Rigoberta’s words stayed with me. Over the years that followed, I had similar conversations with other women on the dangerous front lines of democracy. In 1999, the Belarusian human rights activist Vera Stremkovskaya asked to take a photo with me. Her work exposing the abuses of the Lukashenko regime (the same dictator that Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is still opposing today) had put a target on her back. She hoped that a picture with me—physical proof that the international community had its eye on her—might provide some measure of protection. “That picture will be my bulletproof vest,” she said.
Alexei Navalny’s death tragically demonstrated that even intense global scrutiny cannot deter every reprisal, but it is true that most authoritarian regimes prefer to commit their crimes behind a veil of secrecy. They “disappear” dissidents and silence critics when they think no one’s paying attention, when the world isn’t watching and there will be no consequences. That’s one reason I’ve tried to put a spotlight on as many heroic women as I can.
Before a speech at Tina Brown’s Women in the World Summit in 2012, I was thrilled to be introduced by Meryl Streep, one of my favorite actresses of all time. She talked about meeting some of those women, and I was absolutely bowled over by what she said: “Women from all over the world said the same thing,” Meryl reported: “I’m alive because [Hillary] came to my village, put her arm around me, and had a photograph taken together. I’m alive because she went on our local TV and talked about my work, and now they’re afraid to kill me. I’m alive because she came to my country and she talked to our leaders, because I heard her speak, because I read about her.”
I often don’t know how much I’ve actually helped, but I do know that I’ve been humbled by the brave women who have risked their lives to meet with me, tell me their stories, and urge me to keep up the fight. Like the Iraqi women who waited for hours to talk with me in Baghdad in 2005, ignoring the dangers that came with being out after curfew because they wanted me to know that their country was falling apart and U.S. policy was failing. I also know that my life is richer and my spirit is stronger because of all the women I’ve met and worked with over the years. Whatever inspiration I’ve managed to give them, they’ve given me so much more in return.
The day after I embraced Yulia Navalnaya in Munich, I sat down with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and three other remarkable women dissidents for a discussion about resistance and resilience: The crusading Filipino journalist Maria Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work exposing corruption and campaigning for freedom of the press. Zin Mar Aung is a leader of Myanmar’s democratic government-in-exile and is part of the rebellion opposing her country’s military junta. I first met Zin Mar Aung when I visited Myanmar, formerly called Burma, in 2011, at the start of a brief experiment with freedom and democracy that was tragically cut short by the military in 2021. I had also met and been impressed by the exiled Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad, who is part of the movement resisting the Islamic Republic’s brutal repression of women and whose voice the regime has tried to silence. The panel was called “Rebels with a Cause.”
I was glad that world leaders in Munich would hear from these women, because while their stories are different, they share powerful insights about what it takes to defend democracy and defeat dictatorship. We were all still absorbing the tragic news of Navalny’s death in Russia, and the reality that all these women—and so many more around the world—live under the constant threat of violence was inescapable.
“My husband has been in prison for four years, and in the last year he’s been kept incommunicado. I don’t know if he is alive,” Sviatlana said. “Even his lawyer is not able to visit him. Letters are not delivered. My children ask me every day when they are going to see their daddy.”
“My family is on the run. All of my family’s property has been seized by the military junta,” said Zin Mar Aung. “It’s like this for everyone who has participated in the civil disobedience movement against military rule. Many suffer more than me. But the only thing I would like to underscore with you is resilience. Resilience is the symbol of our revolution.”
These were not idle words. In 1998, Zin Mar Aung was a university student protesting against the ruling junta. She was arrested after reading a pro-democracy poem at a rally in Yangon (formerly Rangoon). She was imprisoned for eleven years, nine in solitary confinement, and not even allowed to read books. She emerged unbroken and even more determined to continue the struggle for democracy. Zin Mar Aung started a new organization to help other women who had been political prisoners rebuild their lives and advocated for the rights of women and ethnic minorities. When the country started opening up, Zin Mar Aung ran for parliament. The experiment with democracy was tenuous but exciting. On my first visit, in November 2011, there were just flickers of progress. By late 2012, when I visited with President Obama, Yangon felt like a different city. Crowds jammed the streets as we drove by. Children waved American flags. People were starting to believe they could be free, that they could finally live in a “normal” country. I wish it had lasted.
“Half of Myanmar’s population is under the age of thirty,” Zin Mar Aung said. “They saw a promising future for themselves, during our so-called democratic transition. And they are determined not to let the military take that future away from them.”
In Myanmar, nonviolent protests have given way to an armed rebellion. Zin Mar Aung does not carry a gun herself. She’s the foreign minister for the democratic government-in-exile. But she is clear-eyed about the need for armed resistance. “We faced the choice to either succumb to Min Aung Hlaing’s ugly dictatorship or to defend ourselves and our belief in a better future,” Zin Mar Aung explained. She later added, “Dictators don’t understand the language of nonviolence. The only thing that they understand is force.”
That’s a tough statement but one born out of brutal experience. I’m not ready to give up on the idea of nonviolence, but I understand where she’s coming from. Sometimes, you really do have to fight for freedom.
