Hillary Rodham Clinton's speech to the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women

http://youtu.be/xXM4E23Efvk

On the 5th September 1995 in Beijing, the 4th World Conference on Women was taking place, during which the Beijing Declaration and Platform was approved. The Beijing Declarations is a global commitment for achieving equity, development and peace for women worldwide. One of the speakers during the Conference was Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I have chosen to analyze this particular speech because it reflects some principles about gender issues that appear also today in Hilary R. Clinton’s political guidelines.
The aim of this speech was to introduce the Conference by expressing the biggest issues to face in order to achieve the goals presented in the Declaration of Beijing.

The structure of the speech is simple: it starts with thanks, then there is the explanation of the reason why this Conference is so important, followed by a short but strong critic to those who questioned the Conference. The speech continues with the work of International Organizations, historical experiences about gender issues in different countries and a short outline of who this speech is addressed to. Before the conclusion, she lists the major goals to achieve about freedom and human rights of women around the world, and she gives a little personal experience of discrimination in her country.

When she illustrates the main discriminations women face in the world, she tends to use long lists in order to emphasize how wide and interrelated are the issues regarding women.
During quite all the speech, the speaker uses the pronoun “we” in order to indicate: firstly that the issues she listed are not only about women, but involves everyone, and secondly, that there is a need to work together to obtain more effective results. The pronoun “I” is also used frequently to underline her personal involvement in the work and to shear her experiences. Few times she creates antithesis by using the pronoun “they”, precisely she does it when she criticizes those who questions the utility and the importance of the Conference.

It is also interesting to notice that she constantly uses active verbs to point out that the situation about women’s rights and freedom is developing and that there are a lot of organizations and individuals that work on that.
As far as rhetorical speech is concerned, she uses some powerful expressions such as: “The history of women has been the history of silence” ( the use of present perfect is very eloquent in this sentence) and “Let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all” suggest the strength and determination of the future actions of those who will join the Beijing Declaration.

She argues that women’s rights are human rights, and in order to highlight that, she repeats seven times the structure “It is a violation of human rights when...” followed by all the discrimination women face everyday. It is a smart way to demonstrate that it is impossible to defend human rights without standing for women’s rights.
She concludes the speech by saying: “Time is now”, and by calling everyone to act in order to achieve more effective results.