In 2021, I agreed to become the American advisor to the Imperiale, an international art prize awarded by the Imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art Association in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theater, and film. David Rockefeller Jr. asked me to join and it’s been a delight to attend the ceremony in Tokyo with him and his wife, Susan. My friend Susie Buell attended with me in 2022 and she bonded with acclaimed artist and prize recipient Ai Weiwei. The next year my friends Lisa Perry and Ann Tannenbaum, who are both well-known art collectors, were my guests. The highlight of 2023 was the wonderful reception for the American awardees hosted by Dr. Biden at the White House.
I also ventured into what I worried would be the lion’s den for an interview with the infamous shock jock Howard Stern. He’d been trying for years to put me in the hot seat on his show, but it always seemed a little too far outside my comfort zone—and I didn’t feel comfortable with the comments that too often objectified and demeaned women. Turns out Howard has mellowed (and maybe so have I). Despite my initial trepidation, it was a lot of fun. We spent more than two hours talking about everything from Trump’s inauguration (“some weird shit,” to quote George W. Bush) to my relationship with Bill. I enjoyed the candid back-and-forth. The audience seemed to agree—of all the press I’ve done in recent years, people have talked to me about that interview more than any other. It made me wonder about opportunities I may have missed over the years to reach different audiences who otherwise might not have heard my message. My caution with the press is well-earned, having endured more than my share of hit jobs and silly gotcha questions, but I’ve also learned that an arm’s-length approach carries its own risks.
And, perhaps most surprisingly (to me), I agreed to cooperate on a documentary about my life produced by Propagate and directed by Nanette Burstein, which resulted in a four-part series on Hulu called, predictably, Hillary. No subject was off-limits, and I’ve heard from lots of viewers how much they learned about me from it, and how much they understood about the challenges facing any woman who dares to run for president.
One important through line for me since 2016 has been finding new and impactful ways to tell women’s stories and lift up women’s history. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. I’ll never forget when I was a young girl and discovered a library book of Greek myths that featured strong female figures like Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, and Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and wild animals. Their examples gave me so much courage that I asked my mom if I could get a bow and arrow like the hunter Artemis. She wisely refused, despite my best argument that the Roman name for Artemis, Diana, was like my middle name, Diane.
I was thrilled when Oxford University established the world’s first chair in women’s history—and humbled when they named it after me. I hope it will not be the last such position. Creating this endowed chair at one of the most revered universities in the world sends the message that women’s history is worthy of study, not just the notable but also the marginalized and forgotten, and that no one can write us out of history again.
I’m also excited about the work getting underway at the new Hillary Rodham Clinton Center for Citizenship, Leadership, and Democracy at my alma mater Wellesley College and at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law at Swansea University in Wales, with a focus on the human rights of children. And I’m delighted to serve as the first woman chancellor at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, where Bill and I have worked so hard over the years to support peace and reconciliation.
Chelsea and I wrote a book together for the first time, The Book of Gutsy Women, about the women who motivate us—women with the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done. I loved hearing stories from readers, particularly little girls, about how they connected to the civil rights activist Dorothy Height, or the LGBTQ+ trailblazer Edie Windsor, who took her fight for marriage equality to the Supreme Court, or the figure skater Michelle Kwan, who kept pushing forward, no matter what.
We turned the book into a docuseries called Gutsy on Apple TV+ with the production company we’ve created, HiddenLight. Chelsea and I traveled all over the country (and to Paris) on adventures with bold, brave women. We walked the halls of Little Rock Central High School with Carlotta Walls LaNier and Minnijean Brown-Trickey, who were among the Little Rock Nine students to bravely desegregate the school in 1957. We learned magic tricks from Meriam Al-Sultan, who told us she left a controlling marriage in Saudi Arabia with her daughter, Judy, to pursue their dreams in America. We walked with the activist and academic Kimberlé Crenshaw through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s replica of the African American settlement called Seneca Village that had existed in the middle of Manhattan until it was seized and destroyed to create Central Park.
