    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [August 26, 1995]
    [Pages 1267-1271]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1267]]

    Remarks on the 75th Anniversary of Women's Suffrage in Jackson Hole,
    Wyoming
    August 26, 1995

        Thank you very much. Thank you very much, I think, Hillary.
    [Laughter] In my own defense, I brought these boots home about 10 years
    ago, and the shine has kind of come off of them now. [Laughter] They
    don't wake anybody at night anymore.
        I want to thank Rosemary Shockley and all the representatives and
    guests of the women's organizations who are here who put this wonderful
    event together. I want to thank the wonderful people who work for the
    Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks for making this an incredible
    vacation for our family. We have had a wonderful couple of days.
        Yesterday we were up in Yellowstone, and I remarked that I had had a
    lot of incredible things happen to me in my life, but in spite of that,
    if anybody had ever told me that within the space of about 8 minutes I
    would be feeding bison to wolves and then would be hailed on in August--
    [laughter]--or as one of the park rangers said, this is ``hail on the
    Chief''--[laughter]--I would never have believed it. So this has been an
    incredible thing for me, and I'm so profoundly grateful to everybody
    here in Wyoming who has made our vacation so wonderful.
        I'm glad to be here for this occasion. I was thinking how amazing it
    is that a State like Wyoming would be the first place, the first
    democracy anywhere in the world to give women the right to vote. And
    maybe it was because the men were more secure here than they were other
    places at the time. [Laughter] But for whatever reason, it was a very
    good thing.
        I have always been interested in these issues because, as Hillary
    said, I was born to a working mother in the 1940's and raised by a
    working grandmother in the 1940's. So my mother and my grandmother were
    both working 50 years or so ago, just 25 years after women were given
    the right to vote in the country as a whole.
        I'd like to say a word, if I might, at the beginning about this
    world conference on women. I'm glad the First Lady is going to lead our
    delegation. And you heard her describe the delegation. They come from
    all walks of life, from different political parties and religions, and
    they disagree about a lot of things. But they do agree that if you look
    at the world and imagine what the future is going to be like and if you
    believe as I do that more and more the fate of Americans--even in
    landlocked States like Wyoming and Arkansas, where I grew up and lived
    until I became President--will be caught up in the fate of what happens
    to people all around the world, we must have a common agreement that we
    need a united front for treating women all over the world with dignity
    and respect and giving them opportunities in the family and education
    and in the workplace.
        We can't imagine what it's like in America because of the progress
    being made in this country by women, but there are still places where
    women babies are more likely to be--little girl babies are more likely
    to be killed just because they are little girls. There are countries in
    the world today that have a huge imbalance in the number of males and
    females because the little girls are killed at birth because they're not
    thought to have sufficient value.
        There are still countries in the world that try to force women not
    to have children, and that's something we can't imagine in this country,
    where that's the most profound right that women have in the family.
    There are still countries in the world where a young bride can be burned
    if her family can't come up with the dowry or won't come up with a
    little more. There are still places in the world that are held in abject
    poverty because women who are entrepreneurial and creative and willing
    to work don't have a chance even to borrow what would be a pittance in
    America to start a little business to ply their trades and work their
    skills.
        And all of this will affect us because we're going to live in a
    global economy. And if we want to trade with the rest of the world and
    promote democracy and freedom with the rest of the world, then,
    obviously, we need to be working with people who are trying to unleash
    the potential of every citizen in their country. And we believe that's
    the only thing that works here in America.
        One of the most troubling things to me about our politics today in
    America is that everything gets turned into just another version of the
    same

    [[Page 1268]]

