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By Lisa Anderson
Packing 28 presentations and panels into a whirlwind 14 hours, the annual Women in the World Summit, hosted by Daily Beast and Newsweek editor Tina Brown, is the equivalent of a global speed-dating event introducing influential people to ideas, issues and players who matter in the realm of women’s rights.
The four-year-old summit, held at New York City’s Lincoln Center, is a slickly produced, star-studded (Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey) affair that also provides a prominent platform for veteran activists, up-and-coming stars of the women’s rights movement, corporate social responsibility programs and -- most unusually this year--two very likely female candidates for the presidencies of the United States and the Republic of South Africa, respectively.
Both are women who already are being watched very closely, scrutiny that will only increase in coming months.
If there were any doubts that Hillary Rodham Clinton is running -- or seriously thinking of running -- for the U.S. presidency in 2016, her crisply passionate speech to the summit last Friday morning swiftly quashed them. The crowd, which began cheering before she said a word, went wild.
The previous evening, Mamphela Ramphele took the same stage and was greeted with a less raucous but notably enthusiastic reception. A legendary anti-apartheid activist, who recently formed a new political party in South Africa to take on the dominant African National Congress (ANC), Ramphele also left little question that she intends to run for the presidency in 2014.
Both women were at the event under the auspices of promoting women’s rights and both are evidence of how far women have come -- even if they still have much further to go.
Both women are 65 years old, highly accomplished, household names in their own countries and would be making history as the first women elected to lead their nations if they succeeded.
Both clearly saw value in appearing at Women in the World -- and may have shared some of the same motivation for exposure -- and both their messages to the summit concerned “unfinished business.”
For Clinton, it is “the great unfinished business of the 21st century -- advancing rights and opportunities for women and girls.”
For Ramphele, it is the unfinished business of restoring what she sees as the legacy of Nelson Mandela, a promise of freedom, accountability and good governance that she believes has been tarnished and distorted by the governing ANC.
“We cannot afford to continue to betray that promise, that passion that led us to fight against all odds to win our freedom,” said Ramphele when interviewed by American television presenter Charlie Rose.
A slim woman with a commanding presence, Ramphele is a medical doctor by training. She also has served as a managing director of the World Bank and a vice-chancellor at the University of Cape Town. She resigned earlier this year as chair of Gold Fields Ltd., a precious metals firm, to found the new political party Agang, which means “Let us build” in the Sesotho language.
Ramphele, who is unmarried, had a love affair and two children with Stephen Biko, the anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, who died in 1977 at the age of 30 while in police custody. Ramphele herself spent seven years under house arrest for her anti-apartheid activities.
“We believe South Africa’s people see that the hope they had in 1994 is slipping away,” she said, referring to the year that Mandela became the country’s first black president. In particular, freedom “has not yet been translated into the lives of women,” she added, noting that a woman is raped every 34 seconds in South Africa.
“What I want is to see South Africa to be led in a way that restores our freedom,” she told the audience. “If that means that I will lead, I will.”
In contrast, Clinton made no mention of her political aspirations, even though Tina Brown introduced her by saying “the big question now about Hillary is - what’s next?”
Clearly that was on the minds of those in the audience as well.
In only her second public appearance since resigning as U.S. Secretary of State two months ago, the former U.S. senator rocked the Lincoln Center auditorium, where some 2,500 people packed the house for her keynote address on Friday morning.
While delivering a speech that focused on women’s rights, Clinton painted her remarks on a national and global palette, touching on policy issues at home and abroad that may foreshadow a future presidential agenda.
She told the audience that, “if America is going to lead the way we expect ourselves to lead, we need to empower women here at home to participate fully in our economy and our society. We need to make equal pay a reality. We need to extend family and medical leave benefits to more workers and make them paid. We need to encourage more women and girls to pursue careers in math and science.”
Stating that she had pushed to weave the importance of women’s rights “even deeper into the fabric of American foreign policy,” Clinton said “the next time you hear someone say that the fate of women and girls is not a core national security issue, that it’s not one of those hard issues that really smart people deal with, remind them: The extremists understand the stakes of this struggle. They know that when women are liberated, so are entire societies. We must understand this too. And not only understand it, but act on it."
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