Producing and starring in my first television series was deeply meaningful, but I wanted HiddenLight Productions to be more than my personal platform. I wanted it to amplify untold and important stories from brave women around the world, particularly in their own voices. That’s why I was delighted to produce In Her Hands, the Emmy Award–winning Netflix documentary detailing the story of Zarifa Ghafari, one of Afghanistan’s few female mayors discussed earlier in the book, and Lyra, an award-winning film about the remarkable young gay journalist Lyra McKee, who was murdered in Northern Ireland in 2019 after a life fearlessly committed to truth and justice. We’re now working on a documentary about how losing Roe v. Wade has impacted women across America and the very real harms of abortion bans.
In my podcast called You and Me Both I talk with inspiring people making and shaping history, literature, entertainment, politics, and so much more. After decades of being interviewed, I enjoyed being the one asking the questions. Like anything, it took practice. Now, with fifty-two episodes and counting, I’ve hit my stride. It’s been thrilling to learn a new way of telling stories, particularly for and about women.
Another project that was deeply personal to me was trying to turn my friend Elaine Weiss’s 2018 book, The Woman’s Hour, a riveting account of the women who fought for ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, into a film. The story is a page-turner. Real-life drama with historic consequences. I thought, Who better to be attached to this project? I know women’s history—I’m a part of that history—and I believe strongly in the importance of teaching it. I shopped the idea to one studio after another, who were not as enthralled as I was, with the help of my friend Steven Spielberg. Women’s history? A constitutional amendment? Not sure how to make that sell. Elaine eventually got an offer and started working on a show, only for it to be canceled during COVID. That was a big disappointment.
I believe passionately in the importance of this story, because too many Americans now want to deny or erase our nation’s complicated history. They think somehow learning about the struggles of America takes away from the dreams and ideals of America. But the opposite is true. We need to understand women’s history (and all our history) to better secure our rights and fight for the ones we’ve lost or have yet to gain. How much more effective could we be in future battles—for abortion rights, for paid family leave, for childcare, for liberty and justice for all—if we better understood what it took just to get us started?
While Elaine was writing The Woman’s Hour, Shaina Taub, a young woman in New York who was similarly inspired by the suffrage movement, was hard at work giving the story a different home: the stage. Shaina’s inspiration would ultimately allow me to help bring this pivotal chapter in women’s history to a whole new audience and realize a dream so secret I didn’t even know I had dreamed it. I would become a Broadway producer.
It probably won’t surprise you that one of my favorite musicals is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. I’ve seen it four times in New York and once in Puerto Rico with Lin’s parents, Luis and Luz Miranda, who are longtime friends. I devoured it when it started streaming on television during the pandemic. There’s a wonderful moment when the free-thinking, fast-talking Angelica Schuyler quotes the radical idea at the heart of America’s new Declaration of Independence, “That all men are created equal,” but then adds an even more radical twist: “When I meet Thomas Jefferson, I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the sequel.”
Whenever I hear that line, I think about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the woman who actually did it. In July 1848, seventy-two years after Jefferson wrote the original Declaration of Independence, Stanton drafted the sequel for the first great conference on women’s rights, held in Seneca Falls, New York. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, which updated Jefferson’s text and asserted, “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal” (emphasis mine, but inspiration hers).
Stanton was just thirty-two years old, but she had grown up reading her father’s law books (he was a New York judge), and she was convinced that for American democracy to succeed, it had to include women. She had already managed to persuade the state legislature to allow married women to own property, make contracts, and have legal custody of their children. Now Stanton set her sights on the most fundamental right in a democracy: the right to vote.
The idea that women should be able to vote was highly controversial even among the activists gathered in Seneca Falls, including Stanton’s own husband. But she pointed back to Jefferson’s argument that legitimate governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” How could American democracy be legitimate if it denied women the right to consent? If it forced women to submit to laws and leaders they had no say in choosing? The only way to live up to our founding ideals was to rewrite our founding documents and expand the “we” in “we the People.”
