A Quote by Barack Obama

The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women. If it's educating its girls, if women have equal rights, that country is going to move forward. But if women are oppressed and abused and illiterate, then they're going to fall behind.
The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women
We see all around the world where women's rights are denied, where governments don't believe in educating their girls. There are 800 million people in the world who are illiterate and 75 percent of them are women and girls.
It's going to be very important that we as women's rights advocates are involved in redistricting of both the states legislatures and of the House of Representatives and that we not lose seats but we gain seats for talented women and our country, but we're lacking behind.
We are not going back. Not only are we not going to retreat on women's rights, we are going to expand them. We are going forward, not backward.
As Elders, we are fully committed to the principle that all human beings are of equal worth. You will see that we highlight equality for girls and women - not just women's rights. That is important as girls, especially adolescent girls, have been almost invisible in debates on equal rights. Yet it is in adolescence that events can have a huge effect on a girl's life.
It took a lot of women like that, a lot of women who said "I'm not going to do what you expect me to do, because you have no idea what I'm capable of. I'm going to get dirty and use tools and live the way I want" to move the world forward.
During the first campaign, one of my jobs as my husband's spouse was to travel around the country and really listen to women. There were voices that were new to me: the voices of military spouses, many of them women, and veterans.... I was overwhelmed by their challenges, and the notion that we as a country don't even know that these women exist, because we live in a country where one percent of the population protects the rights and freedoms of the other 99 percent of us. I thought that if I had the opportunity to serve as First Lady, I was going to use this platform to be their voice.
I sat down in 1989 and I made up my mind at that point that I was going to spend the rest of my life assisting women and youth to gain social and political empowerment through business and education. I convinced myself economic empowerment of women was going to be key, especially in a country like this where most women didn't go to school.
When I stepped into the Lifetime role in 2010, I did a listening tour of what was going on for women in this country. There was such a parallel in Hollywood with women talking about how there are stories that are not getting made and that talented young women are not getting the opportunity to direct and write.
We need to make equal pay and equal opportunity for women and girls a reality so women's rights are human rights once and for all.
What I love the most that I really want to talk about is that there are women in business. They are incredibly focused on creating their own businesses and going out there. That's going to be their life, whether they have kids or not. And then there are women who have children that kind of nobly say, "You know what? I'm going to be a mom, and that's going to be my work and my love of my life." Which to me, is just as ambitious of a job and a journey.
It's one thing to work women into your talking points. It's another to tell them how you are going to educate their kids, how you are going to ensure they get health care, how we are going to rebuild infrastructure, how they are going to get equal pay.
In the last 25 years, we've convinced ourselves and a majority of the country that women can do what men can do. Now we have to convince the majority of the country - and ourselves - that men can do what women can do. ... Let's face it: until men are fully equal inside the home, women will never be really equal outside it.
The view I take is that while I'm proud to live in a free and prosperous country, I do believe American is a special land and should be a beacon to the world. And part of that leadership is that women are equal under the law and I do have concerns in how Trump talks about and treats women. I think it's very clear in his rhetoric that he sees them as second class citizens.
I think in a society where you can't even pass the Equal Rights Amendment, it's very difficult to women make a progress. Incidentally, we are exactly 160 years after the very first women's public rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, when a handful of women started it all and began the movement to make women equal.
I convinced myself economic empowerment of women was going to be key, especially in a country like this where most women didn't go to school.
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