11 Words: But Are Women’s Rights Human Rights Once And For All?
Issue 2858— September 8, 2025
Just when you think something is over, it starts again. Women’s quest for equality is no exception.
While I was busy with Take The Lead’s annual Power Up Concert and Conference in Washington D.C., I lost track that September 5, 2025 marked the 30th anniversary of the United Nations’ 4th World Conference on Women. A few rather subdued social media posts reminded me.
So I updated the text of a podcast I recorded when I was reflecting on the 25th anniversary five years ago, to share with you today.
I was, as the song from “Hamilton” says, in the room where it happened. Two rooms, actually.
I had been determined to be at that conference, and I immersed myself in it accordingly. In addition to my Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) pass, I had a press pass that let me into the official UN delegates’ auditorium. I had been asked by the Arizona Republic to write about my experience.
First Lady Hillary Clinton twice made a speech that was personally uplifting and politically groundbreaking.
The whole speech was powerful But it was these 11 powerful words: “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights,” that made headlines globally.
“Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights, once and for all.”
It was an incredibly bold statement on its face, and the fact that it was made by the First Lady of the United States of America gave it singular force.
These 11 words framed the agreements that came out of the conference and would ultimately be signed onto by most all of the world’s nations.
Declaring that women have rights and that these rights are inseparable from any other human rights, was a bold statement. Radical even. It was also controversial in part because it flew in the face of Chinese human rights violations that Clinton fully intended to skewer with her words.
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. Thousands of women and a few men, including my husband, Alex, stood in the rain and mud at 5:00 AM, waiting for a 9:00 AM door opening. We were so close together that we formed a colorful canopy of umbrellas outside the auditorium that would hold the few hundred of those of us fortunate enough to get in.
Clinton was late arriving, and the crowd was getting restless, so a woman named Shirley Mae Springer-Staten from Anchorage, Alaska, went onto the stage and sang acapella. The song 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 words that expressed our hopes for true equality.
On the 25th anniversary of the Beijing conference, Hillary Clinton penned an article in The Atlantic October, 2020 issue, entitled, “Power Shortage. Women’s rights are human rights. But rights are nothing without the power to claim them.”
Clinton recounts how she wrote the iconic speech that stirred the 17,000 women and men attending the official U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and over 30,000 attending the ancillary nongovernmental organization conference in the suburb of Huairou.
The nongovernmental organizations had been sent to this suburb of Beijing because Chinese officials were afraid the feminists were going to do something radical. And in a real sense, we did.
The heavy rains and mud did not dampen the profound feeling of sisterhood or the optimism that propelled participants to work together on consensus language to implement those 11 words.
Change is always a fragile bird however. Look at how 105 years after (predominately white) American women won the right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, factions are working to suppress the vote for everyone.
So, it’s one step back for every one-and-a-half steps forward, and just when you think the fight for equality is over, a new battle has opened nearby. For example, 30 years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that American women’s reproductive rights were guaranteed. Yet since then, the right to choose abortion has been overturned and the threats to birth control access loom.
In her quarter-century retrospection, Clinton wrote: “Twenty-five years after Beijing, it’s no longer enough to talk about women’s rights. We must augment women’s power in every sphere...”
We must use our power for our rights to be meaningful.
The most shocking insight I gained when I was writing my book, No Excuses: Nine Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, was that while we have changed many laws and opened many doors, and even though external barriers of policy and implicit bias remain, there is something else holding us back: our own ambivalent relationship with power. It is culturally learned. It’s not hardwired, but it keeps us from having intentions to lead at the level that would bring gender parity to power, pay, and position.
In her NGO speech, Clinton included this poem, given to her by a young woman from Delhi. The poem goes like this:
“Too many women in too many countries speak the same language of silence. My grandmother was always silent, always aggrieved…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…I seek only to forget my grandmother’s silence.”
After Clinton read that poem, she commented, “That is exactly the kind of feeling that literally millions and millions of women feel every day.” And everyone in the audience could feel she spoke from experience.
“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. But it is up to us to embrace that power and use it for good, or it is meaningless. I teach how to do that in my online “9 Leadership Power Tools” course.
Clinton’s speech declared a sea change in how women could be seen and valued in this world.
But the sea is churning today. Continued progress is not inevitable. We have much work to do to recoup recent setbacks and finish the work started in Beijing three decades ago.
GLORIA FELDT is the Co-founder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker, and 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.