The power of this idea sparked a suffrage movement that spread across the country. For decades, women (and men) organized, marched, picketed, went to jail, and refused to sit down or shut up until finally, in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted women the right to vote. It took decades more to enact the Voting Rights Act and protect the rights of Black women (and men), which remain under threat to this day.
At Seneca Falls, Stanton was following in the footsteps of abolitionists who often quoted the Declaration of Independence to encourage Americans to live up to the nation’s promise of equality by ending slavery. Many Americans knew the words by heart; “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” had been drilled into them in school, over the dinner table, or in the town square. That meant that nearly everyone who heard the new phrasing in the Declaration of Sentiments—“all men and women are created equal”—would recognize the change immediately.
Stanton understood this would be controversial. And sure enough, one newspaper called the convention and its declaration “the most shocking and unnatural incident ever recorded in the history of womanity.” But by rooting her demand for equality in a familiar, widely revered frame, Stanton hoped to make a radical reform sound like a natural, patriotic step forward.
As First Lady, I initiated a program called Save America’s Treasures to recognize and restore cultural and historic landmarks and artifacts around our country. To kick off the program, I went on July 16, 1998, to the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls to mark the 150th anniversary of the campaign for women’s suffrage. A crowd of sixteen thousand people gathered, and I urged them to be guided into the future by the vision and wisdom of those who signed the Declaration of Sentiments: “The future, like the past and present, will not and cannot be perfect. Our daughters and granddaughters will face new challenges, which we today cannot even imagine. But each of us can help prepare for that future by doing what we can to speak out for justice and equality, for women’s rights and human rights, to be on the right side of history, no matter the risk or cost.”
On August 26, 2020, while the pandemic raged and the presidential campaign between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was heating up, I gathered in Central Park with a small, socially distanced crowd on the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. We were there to unveil the city’s first sculpture depicting real women in Central Park (the others of unreal “women” are Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose). Men, it’s worth noting, have 145 statues erected to them in New York City.
This long-overdue statue stands fourteen feet tall and depicts three women who devoted their lives to winning the right to vote but never lived to cast a legal ballot themselves. Gathered around a small table are Susan B. Anthony, who was arrested in 1872 for the crime of “voting while female” and for whom the Nineteenth Amendment is named; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who never forgot that she and her fellow suffragists were fighting not for themselves alone but for the generations that would follow; and Sojourner Truth, who told the Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention in 1851, “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!”
When I was in the Senate, the civil rights pioneer Dorothy Height and a group of other civil rights leaders from the National Congress of Black Women came to see me about putting a statue of Sojourner Truth in the U.S. Capitol Building alongside other national heroes (mostly white men, of course). It took us years, but we finally got Sojourner’s bust put up when I was secretary of state, the first sculpture honoring an African American woman to be represented there. I was so pleased to see her likeness again in Central Park.
Looking up at the three determined faces whose life’s work made so much of my own possible, I wondered what they’d say about the struggles and setbacks we now face—about the loss of constitutional rights for women and the disappointment of getting so close to shattering the highest, hardest glass ceiling. I imagine it would be something like what the monument’s sculptor, Meredith Bergmann, said after the unveiling ceremony: “Our rights were not gained by one dramatic action but from long shared struggle.”
To honor that struggle, each of us wore a purple, white, and gold sash—the official colors of the suffrage movement. Over my decades-long political career, I’ve often reached for those colors during symbolic moments. I wore a white pantsuit and gold jewelry during my final debate with Trump and when I accepted the 2016 Democratic nomination for president—the first time in American history when a woman secured the backing of a major party. I also had planned to wear yet another suffragist-white pantsuit on election night to claim victory as the first female president of the United States. Instead, I wore it to Trump’s inauguration. On the rainy November morning when I delivered my concession speech, I wore a suit with purple lapels (and Bill wore a purple tie) that I had intended to wear on my first trip to Washington, D.C., as president-elect. It was a nod to bipartisanship and to the women whose shoulders I stood on.
