Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey Celebrate Women in the World
In her opening remarks on the second day of The DailyBeast/Newsweek Women in the World Summit, former Secretary of State and New York Senator Hillary Clinton called women’s rights the 21st century’s “unfinished business.”
“The world is changing beneath our feet, and it is past time to embrace a 21st-century approach to advancing the rights and opportunities of women and girls,” Clinton said. “Technology, from satellite television to cell phones, from Twitter to Tumbler, is helping to bring abuses out of the shadows and into the center of global consciousness.”
Clinton’s remarks framed the morning session of panel discussions at the Summit. Clinton’s daughter Chelsea, a board member at The Clinton Foundation and a special correspondent for NBC News, was the morning’s first moderator, steering a panel about women’s roles in science, math and computer programming. The morning’s other moderators included ABC News anchor Cynthia McFadden, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown and CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell.
NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell interviewed U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. during the a lunch for the Summit’s delegates, and the afternoon program kicked off with a discussion of women in leadership roles moderated by Financial Times assistant editor Gillian Tett. Oprah Winfrey’s interview with her “all-time favorite guest,” a Zimbabwean woman who fights for women’s education opportunities in Africa after she was forbidden to attend school as a young child, received a standing ovation from the crowd at Lincoln Center.
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“I was in the car with my friend [“CBS This Morning” co-host] Gayle [King] on the way here moments ago and I was saying, this is as close to church as we all come,” Winfrey said. “To experience the empowerment and the uplifting and the experience of caring, one woman for another.”
The program wrapped up with an interview conducted by ABC News correspondent Deborah Roberts, Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey and “Good Morning America” anchor Lara Spencer, who called her talk with Diane Von Furstenberg “the easiest interview I’d ever done.” The Summit concludes this evening with a performance by Me N Ma Girls, Burma’s first all female pop group.