    old political fight, and all these issues seem to be torn like Silly
    Putty into extremes. So now there's this huge effort in America to try
    to convince the American people that this conference is somehow anti-
    family and that we're sending some sort of radical delegation there.
    Why? Not because it's true, but because it furthers the almost
    addictive, almost narcotic drive among some elements in our society to
    take every single issue and use it as a cause for division among our
    people when we need to be more united.
        This conference is going to talk about education and domestic
    violence and grassroots economics, employment, health care, political
    participation. It's going to talk about a lot of things we take for
    granted here in this country that we think if everybody had access to it
    around the world we'd be a lot better off. And however anyone might try
    to paint this conference, the truth is it is true-blue to families, to
    supporting them, to conserving them, to valuing them.
        And I want you to know that I think America will have some things to
    learn from this conference as well. And we don't intend to walk away
    from it when it's over. I'm going to establish an interagency council on
    women to make sure that all the effort and the good ideas actually get
    implemented when we come back home.
        I have declared this day Women's Equality Day because there is so
    much to celebrate and so much still to do. All around the country, as
    I'm sure you know, there are events commemorating this important
    anniversary, but no place has a better claim to it than Wyoming, for all
    the reasons that Hillary said.
        The suffragists left us a living legacy and a continuing challenge.
    The legacy is full citizenship for our mothers, our sisters, our
    daughters. The continuing challenge is to honor that legacy by using
    these privileges to lead our Nation in the right direction.
        The vote for women came at the end of an enormous philosophical war.
    Some of the things said kind of remind me about what people are saying
    about this conference on women now. It was bloodless, but it was highly
    costly. It literally consumed the lives of thousands of American women
    who were dedicated to gaining the right to vote. The dividends that were
    won we are still reaping today.
        But remember what the opponents said about that. The opponents said
    that allowing women the vote would mean a disaster for our Nation; it
    would destroy our families; it would end all distinctions between the
    sexes. [Laughter] Happily, they were wrong on all counts. [Laughter] But
    the arguments then and the arguments you hear about this conference on
    women today, they illustrate one of Clinton's laws of politics, which is
    that the American people have one peculiarity: they're all for change in
    general, but a lot of them are against it in particular. [Laughter]
        I remember back in 1993 when I was trying to get Congress to enact
    my deficit reduction program that would also have lowered taxes on
    working families with children and increased our investment in education
    and technology, and the people who wouldn't vote for it said it would
    mean the end of the American economy. It would bring on a great
    recession. It would just be a disaster. It would be the end of
    everything good and true about America. A bunch of those folks are
    running for President today. [Laughter]
        So it turned out that the results of that program were that we
    reduced the deficit from $290 billion to $160 billion. We got about
    halfway home toward our goal of balancing the budget before anything is
    done this year. We got 7 million new jobs, 2\1/2\ million new
    homeowners, 1\1/2\ million new small businesses, the largest number in
    American history, the stock market at 4,700, and things are rocking
    along pretty good. And they still say it was just the worst thing that
    ever happened. Everybody is for change in general, but it's difficult to
    get people to do the particular things to achieve those changes. I think
    that's important to remember.
        Somehow, by some magic of harmony with this beautiful nature behind
    me and a sense of self-confidence and fairness, men who were in the
    decisionmaking process in Wyoming found the self-confidence and the
    innate fairness, without regard to their other partisan or philosophical
    differences, to say it doesn't make sense to have half our folks not
    have the right to vote. And that's a great tribute to the people of
    Wyoming. It led directly to the passage of the 19th amendment, without
    which none of these other things would have happened.
        And of course, as Hillary already said as she introduced the
    survivors here of that remarkable slate of women who swept the elections
    in Jackson in 1920--I thought that was an incredible thing, and I liked
    it a lot until I read that one of the women actually defeated her own

    [[Page 1269]]

