I continued to promote domestic initiatives through public appearances, speeches and in meetings and phone calls with members of Congress as well as outside organizations. Over the course of eight years, my talented domestic policy staff-Shirley Sagawa, Jennifer Mein, Nicole Rabner, Neera Tanden, Ann O’Leary, Heather Howard and Ruby Shamir―was invaluable. Bill and I also convened White House strategy sessions on how to curb media violence directed at children, improve education for Hispanic students who had a high dropout rate and expand work and learning opportunities for American teenagers.

  The first piece of legislation Bill signed into law in 1993 was the Family and Medical Leave Act, sponsored by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, which allowed millions of working people to take up to twelve weeks o£ unpaid leave for family emergencies or to care for a family member who was sick, without fear of losing their jobs. Millions of Americans took advantage of the protections of the law and discovered the profound difference it made in their lives. A woman in Colorado wrote me that her husband had recently died of congestive heart failure after several years of illness. Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, she had been able to take time off from work to transport him to doctor appointments and hospital visits, and to comfort him at the end.

  She did not have to spend the critical last months of her husband’s life worrying that she would not have a job after he died.

  I urged my staff to come up with ideas to improve the law, and we worked with the Department of Labor, the Office of Personnel Management and the National Partnership for Women and Families to modify family and medical leave so that federal workers could use up to twelve weeks of accrued paid sick leave to care for an ill family member.

  I hoped this federal system would become a model around the country, and I pushed for a regulation permitting states to use their unemployment insurance system to offer paid leave to new parents. At least sixteen state legislatures were considering such proposals when the Bush Administration eliminated the regulation, foreclosing an avenue of support for new parents.

  Proposed bankruptcy reform moving through Congress threatened to undermine the spousal and child support many women depended on. The number of Americans filing for bankruptcy had risen 400 percent in twenty years, a staggering statistic with important implications for our nation’s economic stability. Were a growing number of Americans simply using bankruptcy as a financial planning tool to escape mounting personal debts?

  Was the rise due to an irresponsible banking and credit card industry that solicited, and recklessly approved, unqualified cardholders? Or were responsible Americans facing mounting personal expenses that they simply could not manage on their own, such as health care bills that were not covered by insurance? How politicians answered these questions drove the policy solutions they favored. Those who believed that the credit card industry was largely to blame for the increased debt carried by Americans favored solutions that limited aggressive tactics to sign up cardholders who were known credit risks.

  Those who thought that people were using the system to avoid paying debts they rightly owed preferred solutions that would make it more difficult to declare bankruptcy or would limit the amount of debt forgiven in bankruptcy cases.

  Missing from this debate, I discovered, was any discussion of what happens to women and children who depend on legally required child and spousal support that is not being paid. Hundreds of thousands of bankruptcy cases were bringing women into court because they were trying to collect child and spousal support withheld from them by deadbeat dads and ex-husbands who had declared bankruptcy. I recognized that changes in the bankruptcy law would have profound implications for women and families. In cases of bankruptcy, credit card companies wanted unpaid credit card bills to have the same priority as spousal and child support obligations. That meant that single women would have to compete with Visa and MasterCard to collect legally owed child support. I believed that child support obligations should come first and that bankruptcy reform must be balanced, expecting more responsibility from debtors and creditors alike. In 1998, 1 weighed in on the President’s decision to veto one version of the bill that disproportionately favored the credit card industry over consumers, and later I worked with members of Congress to enhance the law’s consumer protections and to add provisions to protect women and their families. In the Senate, one of the first measures I passed increased protections for women and children.

  Women’s economic empowerment also meant continuing the fight for equal pay and retirement security. Women are still not being paid equally to men, and many working women do not receive any or adequate income from pensions but rely on Social Security.

  The structure of Social Security is based on outdated notions of women as secondary breadwinners, or not as breadwinners at all. The payment that a person receives is determined by the contributions that he or she makes during his or her years of employment.

  Most women not only earn less than men and often do not receive private pensions, they are more likely to work part time, spend time outside of the labor force and live alone in their retirement years because, on average, they live longer than their husbands. For many elderly women, Social Security is all that stands between them and abject poverty. Determined to preserve the solvency of this essential safety net, I chaired a panel at the White House Conference on Social Security in 1998 to explore the system’s structural discrimination against women.

  Women and children also suffer from inequities in our health care system, one of my original motivations to work on reform. I led the Administration’s efforts to end the practice of “drive-through deliveries,” in which hospitals discharged new mothers twentyfour hours after giving birth. Now, women can stay for forty-eight hours after a normal delivery and ninety-six hours after a cesarean section.

