[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 11 (Monday, March 22, 1999)]
[Pages 441-443]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Sixth Millennium Evening at the White House

March 15, 1999

    The President. Thank you. First of all, let me welcome all of you 
here tonight and thank our participants. I will be very brief, because 
the only thing that frustrates me about these Millennial Evenings is 
that you will be amazed--we will get literally thousands of questions 
that will start coming in on the Internet and lots of frustrated people 
out there. So I don't want to take a lot of time.
    I would like to say again--I think I speak for all of us--when 
Hillary had the idea to do these evenings, I thought they sounded 
interesting or at least maybe most of them would be interesting. 
[Laughter] They have all turned out to be fascinating and, each in their 
own way, better than the ones before. And I think this is a great gift 
she has given our country for the millennium, and I thank her for it.
    The remarks generated scores of questions in my mind and one fact I 
want to say. If you ever want an example of whether or not the gender 
gap exists, you are looking at it--[laughter]--because I would not be 
here if it did not exist. Or if it did not exist in the right way, I 
would have had bigger margins, depending on how you look at it. 
[Laughter]
    One of the things I wish that somebody would comment on before we 
get through--although, it's not my question--is, if women learn 
different ways of doing things through the century of struggle, how 
would this Congress be different if the party divisions were exactly the 
same, but 55 percent of the Members were women? That would be 
interesting. I don't know the answer to that, but feel free to comment 
if anyone wants to. [Laughter]
    I want to ask Professor Kessler-Harris to answer a question that has 
concerned me quite a great deal, just from remembering the patterns of 
life with my working grandmother and my working mother. Now that we have 
opened more opportunities for women in the workplace, but they still are 
spending, I think, even in two-parent households, more than half of the 
time spent raising children, and we've even opened more opportunities 
for women in the political workplace, and more are being opened all the 
time, I would like to have you comment on what you think the potential 
is for voluntary citizens' groups of women to still produce both social 
movements and specific legislative changes. That is, will voluntary 
groups still have the same impact? And if so, how are we going to 
continue to encourage that?
    Because I think that that's really the unique story of the whole 
20th century, all those parades and everything we saw in the films. Will 
more women in the workplace, still having to raise the kids--and in the 
political workplace, which may make women think they're represented in 
more ordinary ways--lead to a reduction or an increase in these 
voluntary associations? And what are some specific examples where we 
might see voluntary movements produce social movements and legislative 
change?

[At this point, the discussion continued.]

    The President. I just wanted to say one thing that I have learned 
from a lifetime of sort of listening to the way people talk and relate. 
And this goes to Deborah's--the previous question, too. I think if you 
will really

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study the Americans and how they vote, you will see that sometimes they 
vote based on income, sometimes they vote based on racial experience, 
sometimes they vote on philosophy. But a lot of the gender gap is a 
cultural gap; it's almost about the way we relate to one another and 
define winning and losing in our own lives.
    And I think in order for men to ever get through this, one of the 
things that men are raised to believe is that fulfillment and success is 
defined in terms of winning and control; whereas people who--women, 
historically, have had more nurturing roles. They have to raise their 
children. So you don't think--maybe you have to control your child for a 
while, but sooner or later you even give up on that. But winning is 
defined not just as winning against someone else, but it's doing 
something in the context of your family, in the context of your 
childrearing.
    And I think a lot of subconscious patterns that men are raised with 
make it almost impossible for them to really get there on this issue. 
And I think that for a father to raise a son to believe that there is a 
way to win in life and find fulfillment in a shared victory and shared 
decisionmaking and not always victory over someone else and continued 
control over someone else, I think it's something that take some doing.
    But it's something that doesn't come naturally to men once we've 
been socialized. And I think that's an important part of this, and that 
until we can change it, it will never be just like it should be.

[At this point, the discussion continued.]

