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Alexis Ortega
Miss McCallin
English 4 P. 3
3 September 2013
Womens Rights are Human Rights
Former Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her speech, Womens Rights are
Human Rights, addresses the hope for womens rights. Clintons purpose is to get everyone on
board to stand up for womens equality. She adopts a firm tone in order to get not only the
people at the conference, but just people as a whole to help and support her in her stand for
womens rights.
Hillary Clintons speech shows how women dont get treated with the same amount of
freedom and rights as men do. On page two of the speech, Clinton goes further into detail on
why this is true and why it should stop. Clinton states, Women compromise more than half the
worlds population, 70% of the worlds poor, and two-thirds of those who are not taught to read
and write. That statement just shows that women, typically, always get the shorter end of the
stick. In some countries, women do not even get the option of receiving an education. To support
her argument, Clinton also pointed out how little women are valued for how much they respect
they actually deserve. On the same page, Clinton points out, We are the primary caretakers for
most of the worlds children and elderly. Yet much of the work we do is not valued. Women are
the people that not only take care of the previous caretakers, but the upcoming ones as well. It
would only make sense that they should be treated as equals, if not, higher. By giving these two
arguments, Clinton was appealing to her audiences sense of what is ethical. Using that approach
was a good idea because she was giving the facts and statistics for what she was making a point
about. This helps at a place like the U.N. 4
th
World Conference on Women Plenary Session
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because nobody is really going to listen to someone stating their opinions. People want the facts
because they know it is real and it is not just completely biased.
Women are never going to be able to achieve the greatness they can accomplish if the
government does not protect their rights. Clinton addresses this on page three by saying,
Women will never gain full dignity until their human rights are respected and protected. This
is completely true. Women will never be taken seriously if nobody else respects them. It is sad,
but true. No woman is going to go up and try to take control of something knowing everybody
that her rights are limited. That is where the government needs to step in and change things.
Clinton defends this idea on the same page saying, Our goal for this conference, to strengthen
families and societies by empowering women to take greater control over their own destinies,
cannot be fully achieved unless all governments here and around the world accept their
responsibility to protect and promote internationally recognized human rights. Once
governments decide to not only protect, but to promote real human equality, woman will start to
actually take control over their lives and show what they are really capable of. The sooner
women can show what they are capable of, the sooner the female population as a whole will get
treated with more respect. In the middle of the speech, Clinton is continuing to use the ethics
appeal which helps in this case because her audience needs to see how important this topic really
is and how it really effects woman as a whole. Her audience needs to realize that although
everything she is bringing up seems really bad, it could be changed. There just needs to be help
to make the change, which is why she is reaching out to the conference to try and persuade them
to help support her in her stand for womens rights.
In the last parts of the speech, Clinton uses pathos and imagery to appeal to her
audiences emotions and feelings. Women are so vulnerable to abuse because nobody has cared
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to speak up and ordered the abuse to stop. Clinton uses imagery to help her specify what kind of
abuse that has been going on. On page four, she said:
These abuses have continued because, for too long, the history of women has
been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.
But the voices of this conference and of the women at Huairou must be heard loudly and
clearly:
It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or
suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.
It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of
prostitution for human greed -- and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this
practice should no longer be tolerated.
It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and
burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.
It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own
communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize
of war.
It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among
women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their
own relatives.
It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and
degrading practice of genital mutilation.
It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own
families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against
their will.
Not only do these statements appeal to an audiences feelings and emotions, they appeal to what
is ethical. Most people have not heard of over half of these statements. That just shows how
much people do not know about the history of womens abuse. What happens to the women of
this world is just as important as what happens to the men. It should be no secret of the crimes
human rthat are committed to women because at the end of the day, they are people too and the
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crimes are just as serious as the ones committed on anybody else. Hillary Clinton says, Let it be
that human rights are womens rights and womens rights are human rights once and for all.
Women and human are no different. Their rights should not be different. Women are a part of the
human population and they deserve the same amount of freedom that everyone else gets.
At the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women Plenary Session, Hillary Rodham Clinton
gave a speech addressing the importance of womens rights. In her speech, she was trying to get
her audience to help her in standing up for womens equality.

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Works Cited:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/PDFFiles/Hillary%20Clinton%20-
%20Womens%20Rights%20Human%20Rights.pdf