I didn’t get the chance to execute on these proposals, but I was glad that many of my longtime policy advisors served in both the Obama and Biden administrations, bringing along our shared passion for improving the lives of working families and providing more support to parents and kids.
Today, care is a conversation at every kitchen table in America. It’s a universal need—for moms and dads of young children but also for anyone with aging parents or sick loved ones. Too many working people are cutting back on hours (if they can), using vacation time (if they even have it), or leaving the workforce altogether to take care of themselves or loved ones. Demographic shifts are compounding these challenges. Each day, approximately ten thousand babies are born in America and another ten thousand people turn sixty-five. Americans today live longer than previous generations, which means the number of people living with disabilities and chronic illnesses will continue to grow, and the overwhelming majority (90 percent) want to age at home or in their community. This puts more pressure on the “sandwich generation,” those caring for aging parents and children at the same time (most of whom are women). Despite the extraordinary care they provide, care workers (like home health aides, childcare providers, and nurses) are often invisible and among the lowest paid of any occupation. Nearly half live in households that depend on public assistance, and many are undocumented immigrants without strong networks of support. The median annual income of home care workers in America is $33,530 per year. That’s not nearly enough for workers to care for themselves and their loved ones and live in dignity—and it leads to high turnover and unmet care needs.
A big part of meeting the needs of working families and our aging population is bolstering the care workforce. We should be valuing the people caring for our kids and our parents. That’s why, as a candidate for president, I proposed launching a Care Workers Initiative to improve opportunities for care workers to build sustainable careers and earn fair wages.
Ai-jen Poo, leader of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations, calls investments in the care workforce “triple dignity investments.” They benefit care workers by providing them with training, livable wages, and dignified jobs. That benefits the people they’re hired to care for, who receive quality, consistent care. And that benefits family members, who are free to pursue their own careers outside the home. It’s a win-win-win.
On top of investing in the care workforce, we need to invest in new parents. The United States is the only developed nation in the world that doesn’t require paid leave for new mothers. Many offer parental leave for mothers and fathers. That means a lot of moms and dads in the U.S. can’t stay home with their newborns because they can’t afford unpaid time off. The consequences of this failure fall particularly hard on women. One in four new moms in the United States returns to work within two weeks of giving birth, potentially sacrificing her health and her baby’s. On top of that, many families are forced to choose between spending a significant portion of their income on childcare (the cost has more than doubled in the last decade while wages remained mostly stagnant) or abandoning paid work altogether to become a full-time caregiver.
Critics say a care agenda is too expensive, but that’s a scarcity mindset that never seems to get in the way of another tax cut for billionaires or subsidies to big corporations. And not investing in care comes at a cost to the wider economy. Businesses lose an estimated $12.7 billion annually because of their employees’ childcare challenges. If American women earned minimum wage for their unpaid caregiving work in 2019, they would have made $1.5 trillion a year—exceeding the combined revenue of the fifty largest companies on the Fortune Global 500 list, including Walmart, Apple, and Amazon.
The COVID-19 pandemic made all this worse. As schools and childcare centers closed, working moms left the workforce in droves. And although the workforce now reflects pre-pandemic parity levels, the return-to-work rates for women lagged significantly behind those for men.
Despite the clear needs, every attempt to make progress has faced implacable opposition, mostly from Republicans but regrettably from some fellow Democrats as well. Here’s a quick story to give you a sense of what we’ve been up against: In 1994, after Republicans won a majority in Congress, the new Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, proposed taking children away from moms on welfare and sticking them in state-run orphanages. Gingrich and his allies were especially keen to go after the kids of unmarried women under the age of twenty-one. The idea was to send the kids—babies, really—to orphanages and the mothers to group homes. I have heard politicians spout a lot of horrible and heartless ideas over the years, but this was one of the worst. After decades of working on children’s issues, I can tell you that the evidence is clear: Kids are almost always better off with their families, unless there is real abuse or neglect. And parents, including single moms, deserve support, not scapegoating. Republicans claimed to be the party of “family values,” yet they were cavalierly talking about breaking up families and victimizing children.