    husband. [Laughter] Those guys have even more self-confidence than I do
    when it came to that. [Laughter]
        If you think about it, it's interesting, women have always had great
    symbolic importance in our country's democracy. Our greatest symbols for
    justice and liberty are women. Think about it, a woman holding the
    scales of justice, blindfolded; the Statue of Liberty holding a torch.
    One promises fairness; the other, freedom.
        We are a country that, more than anything else, is still around
    after all this time because we kept expanding the boundaries of fairness
    and freedom, because we never listened to not only the naysayers among
    us but also the naysayers in our own spirits, for each of us, inside,
    every day wakes up with the scales balanced between hope and fear. And
    somehow we've always found the magic balance to go forward for fairness
    and freedom.
        Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Esther
    Morris, Carrie Chapman Catt, they helped to achieve that. Mother Jones
    fought to end child labor. Sojourner Truth fought to end discrimination
    and to establish social justice. My friend Rosa Parks set in motion the
    civil rights movement by simply refusing to sit in the wrong place on a
    bus. A lot of ordinary women all over this country, decade after decade
    after decade, have worked to advance the cause of fairness and freedom.
        When we look back on them from the vantage point of the present,
    it's hard to imagine that as recently as 1920 American women couldn't
    vote. The suffragists had a lot of vision. They knew that the vote would
    be an opening, a door through which women could help to direct our
    Government to where it should be and with which women could stand behind
    issues that would make their families stronger and their children's
    lives better.
        When you look back, it seems remarkable that all this has happened
    in the last 75 years. Now, more and more women are completing higher and
    higher levels of education, entering fields which were closed to them
    not so long ago. Every time I visit a Federal facility, every time I go
    to these national parks, I marvel at how many of the park rangers are
    women.
        We just celebrated, Hillary and I did, a milestone in the progress
    to erect a memorial in Washington to the women who are veterans of our
    wars. And I was so proud to be able to say at this ceremony that in the
    2\1/2\ years I have been President, we have opened more than 250,000
    positions in the United States military to women that were closed just
    2\1/2\ years ago.
        In the last 3 years, the Small Business Administration in our
    administration has cut its budget by 40 percent, almost doubled its loan
    volume, and increased loans to women entrepreneurs by 85 percent. We're
    not at 50 percent yet, but I have six women in my Cabinet, twice the
    number of any previous administration, and over one-third of our
    Presidential appointees and about one-third of the new Federal judges
    appointed in the last 2\1/2\ years are women. Women are beginning to
    participate more fully throughout this country in the life of America.
    And so far as I know, the sky is not falling anywhere. [Laughter]
        We also have to recognize that the people who were against the right
    to vote for women were wrong when they said this would abolish all
    differences between the sexes. And some of the differences that still
    exist are not such good ones. We know that women are still, in peculiar
    ways, more vulnerable to violence, and we have established a violence
    against women section in the Department of Justice which is doing
    exemplary work. And the former Attorney General of Iowa, Bonnie
    Campbell, heads that, and she is also going to the women's conference.
        We have tried to do a lot of work to see that our national medical
    research focuses more on the health concerns of women. I was stunned
    when I started running for President, I never knew before how women had
    been systematically left out of a lot of the research efforts in the
    health area, particularly areas relating to cancer. And so we have done
    a lot of work to make sure that in medical research and treatment, with
    heart disease, cancer, AIDS, and other diseases, women are more fully
    represented in the testing protocols and the research to make sure that
    we do what we ought to do.
        Hillary has launched a national campaign to try to increase the use
    of mammograms which will help in the early detection and the saving of
    thousands of lives. And I hope it will be ever more successful.
        As you look ahead, I ask you to think about what is the agenda for
    women and for families, for more than any other people in our society,
    women have always carried on the struggle to find both personal
    fulfillment and still fulfill the social obligation of maintaining
    strong families