  Inspired by the life of AIDS activist Elizabeth Glaser, I also began working for better testing and labeling of pediatric drugs, including drugs to treat children with HIV/AIDS. I first met Elizabeth at the Democratic convention in 1992, where she spoke movingly about having contracted HIV through a blood transfusion while giving birth to her daughter, Ariel, in 1981. Unaware that she was infected, Elizabeth passed the disease on to her daughter through her breast milk and later to her son, Jake, in the womb. Elizabeth was outraged that medications available to her were denied to her daughter and son because they hadn’t been tested for safety and efficacy for children. She and her husband, Paul Glaser, watched helplessly as their daughter succumbed to AIDS at age seven.

  Elizabeth turned her personal loss into a mission on behalf of children with HIV/AIDS, founding the Pediatric AIDS Foundation to support and encourage research into the prevention and treatment of childhood AIDS. Until her death in 1994,I worked with Elizabeth to require that medications were being properly tested and administered to children, and then I continued the cause in her memory. Jake has benefited from the advances in treatment and is doing well.

  While some drugs are not available for desperately ill children, others are routinely prescribed with little understanding of the proper dosages or potentially harmful side effects.

  Jen Klein, my staffer who headed the successful White House effort to improve pediatric labeling and testing, was keenly aware of the issue because her own son, Jacob, was taking medications for asthma. In 1998, the Food and Drug Administration introduced requirements that pharmaceutical companies test drugs for use in children, but some companies sued, and a federal court ruled that the FDA did not have the authority to require testing. As a Senator I’ve been working to pass a law that gives the FDA the power it needs to do what Elizabeth advocated.

  Because of my Beijing speech the year before, my visibility around the world had dramatically increased, and my office was bombarded with requests for me to make speeches and attend meetings on my own to discuss issues affecting women in the countries we visited. Prior to Beijing, when we traveled on official visits abroad, I accompanied Bill where appropriate and attended the spouses programs. In mid-November, when we made state visits to Australia, the Philippines and Thailand, I followed my own agenda as well as Bill’s. We also scheduled some necessary R&R. We visited the Great Barrier Reef while we were in Australia after stops in Sydney and Canberra. At Port Douglas, Bill announced American support for the International Coral Reef Initiative, to stem the erosion of reefs around the world, and then we took a boat out to the reef in the Coral Sea. I was anxious to get in the water. “C’mon you guys!” I said to my staff. “Life is too short to worry about getting your hair wet!”

  It’s always a big production when a President goes swimming. Navy divers and Secret Service agents in flippers and masks circled us as Bill and 1 marveled at a giant clam and curtains of iridescent fish darting through turquoise waters.

  There were other wonderful moments on that trip. Bill played golf with Australia’s most famous “Great White Shark,” the legendary Greg Norman, having prepared by putting up and down the aisles of Air Force One during the flight over. I visited the world famous Sydney Opera House where I spoke to an audience of distinguished women about the presidential election and the emphasis Bill and I had placed on matters concerning women and families, what some pundits called the “feminization of politics” but which I considered the “humanization.”

  At a wildlife preserve, Bill cuddled a koala named Chelsea. It’s a small miracle―or an example of fortunate oversight―that he got anywhere near the animal. An overeager White House advance person had taken it upon himself to protect Bill against any possible allergy attack overseas. During a courtesy visit to the Governor-General’s house in Canberra, Bill and I stood with Sir William and Lady Deane, admiring their vast green lawn. Lady Deane turned to Bill, “We’re sorry about the kangaroos,” she said, “We think they’ve caught them all.”

  Bill looked puzzled.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “We were told to get all the kangaroos off the lawn because if one of them came near the President, it would cause an allergic reaction.”

  As far as Bill knows, he isn’t allergic to kangaroos, but someone said he was, so the urge to protect him prevailed. Our loyal and dedicated advance teams were eager to help, and I’m grateful for their diligent efforts to anticipate our every need, but I felt terrible when their solicitude became an imposition on others around us. At a state dinner hosted for us by President François Mitterrand and his wife, Danielle, at the Elysée Palace in Paris in 1994, Madame Mitterrand apologized to me because the tables would look so bare without flower arrangements. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I was told that the President was allergic to flowers.”

  He isn’t allergic to cut flowers either, as he told his staff for years, usually to no avail.

  We couldn’t have accomplished anything without so many wonderful staff people, but on rare occasions we got more help than we needed!

  By now it was understood that when I traveled with the President, I would emphasize issues relating to women, health care, education, human rights, the environment and grassroots efforts such as microcredit to jumpstart economies. I usually branched off from Bill’s official delegation to meet with women in their homes and workplaces, tour hospitals that used innovative approaches to expanding health care to children and families and visit schools, especially those educating girls. In these settings, I learned about the local culture and reinforced the message that a nation’s prosperity is linked to the education and wellbeing of girls and women.

