is listed on the American Rhetoric website, under top 100 speeches.

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It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.

It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution for human greed -- and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice should no longer be tolerated.

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 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 homes by their own relatives.

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.

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely -- and the right to be heard.

Yes, Melinda Henneberger and Dahlia Lithwick, this post is for you.

Thank you for pointing this out. Love makes on blind, I guess Obama-love makes one an amnesiac as well.

So much for journalism that these supposedly smart women forgot something even a working-class woman in Beijing, Bangaldesh or Brazil still remembers with pride, thirteen years on.

Thank you for this!

this is good, but it leaves out the position, the subjectivity clinton has. hopefully this is not too glib: it is easier to condemn the injustice on the other side of the world, than in your own bedroom. yes, raping and burning is much worse. but she is not implicated in it. sexism in the united states is different:

by tolerating bill clinton's treatment of her, and calling paula jones "trailer trash," she seemed to choose sides in a gender war. can she not bear to stand up for herself, as she stands up for other women? she needs to confront her relationship with misogyny and, as the authors mention, victimhood (if not for the election's sake, then for her own psychological well-being).

this kind of sincere, personal engagement with an issue, i think that's the point the authors are trying to make. there is something appealing about hearing it from a politician. their argument is that obama tried this, clinton has not tried this.

These are about women's issues around the world.

Obama's speech was about race in America.

More than half of the things described in that speech do not apply to America.

They are indeed horrible, but when we're talking about women's rights in America, it's about equal pay, respect for career women, respect for not having children, the right to not have to be seen as a domestic worker, the right to choose to be 'feminine' but not be forced to be so. These things are a lot harder to speak about in a way that is inspiring to the nation, which Clinton must know. It's hard enough for many people to hear what they perceive as complaints about racism, a problem that a lot of people, and a lot of posters in the fray, apparently think is already solved.

and does its job better.

Want to know why?

Because Obama only delivered his speech because he got his knickers twisted after the Internet media started posting Wright's comments. Before that, Obama was content to rest on his laurels as a "post racial era politician" (actual term used by the mainstream media). He had the opportunity to address race earlier (many, many times in the past couple of months) but chose not to.

Hillary, on the other hand, had the opportunity to sit out the women's conference as the smiling, supportive spouse at the UN, and she took the opportunity to speak about real issues.

As for American women, the leading indicator of poverty indexes in THIS country is female headed households. That's goes across racial lines. It is the female headed households that live in poverty.

Equal pay for equal work for women is not a reality, in this country either... (screw respect. give us the money!). And Hillary has reaffirmed her support for that all well (to loud cheers I may add)....

It's not likely to have done its job better, since it's relatively unremembered. That's one of the many problems with Senator Clinton's campaign: in addition to being a habitual and shameless liar, she's also incapable of delivering a speech in a way that shapes public perception. She is either angry and agressive or cloyingly faux sentimental, and neither one persuades people to listen to her. Take the words of the speech above, put them into the mouths of both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, and notice how--despite the fact that she's a woman--he would deliver the point much more effectively, persuasively, and memorably.

I agree that Clinton's not capable of giving a speech that shapes public opinion. The above is not even a speech, per se, as much as it is a series of statements that do not pull together the same way that Obama's speech did, pointing a finger into the heart of every American. Her statements certainly point at the injustices against women, but only the most egregious, not the subtle injustices that seep into our everyday lives like the poison of misogyny.

This is a speech about international abuses, not American. While these kinds of horrors might once in a while occur in the U.S., she's addressing the terrors abroad of violence against women. So, it's not on the same level of Obama's speech at all. I have rarely met a Clinton supported who doesn't howl about her suffering at the hands of a misogynistic media. Clinton therefore needs to address the problems at home, not abroad.

That speech isn't about sexism... Can't you people read? It's a speech about human rights. Last time I checked, there was nothing risky about condemning human right atrocities...