She’s held many titles in her lifetime, many roles of distinction. Over and again, the tag “first” has been attached to her accomplishments, the list of which is staggering. It’s interesting, then, that all it takes is a single first name for half the globe to know exactly who is being talked about: Hillary.
Born to Dorothy and Hugh Rodham in Park Ridge, Illinois, it didn’t take long for Hillary Rodham Clinton to make it onto the global radar. Two younger brothers and a house filled with rules and tall expectations toughened her up quickly, while a push to chase her ambitions sent her dreams sky high.
A rare and valuable blend of her parents’ distinguishing qualities, along with purely self-brewed grit and gumption, drove Hillary to excel in and out of the classroom. Even with an early interest in politics (particularly her father’s flavor of choice: staunch Republicanism), it was a day trip with her youth minister to see Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak in Chicago that changed everything.
From that point on, social justice and human rights became the foundation upon which Hillary built her career. That passion to help the vulnerable and the dismissed — especially women and children — remains healthy today.
Hillary graduated with honors with a degree in political science from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she was president of the student government and presiding officer of the college senate. When asked to giver her graduating class’s commencement speech, her emerging status and remarks landed her in Life magazine at age 21.
“One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to a woman who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world,” Hillary told her classmates. “She wouldn’t want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she’s afraid. Fear is always with us, but we just don’t have time for it. Not now.”
If there was no time for fear at Wellesley, there certainly wasn’t once Hillary was on her way to Yale Law School, one of only 27 women in her class. There was no time for fear when she served on the board of the Yale Law Review and Social Action, or when she interned with president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman, or when she took on various child abuse cases.
And there was definitely no time for fear when, as the story goes, she walked up to one of her classmates in the library — an Arkansas boy named Bill Clinton with whom she had been exchanging glances — and said, “If you’re going to keep looking at me, and I’m going to keep looking at you, we ought to at least know each other’s names. I’m Hillary Rodham.”
After graduation, Bill returned to Arkansas to begin his political career. Hillary set off for Washington, joining the impeachment inquiry staff advising the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives investigating the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal. She also worked with the CDF, again proving her passion for those in need was not just a passing phase.
It was only a matter of time, however, before she made one of the most definitive decisions of both her personal life and her career and followed Bill to The Natural State. She was on the faculty and taught at the University of Arkansas Law School, and the two married and soon took off to the capital city of Little Rock when Bill was elected attorney general.
It was in Little Rock where Hillary began to dig into her work and into the community, making a name for herself as much as her husband did. She joined the well-established Rose Law Firm, where in a few years’ time, she was named a full partner, the first woman to do so. Hillary was twice named one of the 100 most powerful lawyers in America by the National Law Journal, and was appointed to the board of the Legal Services Corporation by President Jimmy Carter the same year her husband was elected Governor of Arkansas.
In 12 years as First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary chaired both the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee and the Rural Health Advisory Committee, served on the boards of the Children’s Defense Fund and Arkansas Children’s Hospital, as well as Arkansas businesses TCBY and Walmart.
She co-founded one of the state’s first child advocacy groups, the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and started a family of her own when daughter Chelsea was born in 1980.
Hillary’s efforts didn’t stop when Bill Clinton became the 42nd President of the United States. She helped pass the Adoption and Safe Families Act and the Violence Against Women office in the Department of Justice.
She not only had a successful professional career, but a postgraduate degree and her own office in the West Wing — a definite first for a First Lady.
But Hillary’s ambitions didn’t sit well with everyone. Former White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes remembers some of the backlash. “She was outspoken, she was smart, she was hard driving and some people resented her,” he told PBS in the American Experience documentary “Clinton.”
But Hillary didn’t slow down. She wrote “It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us,” her audio recording for which won a Grammy, and initiated the game-changing Children’s Health Insurance Program, providing care to kids whose parents couldn’t. She also went against the wishes of advisors spoke at the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where she brought the house down, ardently declaring that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”
After the the Clinton presidency, Hillary was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York in 2001, making her the first former First Lady to achieve a national office, as well as the first female senator from the state altogether. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks she brought attention to the needs of first responders suffering from contaminants at Ground Zero and launched Farm-to-Fork, a program connecting local farmers to restaurants and schools.
After her unsuccessful run for president in 2008 she was named U.S. Secretary of State when her primary election rival Barack Obama won the Oval Office, making her the first former first lady to serve in a presidential cabinet. Halfway through her term, she’d clocked a half-million miles in her Boeing 757, circling the globe to meet with officials on everything from sanctions against Iran to political upheaval in Libya.
Despite every achievement, however, Hillary faced gender-targeted critiques and expectations. People raised eyebrows when she kept her maiden name attached to her law practice, then again when she made the decision to go by Hillary Rodham Clinton as a political spouse. The public thought her style too bohemian, then joked about her more traditional suits. Then came the Internet’s obsession with her hairstyles.
When Hillary released her 2014 memoir “Hard Choices,” she laughed in an interview about alternate book titles. “There was also this wonderful idea that just stayed with me that I thought about very seriously: ‘The Scrunchie Chronicles: 112 Countries and It Is Still All About My Hair.’”
But the upbeat attitude in no way suggests she takes her responsibilities as a woman of leadership lightly. One of the pillars of her 2016 presidential campaign is equality, something she’s fought for in her nearly five decades in politics.
“My mother and my grandmothers could never have lived my life; my father and my grandfathers could never have imagined it,” Hillary wrote in her 2003 book “Living History.” “But they bestowed on me the promise of America, which made my life and my choices possible.”
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