before she met Bill Clinton?
I've noticed that in many cases we remain ignorant of the biography's of other candidates. No real surprise there, why would we want to know more about people we aren't very interested in? But I thought it would be important to disspell some of the misconceptions I've seen about Hillary Clinton's past. Her history is often boiled down to "She was a Goldwater Girl!" and "Without Bill, she was nothing". I don't think the first tells the whole story, and I believe the second is just false. So, if you have a few minutes, this is what Clinton was doing before she met Bill:
Clinton was an early volunteer and community organizer. "Even as a teenager, she displayed a predilection for social activism. Spurred by the Reverend Don Jones, her youth minister at the First United Methodist Church, she organized baby-sitting services for local migrant workers."
Jones had a further formative impact on Clinton, "Taking his white, middle-class charges into Chicago's inner-city neighborhoods, Jones introduced them to black and Hispanic youths in an effort to eradicate prejudice among his pupils. On one occasion, the two groups of young people discussed the relevance of Picasso's painting Guernica to their own lives; on another day, in 1962, Jones took the teenagers to listen to a speech by the civil rights leader the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to whom Jones introduced the teenagers backstage. Sensing Clinton's insatiable intellectual curiosity, Jones lent her books by the theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich as well as J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye."
But he couldn't yet break the hold of family, "Despite her association with children from less-privileged backgrounds and her exposure to a variety of philosophies, Clinton remained, like her parents, staunchly Republican, campaigning enthusiastically for Barry Goldwater in the presidential campaign of 1964. After graduating in 1965 from Maine South High School in the top 5 percent of her class, which voted her the student most likely to succeed, Clinton enrolled at the all-female Wellesley College, near Boston, Massachusetts, where she promptly became head of the local chapter of the Young Republicans."
However, this alignment with conservatism could not stand up to the experiences she had at College and to events on the national stage "It was not long, however, before the turbulence of the late 1960s reinforced the teachings of her youth minister and led her slowly leftward in her politics. The assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, coupled with the violence Clinton witnessed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in the summer of 1968, dovetailed with her keen sense of social justice to convert her wholeheartedly to the Democratic party."
In the span of 4 years she went from supporting the then conservative Goldwater (he'd probably be to the left of virtually the entire Republican party today) to backing the most liberal Democrat running for President. "She campaigned for Eugene McCarthy for president in 1968, worked to enroll more black students at Wellesley, organized the school's first teach-ins on the Vietnam War (which turned into antiwar protests), and wrote her senior thesis on poverty and community development."
Clinton appeared on the national stage because of her commencement address, "In 1969 Clinton graduated from Wellesley with a bachelor's degree in political science. As president of the student government, she was selected by her classmates to deliver the school's first student commencement address, immediately following a speech by Senator Edward W. Brooke, a liberal Republican from Massachusetts. After shocking her audience by castigating Brooke for the irrelevance of his remarks, she spoke about her classmates' college experience in terms of what it had meant to them personally. "We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty," she told her fellow graduating seniors. "But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including, tragically, the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living." Clinton's words and her photograph were published in Life magazine. The national publicity she received through the article and through her victories as a contestant on the television quiz show College Bowl enhanced her already impressive resume..."
During that summer, "she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing factory in Valdez (which shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthy conditions there" (From Wikipedia)
That Fall, "Clinton enrolled at Yale Law School, in New Haven, Connecticut, after a Harvard professor told her that his university did not need any more female students. At Yale she served on the editorial board of the now-defunct Yale Review of Law and Social Action and presided over a mass meeting that was called in the spring of 1970 to formulate a response to the trials of the Black Panthers Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale, which were then underway at a courthouse near the university. The solution to Clinton's dilemma--how to combine social activism and a legal career--presented itself in the figure of the civil rights lawyer and Yale alumna Marian Wright Edelman, the first black woman to pass the bar exam in Mississippi. After Edelman gave a speech at Yale in the spring of 1970 about her work in behalf of the poor and children's rights, Clinton volunteered to work for Edelman's Washington Research Project, the congressional lobbying and advocacy group that later became the Children's Defense Fund." This would be the begining of a long association with the Children's Defense Fund. Clinton would eventually serve on it's board.
"Edelman could not afford to pay her for her services, so Clinton applied for a Law Student Civil Rights Research Council grant, obtained a stipend, and spent the summer of 1970 in Washington, D.C., interviewing the families of migrant laborers and reporting her findings to Senator Walter F. Mondale's subcommittee. Back at Yale, she augmented her knowledge of the nascent children's rights field with classes on child psychology and family law. Scheduled to graduate in 1972, she prolonged her education for a year in order to work at Yale's Child Study Center, where she helped research a book by Anna Freud, Joseph Goldstein, and Albert Solnit entitled Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973). During her final year at Yale, Clinton also performed legal research for the Carnegie Council on Children, specializing in the rights of children to education and medical care."
There is a lot more biography after this. And I plan to post on that in the future, but here begins the "Bill Years" and I just wanted to discuss Clinton as an individual.
Most of the biography came from http://www.hwwilson.com/...