  On our first visit to the Philippines in 1994, Bill and I had toured Corregidor, the American base that had fallen to the Japanese during World War II. There General Douglas MacArthur was forced to abandon the islands, though promising, “I shall return.” Filipino soldiers had fought valiantly alongside Americans, paving the way for MacArthur’s eventual return in 1944. The Philippines had undergone wrenching political changes in the decades since World War II and people were still recovering from the effects of twenty-one years of autocratic rule under Ferdinand Marcos. Corazon Aquino, whose husband was assassinated as a result of his opposition to Marcos, had led the way in restoring democracy in her country. “Cory” Aquino ran against Marcos for President in 1986. Marcos was declared the winner, but his victory was attributed to suspected fraud and intimidation. Popular protests drove Marcos out of office, and Aquino became President, another woman thrust into politics as a result of personal loss.

  President Aquino was succeeded by Fidel Ramos, a former general educated at West Point, who brought a quick smile and sense of humor to his daunting responsibilities. He and his wife, Amelita, were our hosts for both of the trips we made to Manila. At the state lunch in 1994, he insisted that Bill play a saxophone, and when Bill demurred, he arranged for the band to call Bill up to play, accompanied on the piano by Mrs. Ramos. She also gleefully showed me one of the many closets in the former presidential residence still filled with Imelda Marcos’s shoes.

  After speaking at a conference attended by thousands of women from all over the Philippines, I left Manila for the hill country of northern Thailand and was to meet Bill in Bangkok for a state visit hosted by King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit that coincided with the King’s fiftieth anniversary on the throne.

  Flying into the town of Chiang Rai, near the Laotian and Burmese frontier, I savored the spectacular view of green rice paddies and meandering rivers spread out below me. I was greeted on the tarmac by musicians beating drums and cymbals and playing the sah, a stringed instrument with a melancholy, piercing sound. Girls in traditional hill country tribal garb danced, while miraculously balancing the array of flowers and candles attached to their wrists. My arrival coincided with the Loy Krathong Festival, when the streets are filled with celebrants on their way to the Mae Ping River to launch floating clusters of flowers and candles into the water. The ancient custom, I was told, symbolizes the end of the troubles of one year and the hopes for the next.

  The hopefulness of this ritual stood in stark contrast with the dire lives of the young girls I later visited in a rehabilitation center for former prostitutes. This region of northern Thailand was part of the “Golden Triangle,” an epicenter of trafficking of all kinds: drugs, contraband and women. l was told that 10 percent or more of the girls in the area were coerced into the sex industry. Many were sold into prostitution before they reached puberty, because clients preferred young girls, wrongly convinced that they did not carry AIDS, endemic among prostitutes. At the New Life Center in Chiang Mai, American missionaries gave former prostitutes a safe haven and a chance to learn vocational skills they needed to support themselves. I met one girl at the Center who had been sold by her opium-addicted father when she was eight years old. After a few years, she escaped and returned home―only to be sold again to a whorehouse. Now only twelve, she was dying of AIDS at the Center. Her skin hung off her bones, and I watched helplessly as she summoned all her strength to draw her tiny hands together in the traditional Thai greeting when I approached her. I knelt next to her chair and tried to speak to her through a translator.

  She did not have the strength to talk. All I could do was hold her hand. She died shortly after my visit.

  On a tour of a local village, I witnessed disturbing evidence of local supply-anddemand economics that brought this girl to her death. My guides explained that every house with a TV antenna sticking out of its thatched roof represented a wealthier family―

  and that almost always meant one that had sold a daughter into the sex trade. Families in the poorer mud huts without televisions either refused or had no daughters to sell.

  This visit reinforced my resolve to bridge the disconnect between global politics and local lives. In a meeting with representatives of the Thai government and women’s groups, I discussed the government’s plan to crack down on the trafficking of women, particularly young girls, into Bangkok’s sex trade by toughening the enforcement of its antiprostitution laws and imposing serious jail terms for brothel owners, clients and families that sell their children into prostitution. Trafficking in women is a human rights violation that enslaves girls and women and distorts and destabilizes economies of whole regions, just as drug smuggling does. Thailand was not unique. Over the course of my travels, I began to understand how vast the industry of trafficking human beings―particularly women―had become. Today, the State Department estimates that as many as four million people, often living in extreme poverty, are trafficked each year. I began speaking out about this horrific violation of human rights and pushing the Administration to assume global leadership in combating it. In Istanbul, Turkey, at the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) meeting in 1999, I participated on a panel to urge international action. I worked with the State Department and members of Congress already concerned with the issue. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, passed in 2000, is now the law of the land, helping women trafficked to the United States and providing assistance and aid to governments and NGOs combating traffic abroad.