I marvel at the resilience of all these women and how much they’ve had to overcome. “In order to keep doing my job, I had to be okay with going to jail for over a century,” Maria said. She posed this question to the audience: “What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth, for the facts, for your own individual battle for integrity, for your values?”
That spirit is how Maria has persevered as a journalist in the face of decades of intimidation and harassment in the Philippines. She came of age as the People Power Revolution was toppling the corrupt regime of Ferdinand Marcos. Working for CNN, Maria exposed efforts to sabotage the Philippines’ fragile democracy, including multiple coup attempts. She co-founded her own news organization, called Rappler, and provided indispensable coverage of President Rodrigo Duterte’s reign of terror after he came to power in 2016. Duterte claimed to be cracking down on illicit drugs but acted like a dictator, and thousands of bodies piled up in mass graves. Maria was repeatedly threatened, arrested twice, and accused of “cyber-libel”—in other words, she was telling the truth about a violent would-be autocrat. Today, Duterte is gone, but he’s been replaced by Marcos’s son as president and his own daughter as vice president. As Maria put it during our conversation in Munich, “We’ve moved from hell to purgatory.”
Hell is also how I’d describe life in Iran for many women. “In Iran, women [are] facing rape in prison. They’re being gassed, they’re being blinded, just because of demanding freedom, equality, dignity,” Masih told us. She was exiled in 2009 and has been forced to dodge kidnapping and assassination attempts by Iran’s agents. They can’t stand that she dares speak out against the theocratic regime’s brutal treatment of women, including by collecting and distributing videos shared by thousands of women on the ground in Iran.
In 2022, the Iranian morality police arrested a twenty-two-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, for allegedly wearing her headscarf improperly. She was beaten and pushed into a police van, and her family was told she was being taken to a women’s “re-education” class at a nearby detention center. Just thirty minutes later, she was taken to a hospital in Tehran with clear signs of beating and torture. She fell into a coma and died three days later at the hospital. Protests broke out almost immediately. Women marched in the streets with their hair uncovered and took videos of themselves setting hijabs on fire. They chanted “Woman, Life, Freedom.” The regime responded with assault rifles and submachine guns. Many women were arrested and subjected to sexual violence and torture. From New York, Masih supported the protest movement by publishing video evidence and forcing the world to pay attention to the crimes of the Islamic Republic.
As we spoke in Munich, Masih asked a young woman named Kosar Eftekhari to stand up. Kosar had been shot in the face by Iran’s morality police because she dared to remove her hijab during a protest. She was blinded in one eye. Like other women in the resistance, she reached out to Masih to help share her story.
“She sent videos to me saying, ‘Masih, tell the rest of the world that this regime can take my eye, they can take our life, but not our hope,’ ” Masih explained. “That’s why I brought her here.” She looked at the world leaders gathered in the room. “We don’t want to cry, we want you to help us to make our oppressors cry. I feel the pain of my sisters on stage. Sviatlana, my brother was in prison. And millions of Iranians are still in prison—a bigger prison called Iran. Zin Mar Aung, I feel your pain when you say that the people of Myanmar are even braver than you. We feel guilty talking about ourselves. Although we feel pain and suffering from being away from our families. We don’t even know what they’re going to do with our families. I don’t even know when I’m going to hug my family.”
I could feel the solidarity among these women. They came from different backgrounds and spoke different languages, but all of them shared the same struggle. And it’s our struggle, too. As Zin Mar Aung said, democracies must “unite and be one voice against authoritarianism” or we risk losing our freedoms, too.
As the poem says, “Too many women in too many countries speak the same language of silence.” But not these women. They are shouting from the rooftops—and we need to listen.
It can be hard in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives to hold on to that clarity of purpose. Conflicts on the other side of the world can feel awfully far away when you have your hands full just getting through the day. Casualty figures from distant battlefields, reports of human rights abuses in unfamiliar places, the stories of women you’ll never meet enduring persecution you’ll never face—we care, but we forget.
In Munich, Maria quoted the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” We must remember. We have to stay in the fight.
As I look back on my career, I owe so much to the courageous women I’ve met and learned from. I’ll never forget what they’ve taught me about the world, about the human spirit, and about myself.
DO ALL THE GOOD
My grandson Aidan bounded up the steps of the sanctuary of the church my daughter’s family attends, then clutched his mother’s hand as Chelsea read from the pulpit. It was the morning of Christmas Eve 2023, and the church was decked out for the holiday. Behind Chelsea and Aidan, the choir’s red robes matched a bank of poinsettias. Beside them were four lit Advent candles representing hope, love, joy, and peace. A fifth candle, the Christ candle, was waiting expectantly.
“The images of violence and destruction in the world are often before our minds and before our eyes. It seems that nothing changes as the years pass,” Chelsea began. “And then we hear the words—” Just then Charlotte climbed up the steps to join her mother and brother. Chelsea paused and added with a smile, “And we hear the footsteps of small children,” and then continued, “—the words of the prophet Isaiah who shows a radically different path to liberation, peace, love, and justice.”