Listening to that nonsense helped convince me to write a book pulling together everything I’d learned from years of working with children and families and from being a mother myself. My goal was to explain the responsibility we all have to help create a healthy, nurturing community for children. I called the book It Takes a Village.
Republicans, after having just proposed taking kids away from parents, now turned around and accused me of wanting to destroy families and put the state in charge of raising children. Senator Bob Dole, the Republican nominee for president in 1996, even devoted part of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention to these charges. (In fairness, the country was enjoying so much peace and prosperity under my husband’s leadership that Dole struggled to find targets for his ire.)
Throughout my career advocating for children and families, I’ve been called a socialist, a “nasty woman,” and much worse. Other women who have run for office and championed these family issues have faced similar attacks. That’s just what happens when women seek to gain power and use it on behalf of other women. And that’s the key. In 1971, we didn’t have enough power to overcome Nixon and the Birchers. We had staunch allies like Mondale, but women were still easy to ignore politically. In the decades since, we’ve made gains—but not enough. And where we’ve fallen short, it usually comes down to power: who has it and who doesn’t.
Let me tell you the story of another important piece of legislation designed to help working parents and why this one succeeded where the childcare bill failed.
In the early 1980s, the Women’s Legal Defense Fund (now the National Partnership for Women and Families) wrote the first draft of a proposal to provide guaranteed family and medical leave across America. A federal district court had recently struck down California’s maternity leave law as sex discrimination against men, and women across the state and around the country were furious. The new proposal would provide unpaid leave to both moms and dads. Like the team behind the childcare bill in 1971, advocates built a big (and unlikely) coalition of partners. Women’s groups were joined by organized labor because the plan was good for workers. Senior citizens groups like AARP joined and pushed to include elder care. The U.S. Catholic Conference backed it (even though it was drafted by pro-choice organizers) because it supported nurturing babies. Later, some Republicans would get on board, too, because they hoped parental leave would reduce abortions if women didn’t have to choose between their careers and caring for a newborn. (Like I said, unlikely allies.) In the end, a total of 239 groups and organizations joined the coalition.
In 1985, Pat Schroeder, the irrepressible Democratic congresswoman from Colorado, formally introduced what would become the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). It made it through only two House subcommittees before stalling. Despite the broad coalition of support, most of the powerful leaders in Congress (all men) had other priorities. Over the next nine years, the bill was repeatedly reintroduced, debated, and amended. Congress argued over the length of leave that should be provided, the amount of time the worker must be employed to qualify for leave, the minimum size of the company to be held to the new legal requirements, how much these benefits would cost businesses, and whether leave should be paid. Meanwhile, supporters worked with states to develop pilot programs to demonstrate that the concept worked. Nearly forty states adopted some type of family leave policy.
It wasn’t until 1991 that the FMLA finally passed Congress with bipartisan support. Once again, a Republican president sat in the White House. And once again, when legislation to help working parents came across his desk, he vetoed it. This time it was President George H. W. Bush. He said he supported family leave policies but thought they should be voluntary, not mandatory. The bill’s supporters tried again the following year, but Bush vetoed it again. This time, he said it would hurt the economy.
Then came the Year of the Woman. At the same time voters sent Bill to Washington in 1992, they also elected a record-breaking four women as senators and twenty-four women as representatives in Congress. Many of these new female leaders ran because they were appalled by the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee’s mistreatment of Anita Hill during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas in 1991. Hill testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her when they worked together at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Like millions of women across the country, they wondered whether Hill would have been treated more respectfully if there were women senators on the Judiciary Committee. So, they ran. They won. And they got to work resurrecting the FMLA. Like Eleanor Roosevelt once said, it’s up to the women.