    The President. Thank you, Vicky. First of all, I'm sure all of you 
here know how deplorable the conditions are for women in Afghanistan. 
Hillary and I had an event here at the White House not very long ago, we 
had two Afghan women here, among others, to sort of stand for what women 
in their country are going through.
    I want someone in the audience to help me. There is a national 
organization of women, a group now focused on this, and most of the 
leaders are in California, although some in the East Coast--Ann, what's 
the name of it?
    Ms. Ann Lewis. The Feminist Majority. And Ellie Smeal is here----
    The President. Yes, Ellie is here working--Feminist Majority is 
working on it. And I'm going to have a meeting with some of their 
leaders pretty soon to talk about what more I can do, aside from not 
recognizing the Taliban and speaking against it.
    I think the important thing is that we need people to support this 
organization. We need women and men around the country to engage in 
contributing to a common effort to highlight what is going on, who is 
being hurt, what the consequences are to the society as a whole, and 
what we can do to help the people that are being hurt?
    This is the 50th anniversary of the International Declaration of 
Human Rights. It is simply not acceptable to say that this is nothing 
more than an expression of religious convictions. We just had an 
election in Iran, local elections. There were hundreds of women 
candidates. We see, even in Iraq, a country we have serious differences 
with, their women are not subject to these sorts of constraints because 
they are women.
    And I think that the most important thing I could say to an ordinary 
citizen is, write your Member of Congress and tell them not to 
acknowledge or recognize the Government under any circumstances until 
there are changes, and get in touch with the Feminist Majority and get 
all the material and make sure that you are doing whatever you can do to 
help those women over there and to give support for the ones that are 
sticking their necks out to try to change things.

[At this point, the discussion continued.]

    The President. When the Founders wrote the documents that got us all 
started, they said they were doing all this so that we could better 
protect life and liberty and pursue happiness. And even they were smart 
enough to know that they weren't really writing that for white male 
property owners only, even though those were the only folks that could 
vote then.
    So a great deal of the history of this country is about the 
expansion of the notion of liberty, with notions of equality and 
justice. And we hardly ever think about what they meant by the pursuit 
of happiness. They

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didn't mean riding the rides at the county fair. They really meant the 
pursuit of a good life, dreaming dreams and trying to live them.
    When I think about what the women's issues of the 21st century will 
be, I do think there will still be some significant liberty, equality 
issues related to wealth and power, closing the wage gap, the earnings 
gap, dealing with the enormously complicated problem of the fact that 
there are more elderly women than men--because you may be genetically 
superior to us after all--[laughter]--and that, as a consequence, their 
poverty rate is twice the rate of elderly men, breaking all the glass 
ceilings that have been alluded to.
    But I predict to you that there will be increasing focus, more than 
any time in our history, on the latter purpose of our getting together 
as a nation, and that is the pursuit of happiness. And I believe that 
will require us to deal with questions of balance and interdependence, 
more than ever before. The one we talked about a little tonight is a 
balance between work and family. There is no more important job for any 
society than raising children. And men have to recognize that, too. But 
I think that will be a big deal, how to balance work and family.
    The other big balance questions will come involve with how do you 
keep society together with all the diversity we share, not just gender 
but the racial diversity, the cultural diversity, the religious 
diversity. And women will be uniquely positioned to play a major role in 
that.
    And finally--I'll just give one other example because we're running 
out of time--how do we balance our obligation to prosper as well as we 
can and preserve the planet in the face of the evidence on climate 
change and other things?
    So I believe there will be a huge challenge, which is an enormous 
opportunity for women, in the whole area of our pursuit of happiness 
properly defined.
    When Susan B. Anthony came here in 1906 and gave what turned out to 
be her last public comment, in a church here in Washington, DC, the last 
public word she ever uttered was, ``Failure is impossible.'' I am 
persuaded by the presence of you in this crowd and those whom you 
represent that on the edge of a new century she's still right.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The White House Millennium Evening began at 7:35 p.m. in the East 
Room at the White House. In his remarks, the President referred to 
Deborah Tannen, professor, Georgetown University; Vicky LeBlanc, 
attorney in Delafield, WI; and Eleanor (Ellie) Smeal, president, 
Feminist Majority. The panelists participating in the discussion, 
entitled ``Women as Citizens: Vital Voices Through the Century,'' were: 
Alice Kessler, professor, Columbia University, Nancy Cott, professor, 
Yale University, and Ruth Simmons, president, Smith College. The 
discussion following the panelists was moderated by Ellen Lovall, 
Director, White House Millennium Council. The transcript made available 
by the Office of the Press Secretary also included the remarks of the 
First Lady, the panelists, and the question-and-answer portion of the 
evening. The lecture was cybercast on the Internet.