Not if the First Lady has anything to do with it, anyway. As she toured Africa last week, Mrs. Clinton once again tried to highlight the plight of women around the world. Call it the Hillary Doctrine: women’s rights as a central element of American foreign policy. Of course, the issue will never replace great power politics; narcotics and NAFTA will dominate U.S. discussions with Mexico, not, say, spousal abuse. But Mrs. Clinton’s interest has helped shake up America’s foreign-policy bureaucracy. “The administration has really sounded a trumpet through the First Lady,” says Jill Merrick of the International Center for Research on Women in Washington.
The shift in policy has become only more pronounced under new Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Earlier this year Albright ordered U.S. diplomats to monitor women’s rights as “an integral objective” of American foreign policy. Just last week Albright traveled to North Carolina, the home state of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms, to argue for Senate approval of the United Nations’ convention on women’s rights. The international treaty, which compels signatories to battle sex discrimination, is languishing in the Senate. And Albright’s power extends beyond Foggy Bottom: she has just taken the chairmanship of the interagency panel that coordinates all U.S. government response to international women’s issues–from Treasury to the CIA. “We’re making a difference,” says Theresa Loar, who was appointed last fall by Warren Christopher to coordinate international women’s issues at State. From her office on the department’s all-powerful seventh floor, Loar’s influence has grown under Albright.
While neither the First Lady nor Albright had a deep interest in international women’s issues before 1992, each has come to be captivated by the cause. Mrs. Clinton has used a variety of forums–from United Nations conferences to anti-prostitution programs in Thailand–to make her point that “women’s rights are human rights.” Friends say that the two–who have traveled overseas together–reinforce each other’s interest. “As they’ve traveled around the world,” says one insider, “they’ve been moved by what they’ve heard.”
Whether this zeal will improve the sorry lot of many of the world’s women is another question. From Afghanistan (where the ultrareligious Taliban regime has banned girls from school) to Zimbabwe (where girls are still offered as settlement in disputes between families), millions of women live under a tyranny that would make even the worst male chauvinist bridle. Can the crusade make a difference?
American officials say that it already has. They point to a number of projects where, they contend, modest American investments have yielded large dividends. In Rome, the U.S. Embassy successfully lobbied the city’s mayor to appoint a woman as head of the Office of Women’s Affairs–a post previously held by a man. And last year the State Department gave $570,000 to the International Red Cross to help provide education for Afghan refugee children in Pakistan. About 9,000 girls are being educated in these schools, which lie beyond the reach of the Taliban. The vast majority emerge literate, an achievement since female literacy in Afghanistan is only 20 percent. “What we are doing is building up a reserve of educated women-teachers, scientists, computer operators,” says the program’s coordinator, Eric Van Der Lee.
For years, a phalanx of nongovernmental organizations have been arguing for more such programs. Their demand: that the oppression of women be treated not as mere custom, best ignored by foreigners, but as a threat to national security on a par with narcotics or terrorism. Those groups, from wealthy American philanthropies to African tribeswomen, were animated by the U.N. conference on women held in Beijing in 1995. It became a kind of Woodstock for the international women’s rights movement. “You looked out and saw all these thousands of different women–the different colors and textures and smells. It was exhilarating,” says former congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who was director of the U.S. delegation to Beijing. The Jimi Hendrix of the conference was Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose address captivated the conference the way the guitarist mesmerized the 1969 concert.
The new U.S. emphasis on women’s rights, though, is not without its critics. Regan Ralph of the Women’s Project of Human Rights Watch, for instance, is wary that rhetoric may triumph over results when Russian and American law-enforcement officials meet this spring at a conference held under State’s auspices to discuss the subject of forcing Russian women into prostitution. “If we’re talking about women’s human-rights concerns, it can’t be limited to a one-week conference,” says Ralph. Indeed, even some high-profile U.S. efforts have run into trouble. When Mrs. Clinton visited the Thai anti-prostitution program last fall, she got great press. The widely praised program, Thai Women of Tomorrow, provides scholarships and vocational training to gifts. The goal is to make them less likely to fall prey to Thailand’s thriving sex trade. But with only $40,000 in U.S. funds, the oversubscribed program has had to cut scholarships.
More traditional foreign-policy observers have their qualms, too. The American Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Muravchik, a Clinton supporter in 1992 and an opponent in 1996, worries that “radical feminism” leads U.S. diplomats into a dangerous moral relativism. “We wind up saying, ‘In your country you mutilate the genitals of women who reach the age of 10, and in our country, women stockbrokers face a glass ceiling’,” Muravchik says. Indeed, many Western Europeans have bristled at State Department criticism that they haven’t done enough to combat domestic violence.
Like it or not, the issue now is institutionalized in the bureaucracy, and it won’t be easily dismantled. Think back to the Carter administration, which brought human rights to the fore of American foreign policy. President Reagan vowed to correct his predecessor’s zealotry. But the human-rights bureaucracy grew under the Gipper’s watch. Count on the same for women’s rights even after Hillary is gone. The baboons on the boulder may ignore the issue. Few people will.