Wrapped in those suffragist colors on that sunny morning in Central Park four years later, I thought about the many milestones that their long struggle had made possible. My mother was born before women had the right to vote, and she lived long enough to cast her ballot for me in the 2008 primaries. In my own lifetime, women couldn’t have a credit card in our name. We couldn’t have a bank account. We couldn’t access birth control unless we were married. Couldn’t access legal abortion. Couldn’t sue for sexual harassment. There were schools we couldn’t go to, jobs we couldn’t apply for. We could get fired for getting pregnant. We’ve made so much progress because the suffragists pushed for women’s voices to be heard. And yet their stories are rarely told. Growing up, I didn’t learn about suffragists in school. There were no lessons on great American women in my history classes. When I got to college, the women’s liberation movement was just beginning, and there were wonderfully smart women like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan writing about politics and gender equality. But I wouldn’t learn much about the Declaration of Sentiments, about the women on the pedestal in Central Park and the determination of the suffrage movement, until years later.
“Our charge now,” I told the crowd as we stood in the shadows of Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, “is to take the stories of the women in this statue and carry them forward into our schools, into the media, onto social media, and into our lives.” Those weren’t empty words. They were a mission statement.
I wasn’t the only one to feel this mission in my bones. In 2016, Shaina Taub was a young volunteer on my campaign when she began writing a musical about the final push for the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The suffrage movement had all the makings of a dramatic stage production: parades and pageantry, a decades-long bitter political fight, and a cast of daring, dynamic women who refused to back down.
There was Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and Susan B. Anthony’s anointed heir. For nearly three decades Carrie faithfully followed the strategy laid out by her foremothers: a state-by-state approach to put the question of women’s suffrage to (male) voters. There were few victories. There was plucky upstart Alice Paul, a New Jersey Quaker who founded the rival National Woman’s Party to pursue more provocative tactics: dramatic parades, picketing the president, publishing letters from prison where she and her fellow “suffs” were force-fed raw eggs for hunger striking—all for the goal of a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. There was Ida B. Wells, the fearless Black journalist and anti-lynching activist, and her good friend Mary Church Terrell, the daughter of formerly enslaved parents and co-founder of the NAACP.
Together these suffragists defied entrenched cultural norms, applied political pressure, endured sexist abuse and harassment, formed unlikely coalitions to push the movement forward, quarreled with anti-suffragists and each other—all so women could have an equal voice in government. Their victory wasn’t perfect, nor were their strategies. Both the moderate Carrie and militant Alice, whose activism began during the abolition movement, made compromises with racist southern suffragists and at times excluded Black women from fully participating in their activities. In the later years of the movement, they also refused to work together. In the dramatic final push for the amendment’s ratification, Carrie and Alice were too stubborn to unify their separate campaigns. And even their victory, important though it was, still largely excluded Black women.
Shaina didn’t shy away from recounting the painful parts of the suffrage movement. But she almost didn’t finish the musical. On that gray November day in 2016 when I conceded the race to Trump (in suffragist purple), Shaina sobbed while listening to my speech and considered giving up on her project. I’m so grateful she didn’t, because when I saw Suffs in its first iteration at the nonprofit Public Theater in New York City in 2022, I couldn’t imagine a better time to bring the story of the suffrage movement to life. A month after Suffs opened off-Broadway at the Public, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked, alerting women across America that our reproductive autonomy would soon be revoked—and in effect our equal citizenship. Suddenly, the story of fearless women fighting for a better future didn’t feel like ancient history. It felt like a blueprint.
Suffs was so successful that its sold-out downtown run was extended three times. A year later, the lead producers, Jill Furman and Rachel Sussman, announced it was moving uptown to Broadway. To my immense surprise, a letter arrived in June 2023 from Shaina inviting me to come with them. Would I join the team as a co-producer? she asked.