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    and giving our children a better chance. And I think now that's what we
    want for all Americans.
        If you look at the American economy today, the truth is that most
    people don't have the option not to work. For those who do, I applaud
    them for any decision they choose to make because the most important
    thing in our society is still raising children and doing a good job of
    it. That is still the first and most important job of our society.
        But if you look at this world toward which we are moving, the 21st
    century, the way we work and live is changing dramatically. And we are
    in a big, huge debate today, not just in Washington but in every State
    in the country, about how we're going to reestablish common ground, how
    can we agree on the basic things we have to do to enable our people to
    succeed, first and foremost, in raising their children, secondly, in
    being successful in the workplace, and thirdly, in preserving our
    freedom and our way of life. Those will be the great challenges, the new
    family values challenges for the 21st century. And we have to ask and
    answer those questions.
        If I might, let me just suggest a few things that I think are quite
    important if we are going to extol family values and give women a chance
    to live up to the fullest of their God-given capacities as we move into
    this next century.
        First of all, we've got to say, it is the policy of the United
    States of America for people to be able to succeed as parents and as
    workers. It is the policy of the United States for people to be able to
    succeed. In that sense, perhaps the most important law I've signed since
    becoming President is the first one, the family and medical leave law.
    The people--again everybody was for change in general but against it in
    particular. People got up and gave the awfullest speeches you ever heard
    about that law. They said it would mean the end of the free enterprise
    system, businesses would go bankrupt, stores would be boarded up
    everywhere.
        We have no instance, not a single one, of a business going bankrupt
    because of the family and medical leave law. But there are a whole lot
    of people out there who can take a little time off from work when their
    children are sick--sometimes their children are dying--without losing
    their job. And that's a good thing. There are women who can take time
    off from work to deal with their own illnesses without losing their
    health insurance and thereby losing their ability to work, because of
    that law. So I think that's a part of our family values agenda.
        If you look at the family values agenda, you have to say in the
    world toward which we are moving the level of education people have
    determines their income and their capacity to earn more than ever before
    in American history. So I think giving every child a good start in
    school and guaranteeing everybody the right to go to college with an
    affordable college loan, preserving programs like the national service
    program that allows people to work their way through college, giving
    every unemployed person in the country the right to what I call a ``GI
    bill'' for America's workers, a voucher that they can take to the
    nearest community college so that they can get retrained when they lose
    their jobs, these are family value issues that will profoundly affect
    the women of our country and their ability to do well in the future.
        I think immunizing all the children in this country is a pretty
    important family values issue. I think we ought to keep going until
    we've got the job done. I think we ought to recognize that, yes, we have
    to slow the rate of inflation in Medicare and Medicaid, but we shouldn't
    forget that if we want our working people to be able to educate their
    children, then we ought not to cut Medicare and Medicaid so much that
    they will undermine the ability of middle class people to have their
    parents get the care they need and undermine senior citizens' ability to
    get that kind of care.
        Let me make it clear: I believe balancing the budget is a family
    values issue. I think it--this year--this year, we would have a surplus
    in the budget but for the interest run up on the debt accumulated in the
    12 years before I showed up in Washington. This is a big issue.
        Next year, interest on the debt will be bigger than the defense
    budget. We're worried about getting an adequate budget for the parks
    here. We're worried about getting an adequate budget for education. No
    American has a stake in a permanent deficit. That also is a family
    values issue; lifting the burden of this awful debt off of our children
    is a family values issue. But we can do it without breaking Medicare and
    bankrupting the ability of middle class families to know that their
    parents can get the health care they need while they educate their
    children. We can do both, but we must do both. It's not an either-or
    choice.

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        I think maintaining what you see behind me is a family values issue,
    and making it available for all the American people. And I think being
    willing to honestly confront some of the most difficult conflicts in our
    society where short-term economic gain will cause a heavy price over the
    long run is also an important part of our maturing as a country.
        And let me just mention one issue, a difficult one. Everybody told
    me that I--all my political advisers told me I had taken leave of my
    senses when I said it was time to stop walking away from the terrible
    health consequences of teenage smoking. But I believe the United States
    is right to say this is a children's disease. Kids are being addicted,
    3,000 kids a day start smoking, 1,000 of them, 1,000 of them, will have
    their lives shortened as a result of it. I think that is a family values
    issue, and we should take it and face it together.
        So if we're going to do this, it is important that we remember the
    kind of self-confidence that was demonstrated in Wyoming when women got
    the right to vote. It is important that men and women, with all their
    differences, political and otherwise, have the level of self-confidence
    to sit down and say, America is still a great big family. Like every
    great big family, there's a whole lot of differences, and there's always
    going to be a whole lot of argument, and we're always going to be
    looking at some of our family members cross-eyed, like we do our second
    cousin that we wish wouldn't show up to the reunion. [Laughter] But
    there are limits to the extent to which we can demonize one another.
    We've got to treat each other with respect and work through these
    things.
        And if we really want the day when women will become full partners
    in the decisionmaking process in America--and we believe that's a good
    thing, and we want to face these issues which will determine whether we
    go into the 21st century with the American dream alive and well and the
    American community strong and together--we have got to have that level
    of self-confidence. We have got to remember that every time, every time
    we have faced the choice between going forward with freedom or fairness,
    two things symbolized by women, we have had to deal with the demon of
    insecurity in our country and even inside.
        And we have heard all these proclamations, all these Chicken Little
    proclamations that every change we make--that we knew we ought to make
    would cause the sky to fall. And we're still around after almost 220
    years because somehow, someway when it came time to make the decision,
    we decided Chicken Little was wrong.
        Blind justice was right; the Statue of Liberty was right; and the
    kind of self-confidence displayed by the people of Wyoming when they led
    the world in giving women the right to vote was right. It was right
    then, and it still is.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at approximately 11:30 a.m. at Jackson Lake
    Lodge on the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment
    to the Constitution. In his remarks, he referred to Rosemary Shockley,
    president, League of Women Voters of Wyoming.