I was thrilled to be joining so many energetic new women leaders in Washington and to have powerful new allies in the fight for family leave. During the 1992 campaign, Bill and I met countless Americans struggling to choose between their job security and family emergencies. Friends of ours had missed critical time bonding with their newborns after birth because they couldn’t miss work. I reminded Bill that most other advanced countries provided parental leave to all citizens and this was the right thing to do. He didn’t need convincing. We both believed that other parents should have the same priceless opportunity we’d had to care for Chelsea.
On February 5, 1993, Bill went to the Rose Garden at the White House and signed his first piece of legislation as president. It was the Family and Medical Leave Act. The new law granted millions of American workers access to twelve weeks of job-protected leave for family emergencies like welcoming a newborn or caring for a sick relative. It was a glorious day. Later, Bill told me he was thinking in the Rose Garden about the first few months after Chelsea’s birth. How inconsolable she could be when she cried, no matter how much we rocked her. How easily her smile made us forget how much sleep we weren’t getting. And what a blessing and a necessity that time was as we learned how to be a family of three.
Today, the FMLA has been used nearly 463 million times. I’ll never forget the mail we received at the White House from Americans who took advantage of the law’s protections and discovered the profound difference it made in their lives. A woman in Colorado wrote to me to say that her husband had recently died of congestive heart failure after several years of illness. Under the FMLA, 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. The FMLA may not be perfect—it applies only to employers with fifty or more workers, and it doesn’t guarantee the time off is paid—but it was an important step toward building an economy that supports working families. And it was only possible when women and our allies gained power and used it.
In September 1995, I agreed to speak in Beijing at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women. On the flight, my friend Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, asked me a simple question: “What do you want to accomplish with this speech?” My answer was equally simple: “I want to push the envelope as far as I can on behalf of women and girls.”
I have long believed—supported by mountains of evidence—that relegating women’s health, education, and economic participation to the margins of foreign and domestic policy is ruinous not just for women but for entire nations. The Beijing conference represented a rare opportunity to focus the world’s attention on the status of women and girls. I wanted to argue that it was no longer acceptable to talk about human rights and women’s rights as separate. They were one and the same, and I was determined to make people hear this. “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference,” I said, “let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”
As I delivered my speech, each line was translated in real time into dozens of languages, creating a gap between me and the audience. Hundreds of delegates stared back blankly. This was my chance to change the way the world thought about women, and it didn’t seem to be going well. But when I finished speaking, the room erupted in cheers. The delegates rose, giving me a standing ovation, a rarity at buttoned-up UN gatherings. As I left the hall, women hung over banisters to grab my hand. Some had tears in their eyes. The declaration of a simple, obvious message should perhaps not have had such a galvanizing effect. But in 1995, it caused shock waves.
Since 1995, the phrase “women’s rights are human rights” has appeared on tote bags, cell phone cases, needlepoint pillows, and T-shirts. I’m happy about this. But the work is nowhere near done. As we make progress in some areas and continue to struggle in others, what’s become clear is that simply embracing the concept of women’s rights, let alone enshrining those rights in laws and constitutions, is not the same as achieving full equality. Rights are important, but they are nothing without the power to claim them.
Not long after the 1995 conference, I was on a Voice of America radio program when a man called in to ask what I meant by my speech. As I recall, he was phoning in from Iran. I asked him to close his eyes and picture all the rights men have: the right to earn an income, the right to an education and a job, the right to vote and hold elective office, the right to be heard and valued in their families and communities. “We want the same rights,” I explained. He burst out: “That’s impossible!”
Nearly two decades later, as secretary of state, I sat across the table from presidents and prime ministers and watched their eyes glaze over when I raised the issue of women’s rights and opportunities in their countries. It was only when I showed them hard data and pointed out what nations were losing economically by excluding half their population from full participation that some of them started to listen. When women and girls participate in their economies and societies, the benefits ripple out. Women leaders, for example, are more likely to increase budgets for health care and education.
Yet, even though women are now running for office—and winning—in unprecedented numbers, progress has been slow. We’ve risen from 12 female heads of state in 1995 to just 29 today. Only 13 countries out of 193 have parity in their national cabinets. The share of women in parliaments is only 26.5 percent on average. As I write this, only five countries in the world have achieved parliamentary parity.