Did I know what being a co-producer entailed? Not quite. But I love a challenge. And I love Broadway. Between 2017 and March 2020, when the bright lights of Broadway were dimmed by the pandemic, I saw nearly fifty shows, often with my friends like the late and greatly missed Liz Robbins or Brooke Neidich, and Annette de La Renta, Barry Diller, and Anna Wintour, whose love of theater matches mine, by my side. There is nothing like sinking into a seat, feeling the excitement and the anticipation as the lights go down, and being transported out of our troubling world for at least a little while. School plays, summer stages, Broadway shows—I love them all. One of my longtime aides, Rob Russo, has a second life as a Broadway critic and producer and always has his finger on the pulse of what’s new and can’t-miss. His recommendations never steer me wrong.
I watched shows that were silly and just good fun (like Disney’s Frozen, which I took Charlotte to see for her fifth birthday). Others were a gut punch of humor and heart (like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s off-Broadway hit Fleabag and Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, about a family navigating the Troubles in Northern Ireland). Others got me thinking about the zigzag of American history—two steps forward and one step back on the road to a more perfect union. Heidi Schreck’s brilliant play What the Constitution Means to Me asked deep questions about our founding document’s failure to protect women from violence and discrimination. And Selina Fillinger’s POTUS; or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive… well, let’s just say it gave me a lot to laugh about (and I got two standing ovations just for showing up!).
But I never imagined I could be more than a fan. In high school, a classmate who was in the spring musical, Bye Bye Birdie, told me the director was looking for students to join the show’s chorus. I’d been in the director’s drama class and he was friendly, so I volunteered. “I’ll tell you what, Hillary,” the director said to me, “you can be in the production as long as you don’t actually sing. Just mouth the words.” It was an early lesson in the importance of direct feedback.
Now, with Shaina’s invitation, I offered suggestions on the script she was revising, learned some theater lingo (like sitzprobe, German for “seated rehearsal,” where performers sing sans costumes or props for the first time with a live orchestra in a studio—what a thrill!), watched a video of the newly revised version, attended the first rehearsal for Broadway, and gave my notes to Shaina and our amazing director, Leigh Silverman. I could relate to the persistent professional process the actors were engaged in. All the rehearsing, critiquing, and revising was kind of like preparing for a presidential debate (only with more joy and no Trump).
I also learned that many of us involved in the production shared a similar story of finding our way to the suffragists on our own. Few learned about Carrie Chapman Catt or Alice Paul in school (fewer still had been taught about Ida B. Wells or Mary Church Terrell). I learned that Rachel Sussman had wanted to write a paper on the suffrage movement for her high school history class, but her textbook had just a scant paragraph of details. So she picked up the suffragist Doris Stevens’s firsthand memoir, Jailed for Freedom, and was so moved she gave it to Shaina years later and shared her big idea: What about a musical about these women? Shaina stayed up all night reading the book and sent Rachel an email in the morning: “We have to do this.” Shaina wrote the book, the music, and the lyrics—and stars in the show as Alice Paul (she’s only the second woman in Broadway history to do all four).
After months of rehearsing and a few weeks of preview performances, in April 2024, it was time to roll out the purple carpet for the opening night of Suffs. I couldn’t contain my joy. With my hands over my heart and holding back tears, I listened and watched as the cast and orchestra electrified the room with one of the most thrilling stories of American history. Suffs would later earn six Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical. On the night of the awards show, I had the honor of introducing the company to perform the final song, “Keep Marching,” and I celebrated with them backstage after Shaina won the Tony for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score. I couldn’t be more proud.
The suffrage movement has a lot to teach us about the power of effective advocacy movements, especially right now as our democracy hangs in the balance, women’s reproductive rights are being rolled back, and a radical Supreme Court has signaled rights like birth control and same-sex marriage may be next. The suffragists teach us that movements don’t always work in perfect harmony. There are disagreements and difficult trade-offs, and sometimes progress seems impossibly slow. But the suffragists never gave up. They never gave in to fear of defeat. And in the end, it took all their dogged determination to convince an ambivalent-at-best president, a deeply sexist Congress, and racist southern state legislatures to correct the mistake of our founding fathers and give women the vote.
