Women’s Rights Are Human Rights Speech

1. Hillary Rodham Clinton was born on October 26 1947. She was the 67th United States Secretary of State, U.S. Senator from New York, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and the first lady of the United States. On 5th September 1995, she attended the Fourth U.N World Conference on Women in Beijing, China and gave the speech, “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” about the issues facing women and girls all around the world. Her speech hoped to inspire women who are usually silenced and gives them a voice and reason to be vocal for their basic human rights. In the speech, she uses a propaganda technique that grasps people’s attention. In order to achieve support for the claim of the messages, she delivered her speech by using plain-folks appeal, bandwagon, slanting and charged language, card stacking, and transfer.

2. Plain folk is a device where a speaker tries to win our confidence and support by appearing to be a person like us. From the speech, Hillary Clinton shows the plain folk propaganda technique by saying, “We come together in fields and in factories. In village markets and supermarkets. In living rooms and board rooms” and she also says, “we come together to talk about our aspirations and concern.” She is trying to tell the audience that she is one of the everyday people in fields, factories, markets, living rooms, and boardrooms. She also uses words “we” and “together” to persuade the audience that she is just like one of us. Hillary Clinton also says, “We share a common future.” From saying this, she suggests to the listener that because she shares a common future, she is the one who is in the same situation and same level as us. By delivering her message, she made sure that the audience feels her as being one of them and leading them to trust and follow her.

3. Bandwagon is a technique that influences the audience to follow the crowd by giving a message that everybody’s doing it. She says, “That is why every woman, every man, every child, every family, and every nation on our planet has a stake in the discussion that takes place here,” by pointing out the word “every”, it provokes people’s emotion that they are willing to follow the crowd. Clinton is pressuring people to follow the crowd because everyone agrees and conforms to her idea of the conference. The bandwagon technique that she use makes the audience to feel scared being left out if they don’t follow to what everyone is doing it.

4. Clinton also uses a great amount of slanting and charged language in her speech. Slanting and charged language is using the words, facts, or emphasis that influences emotions of the audience to make a judgment. She says “As an American, I want to speak up for women in my own country – women who are raising children on the minimum wage, women who can’t afford health care or child care, women whose lives are threatened by violence, including violence in their own homes.” In this line, when she stimulates feelings of pity and sympathy towards women who are put into a bad situation, she makes the audience feel a strong anger when they hear the women who have an important role raising children and are threatened by violence. She also says, “As long as discrimination and inequities remain so common place around the world – as long as girls and women are valued less, fed less, fed last, overworked, underpaid, not schooled and subjected to violence in and out of their homes the potential of the human family to create a peaceful, prosperous world will not be realized.” She states that if we continue do nothing, the situation will continue and become worse. She also tells people that if the situation gets worse it may affect the audience as well as their family. Clinton stimulates fear of the audience by telling them what bad things might happen if they don’t participate the idea that we should improve women rights.

5. Another technique that Clinton uses to persuade her audience to deliver her message is card stacking. Card stacking is a device that uses under-emphasis and over-emphasis to dodge issues and evade facts and transfer technique to transfer good feelings about one thing. For example, Clinton employs this technique when she says, “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.” However, women’s right can’t be seen as human rights because human rights stand for all genders. By using card stacking, she wants to persuade the audience in order to state the importance of women rights. She again uses the card stacking technique when she says, “Families rely on mothers and wives for emotional support and care; families rely on women for labor in the home; and increasingly, families rely on women for income needed to raise healthy children and care for other relatives.” Some family members may agree, but since everybody is in the different situations and levels, that can’t be true. For example, the women who works as a house wife in lower and average social level can agree to her idea but the women who works and don’t have a problem for the income in high social level will not agree to her.

6. Transfer is a technique that is commonly used to advertise a campaign for issue. It presents a positive image or idea and attaches the positive feelings to another idea. She says, “What we are learning around the world is that if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish. If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish.” She uses the word “their” rather than stating who is it. She don’t want to state a specific state that who is she talking to, because she wanted not to exclude anyone from her idea of points. She again use transfer by saying “And when families flourish, communities and nations will flourish.” She tells the audience that by raising women rights, family will flourish and furthermore it will give benefits to the whole communities and nation.

7. Hillary used propaganda techniques such as plain folks, bandwagon, slanting and charged language, card stacking and transfer to deliver her message to persuade her idea to the audience. The speech was very successful to spread her message to take an action to make women’s lives better. However I also believe that since her speech was given in 1995, she didn’t really help women’s life to improve because the cruelty against women still exist until now even though the time has past for a long time from 1995~2013.