HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON SPEECH TO SPOUSES OF LEADERS
Women in positions of leadership traditionally have been treated as aberrations, and their accomplishments have been portrayed as less important than the sweep of male-dominated history. This attitude is not something that was once prevalent in our past and that is now no more than a relic, and the treatment of Hillary Rodham Clinton by the press (and by various Republican leaders and commentators in particular) shows this clearly. A woman is still seen as an adjunct to her husband, and for the wife of the president this seems to mean to some people that she should confine herself to giving teas and to standing beside the president at official functions. However, she is the wife of the President of the United States and deserves the respect accorded to that role.
In any case, Hillary Rodham Clinton has achieved much on her own and should be recognized for this. She grew up in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago, where her father owned a textile company. She was elected president of her high school class and earned many honors. She organized circuses and amateur sports tournaments to raise money for migrant workers and was always a leader, able to get others to do what was needed for a project of this sort. She graduated from Wellesley College and then went to Yale Law School, which is where she first met Bill Clinton. They dated for some time after that as Hillary sought her law degree and pursued her goal of joining a major big-city law firm. After graduation, they briefly separated when he returned to Arkansas to teach and run for Congress while she went to Cambridge, Massachusetts to begin working with the Children's Defense Fund (of which she is now chairwoman of the board). She later went to Washington to work on the Nixon impeachment inquiry.
That job ended in 1974, and she went to Arkansas to see if she liked small-town life. She and Clinton were married i...