So what’s holding us back? Although overt discrimination and structural barriers are in many places no longer legal, they’re still very much with us, embedded deeply in our culture and psychology.
Mary Beard, a renowned classics professor at Cambridge University and one of the smartest women I know, dedicated an entire book to this subject. In Women & Power: A Manifesto, she explores the misogyny that has shaped our world for centuries. From our earliest example of Western literature (Telemachus silencing his mother, Penelope, in Homer’s Odyssey), to Shakespeare (Lavinia’s tongue is cut out in Titus Andronicus after she’s raped, borrowed from the ancient myth of Philomela), to depictions of Donald Trump as a triumphant Perseus holding my decapitated head as if I were Medusa—the overwhelming message is that women should be silent. Submissive. Powerless. As a result, we’ve been conditioned to think of women as interlopers in public life. Even the metaphors we use to describe women gaining power—“ ‘knocking on the door,’ ‘storming the citadel,’ ‘smashing the glass ceiling,’ or just giving them a ‘leg up’—underline female exteriority,” Mary writes. As if by assuming or seeking power women are taking something that doesn’t belong to us. And when we do, the backlash is swift and severe. We pay a high price for making ourselves heard.
Mary urges readers to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. That means rejecting the notion of power as a zero-sum game. If power is seen as a tool only a few people can wield at a time, within systems designed by and for men, women will forever be excluded from it. Instead, she suggests, why not look at power more comprehensively? We should think of it as “the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually.”
It’s a beautiful vision of what collective power might look like. But right now in America, power still is held by only a relatively few people, most of them men. And too many of those men (mostly Republican, but not always) love to dismiss childcare and paid leave as “women’s issues” instead of the economic imperatives they are. They dismiss the contributions women make to our economy and ignore the obstacles that prevent us from contributing even more. And that’s bad for everyone, not just women. We can’t build an economy that’s strong and fair if we leave half our talent on the sidelines. Women who want to work should be able to do so without worrying every day about how they’re going to take care of their child or what will happen if a family member gets sick. That’s not a luxury, and it’s not a “women’s issue”—it’s a necessity. It’s a growth strategy. This isn’t complicated: When you shortchange women, you shortchange families. And when you shortchange families, you shortchange America. If the people in power can’t see that, then we need to spread that power around to people who can.
Here’s one more story about what it takes to make real change—and why we desperately need more women in power.
Joe Biden kicked off his campaign for president in the midst of a deadly pandemic and an economy in crisis. During lockdown, Americans experienced firsthand the loss of both jobs and support, like childcare. Advocates started making the argument that care policies should be part of relief and recovery investments. They published a “Care as Infrastructure” paper with support from women-led groups working in childcare, paid leave, elder care, and workers’ rights. Throughout the pandemic that coalition kept growing, building grassroots support, and informing Biden’s campaign agenda while he was running for president. They made the case that if the definition of “infrastructure” is that which enables commerce and economic activity, then care policies were as important as roads and bridges.
Then, in the lead-up to the Democratic National Convention in August 2020, Biden delivered a speech laying out his economic recovery agenda. He called it “Build Back Better”—a once-in-a-generation investment in infrastructure, combatting climate change, and expanding the social safety net. It was an exercise in setting ambitious goals and advancing many long-cherished priorities. The third plank of Biden’s four-part plan was a $775 billion overhaul of the nation’s caregiving system. The proposal was historic for its size and for its place in his campaign agenda. Biden wasn’t relegating care to a sub-bullet under “women’s issues.” He was making affordable quality childcare, paid family medical leave, access to aging and disability care, and good care jobs the core of his economic recovery agenda.
After defeating Trump and entering the White House, Biden and Vice President Harris worked with Congress to quickly pass the American Rescue Plan, a massive fiscal package to stabilize the economy and provide resources for beating COVID. I was delighted that it also included historic support for parents by funding childcare centers and expanding the Child Tax Credit.
