Analysis of Hillary Clintons Speech: “women’s Rights Are Human’s Rights”

                Analysis of Hillary Clintons Speech: “Women’s rights are human’s rights”

                                        Amanda Munro

                                         English 102

                                        Deborah Crowe

                                Baker College of Port Huron

                                        May 1, 2015

Women’s Rights are Humans Rights

        In September of 1995, First lady Hillary Clinton and over 180 countries around the world gathered together in Beijing, China to hear her speech about human rights. Hillary has made a deep impact on many lives and has fought to express our rights as women. She has become famous for her statement, “Women’s rights are human’s rights.”  Hillary is speaking out to people that can make a difference and using her voice to help women have the same equal rights as anyone else. The speech was given at the United Nations fourth World conference of women. “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human’s rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human’s rights once and for all.” (Clinton 1995) According to Aristotle, rhetoric is “the ability in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion.” He described three main forms of rhetoric: Ethos, pathos, and logos. In this speech I will analyze and show you how Clinton uses ethos, logos, and pathos (not specifically in that order) to convey her message to these great countries around the world.

        Hillary Clinton is a well-known public figure, who I think is serving our country well. She has served as Secretary of State, Senator of New York, First lady of the United States, First lady of Arkansas, a lawyer, a law professor, an activist, and she is running in the next Presidential election of the United States. Hillary grew up in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. Her parents worked hard to give a life to their children that they didn’t have. Hillary’s mother was abandoned by her parents at the age of fourteen years old. Since she was an bereave she decided that the only way she was going to be able to persist was to work. She had taught herself at a young age and worked after school as a housekeeper and child minder. I believe Hillary knowing of her mother’s struggles had somehow given her insight on why she became the respected, and dedicated person she is today. Clinton was inspired to work in public service after she heard Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Chicago in the 1960s. Hillary attended Wellesley and Yale Colleges and graduated with a degree in law. Instead of going into law directly after graduation she chose to work for the Children’s Defense Fund in Bedford, Massachusetts, where she devoted her time and contributed her work to help children with disabilities. Hillary married Bill Clinton in 1975, and had a daughter names Chelsea with him in 1980. Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 and was re-elected in 1996. Hillary became first lady where she fought to reform our healthcare system so that all the families in America could have affordable healthcare. She ran for President in 2008 but she backed out of the election the last minute. Clinton has fought for the rights of women, children, and people across the country. Hillary has made a big impact on women’s rights and human’s rights, her speech is still recognized today.

“It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, drowned, or suffocated, or their spine broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into slavery and prostitution. 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’s 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 home. 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. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely, and the right to be heard.”

(Clinton, 1995) In this part of Hillary’s address to the nation she is using logos or logic to convey her message. Logos is a Greek term used by Aristotle who referred to the term as “Reassured discourse”. She is presenting an argument to the audience and using persuasion for you to perceive things how she is seeing them. “Persuasion is effected through the speech itself when we have proved a truth or an apparent truth by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question.” (Aristotle, n.d.) By arguing that women’s rights are violated when babies are drowned or broken just because they are girls or because they are sold into slavery and prostitution. She is setting the tone for the audience to be logical to what’s going on in the world. Clinton is expressing that there is a problem in women not having equal rights, and she is trying to come up with a solution on how to make equal rights possible for women and humanity.

        This speech uses pathos to construe emotion from its listeners. Pathos is Greek for (suffering or experience) in other words the message that is being portrayed is meant for you to feel what the writer is feeling and to make some sort of similar connection to their point of view. Hillary does this in her speech because she is referring to the many years of heartache and suffrage that women had to go through. She uses pathos further when she is describing the violence women have to endure in their own home. Not being able to afford to have someone sit with your children while you are at work, having to work odd shifts and miss out on the opportunity on being with your kids, and being a mother and a woman in our community that cannot voice her own opinion. Clinton refers to the women in our everyday life as well as the horrible acts women had to engage in throughout history. Pathos is definitely essential to have in a speech on a topic that strikes passion in the audience. Many of these women that were in the audience can relate to these topics that Clinton is speaking so strongly about.