and we certainly don’t have a gender to waste.” 

American foreign policy often consists of complicated choices, picking and choosing, with more hope than certainty, among various foreign politicians, selecting from a wide range of potentially disastrous policy choices. But there’s something at once simple and defensible about taking a stance that it’s wrong for a people to savage its women, that no country has a gender to waste.