Previously, families had to wait until they filed their taxes every year to claim the benefit, and the poorest parents were excluded. But Biden made the Child Tax Credit more accessible and equitable, applying lessons from the success of the Earned Income Tax Credit for working families, which my husband dramatically expanded in the 1990s and which helped lift millions of low-wage workers out of poverty. For the first time, working- and middle-class parents started receiving monthly Child Tax Credit payments of up to $300, usually through direct deposit, that they could use to help pay for diapers, groceries, childcare, or any of the many expenses that come with having kids. Biden’s expanded Child Tax Credit covered 88 percent of American kids and helped cut child poverty nearly in half—a historic achievement. (At least until Republicans later blocked an extension of the credit and allowed those kids to fall back into poverty.)
The Biden administration next began planning how to pass the rest of its ambitious economic agenda. As negotiations got underway for the sweeping new legislation that became known as the Build Back Better Act, policymakers and advocates were jostling to have their favorite issues included: paid leave, childcare, tax cuts for electric vehicles, affordable housing, broadband internet, reducing prescription drug costs. Not since the New Deal in the 1930s and the Great Society and War on Poverty in the 1960s had an American president proposed such sweeping legislation.
To make sure the package met the needs of American families, the administration talked to legislators, advocates, and activists with a long history of championing paid leave and childcare. Leaders like Ai-jen, Connecticut congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, SEIU president Mary Kay Henry, Washington senator Patty Murray, and Paid Leave for All director Dawn Huckelbridge. Women who have spent decades fighting for these issues, amassing political power, and building the coalitions needed to finally get this done.
In the House, Nancy Pelosi, in her fourth term as Speaker, worked hard to usher the bill to passage. I’ve always thought Nancy is one of the shrewdest, smartest, and most effective politicians in Washington. She has a spine of steel, deftly builds and holds consensus in the ranks, and knows better than anyone how to count votes. She also proudly declared in a press conference while advocating for Build Back Better that as a mother of five children, she’s changed more diapers than anybody in Congress. Republicans have demonized her for years because they know she gets things done. She deserves enormous credit for marshalling the votes for the 2010 Affordable Care Act. In fact, when I called President Obama to congratulate him on its passage, he told me I really should call Nancy since she had made it happen. So I did. Now, I was keeping my fingers crossed that she and the Democrats could pull off Build Back Better, too.
But the Senate, with its fifty-fifty split and obstinate personalities, was another story. A single Democratic defection would sink the bill, and two had yet to explicitly endorse it: Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Manchin was troubled by some of the bill’s best provisions. He hated the Child Tax Credit expansion in Biden’s rescue package and falsely claimed it discouraged work and rewarded laziness. He also opposed providing paid family and medical leave. Democrats had already scaled back the paid leave provision from twelve weeks to four weeks as they worked to shrink the cost of the bill to appease Manchin. “We just can’t be spending so much money,” he told one reporter. “I can’t put this burden on my grandchildren,” he told another. He also griped about the scope of the bill. Throwing “everything under the sun, and major policy changes… in a bill that no one participates [in] except one party” was wrong, he said. It was infuriating. Just when our country was finally getting close to passing much-needed legislation to support working women, Manchin was standing in the way. Senator Patty Murray, who joined the Senate in 1993 and had been pushing for paid leave ever since, said during the negotiation process, “We’re not going to let one man tell all the women in this country that they can’t have paid leave.”
President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to negotiate with him. Nancy Pelosi did, too. In a moment that went viral, she was seen animatedly talking on her cell phone at the congressional baseball game behind the dugout at Nationals Park. On the other end of the line was Manchin. I tried to reason with him as well. Worried about the bill’s uncertain future, advocates asked if I’d appeal to him directly. I was eager to try, because we were friends and he vigorously supported me in 2016, at political risk to himself. But when I got the senator on the line and explained why I was calling, he just handed the phone to his wife, Gayle. That told me everything I needed to know.