What a joyful day to be a grandmother. And how blessed I felt to be watching from the pews. For me, faith and family have always been entwined. I am a Methodist both by birth and by choice. I was born into a Methodist family—parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, going all the way back to the coalfields of Wales and Newcastle, where the church’s founder, John Wesley, preached to miners, farmers, and factory workers. My mother taught Sunday school at our church in Park Ridge, Illinois. She said it was because she wanted to make sure my brothers showed up. But as I grew up I came to understand how faith had sustained her through a difficult life and why it was so important to her that we kids share in it. She made sure the church was a significant part of our lives. We went to Methodist Youth Fellowship on Sunday nights, church activities on Wednesday nights, and summer Bible school. I was even on the altar guild, cleaning and preparing before services.
As I looked at Charlotte holding her mother’s hand, for a moment I was a little girl again watching my mother read us Bible stories, watching my father praying by his bed. He was gruff—a former football player, a Navy man, a proud self-made businessman—but there he was, humble on his knees before God every night. It made a big impression on me.
“Hope comes with a mighty vision of the end of violence and oppression through the birth of this tiny human being,” Chelsea continued. “The prophet reminds us the world cannot be changed by power and might, but through a helpless baby, innocent and vulnerable.”
How can it be that my baby is now a wonderful mother herself? It feels like just ten minutes ago that I held “this tiny human being” in my arms for the first time. “We hear the footsteps of small children.” I wished my mom could have been there beside me in the pew, watching Chelsea guiding and teaching her children just as Mom once guided and taught me and my brothers.
I thought back to another wintery Sunday morning. It was not long after Bill’s first inauguration in 1993, and there had been a major snowstorm in Washington. At least ten inches piled up in the streets, and much of the city shut down. We were going a little stir-crazy in the White House, which didn’t yet feel like home, so I said, “Let’s go to church.” After all, we had gone to church as a family, both to Bill’s Immanuel Baptist Church and to First United Methodist Church in Little Rock. (Once, during the “children’s moment” at First United, all the kids were asked what they wanted to get us moms for Mother’s Day, and Chelsea said, “Life insurance.” After the congregation began to laugh, she said she thought it meant I would live forever.) I knew that Chelsea, almost a teenager, missed her home and her friends in Little Rock. She missed First United, too. She didn’t think she would find any place as special in this new city, where it seemed there were cameras and crowds everywhere. But I thought it was worth a shot. So the three of us set out on foot into the deep snow and a biting wind, followed by some bewildered Secret Service agents, to walk eight blocks from the White House to Foundry United Methodist Church.
It was the start of a wonderful chapter in our lives. At Foundry, we discovered a community where we could worship, study, contemplate, be of service, get good pastoral advice from its pastor, Reverend Philip Wogaman, and step outside the hurly-burly of life in the White House. When we were there, we were not the First Family; we were just our family. We cherished that time. I particularly valued how the congregation embraced Chelsea and how she in turn embraced the church.
Now, all these years later, Chelsea and her husband, Marc, who is Jewish, have decided to raise their children in both traditions, so they go to both Sunday school and Hebrew school and celebrate both Christian and Jewish holidays.
“God help us to make this dream our dream every day,” Chelsea read. “This morning we light the Christ candle, remembering Jesus, born in a humble stable long ago, yet born in us. A child is born today.” Then she lifted Aidan up so he could reach the microphone.
“A child is born to us,” he said.
I’ve never been one to wear my faith on my sleeve. I inherited a certain midwestern reticence about that (and a few other things, as you might have noticed). For me, faith has never been something to brag about or exploit, even though you see that a lot in politics. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important to me. Quite the opposite: My faith has sustained me, informed me, saved me, chided me, and challenged me. I don’t know who I would be or where I would have ended up without it.
My parents raised me and my brothers in the Methodist tradition of “faith in action.” At church, we were taught to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only.” That meant rolling up our sleeves and being of service. And not grudgingly. We had to be, as Saint Paul put it, generous and diligent and cheerful in our service.
I understand and respect that some people believe that faith is about one’s personal salvation and a direct relationship with God and should not be sullied by the life of the streets, by the challenges of those who are the lost, the last, and the least. But I was taught to believe that is precisely where our faith is most needed. There’s an old saying often attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel always and if necessary, use words.”
My faith gave me both the great gift of personal salvation and the great obligation of social gospel, to serve and give back to others. I spent a lot of time when I was growing up trying to work out for myself the balance between those things. I have always appreciated that in Methodism, we are invited to reason and work through what faith means to us and how we can live it in our daily lives. I’m someone who needs to believe with both my head and my heart. The balance I came to early on is rooted in James in the New Testament: “What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?… For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” I need both; nurturing my personal faith gives me the energy and strength to go out in the world and try to do good.
The youth minister at our church in Park Ridge, Reverend Don Jones, had a profound effect on my spiritual and intellectual development. He and my mother made sure I internalized the famous Methodist credo attributed to John Wesley: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Those words inspired generations of Methodists—including a lot of fantastic, fearless Methodist women—to take their faith out of the pews and into the streets, volunteering in hospitals, schools, and slums. For me, growing up in a comfortable middle-class suburb, it provided a sense of purpose and direction.
