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Hillary Rodham Clinton
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born October 26,
1947) is the junior
United States Senator from
New York, and a member of the
Democratic Party. She is married to
Bill Clinton, the 42nd
President of the United States, and was the
First Lady of the United States from 1993 to
2001. She is a lawyer and a former
First Lady of Arkansas.
Clinton was elected to the United States Senate in 2000, becoming the
first First Lady elected to public office and the first female senator to
represent New York. She was re-elected in 2006. As senator, she sits on the
Committee on Armed Services, the
Committee on Environment and Public Works, the
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions,
and the Special Committee on Aging.
On January 20, 2007,
Clinton announced the formation of a presidential
exploratory committee for the United States
presidential election of 2008 and began active campaigning for the
Democratic nomination.
Hillary Diane Rodham was born at Edgewater Hospital in
Chicago, Illinois,
and was raised in a Methodist family in
Park Ridge, Illinois.
Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was a son of
English immigrants and operated a small business in the
textile industry. Her
mother, Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham, was
a homemaker. She has two younger brothers,
Hugh and Tony.
As a child, Hillary Rodham was involved in many activities at church and
at her public school in Park Ridge. She participated in a variety of sports
and earned awards as a Brownie and
Girl Scout. She attended
Maine East High School, where she had participated in
student council, the debating team and the
National Honor Society. Before graduating from
Maine South High School, she received the
school's first social science award. Raised in a politically
conservative family, she volunteered for
Republican candidate
Barry Goldwater in the United States
presidential election of 1964.
Her parents encouraged her to pursue the career of her
choice.
In 1965, Rodham enrolled in Wellesley College.
She became active in politics and served as the president of the Wellesley
College Chapter of the College Republicans. In
her junior year, Rodham was affected by the death of
civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.,
whom she had met in person in 1962, She
attended the Wellesley in Washington program at the urging of Professor
Alan Schechter, for whom she would write a
senior thesis about the tactics of radical
community organizer Saul
Alinsky that later became the subject of
mystery. Around this time, she decided to join the
Democratic Party. In 1969, Rodham graduated
with departmental honors in political science.
She became the first student in Wellesley College history to deliver their
commencement address.
According to reports by the
Associated Press, her speech received a
standing ovation lasting seven minutes. She was featured in an
article published in Life magazine, due
to the response to a part of her speech that criticized Senator
Edward Brooke, who had spoken before her at the
commencement.
Rodham then entered Yale Law School, where
she served on the Board of Editors of the Yale Review
of Law and Social Action. During her second year, she volunteered at
the Yale Child Study Center, learning about new
research on early childhood brain development. She also took on cases of
child abuse at Yale-New
Haven Hospital, and worked at the city legal services to provide free
advice for the poor. In the summer of 1970, she was awarded a grant to work
at the Children's Defense Fund in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the late spring of
1971, she began dating Bill Clinton, who was
also a law student at Yale. That summer, she traveled to Washington to work
on Senator Walter Mondale's subcommittee on
migrant workers, researching migrant problems
in housing, sanitation, health and education. The following summer, Rodham
campaigned in the western states for 1972 Democratic presidential candidate
George McGovern. She received a
Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973, having
completed a thesis on the rights of children.
She began a year of post-graduate study on
children and medicine at the Yale Child Study
Center.
During her post-graduate study, Rodham served as staff attorney for the
Children's Defense Fund and as a consultant to
the Carnegie Council on Children. She was a member of the impeachment
inquiry staff advising the House Committee on the
Judiciary during the Watergate scandal.
Rodham later became one of two female faculty members at the
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville School of Law,
where Bill Clinton was teaching as well.
On October 11, 1975,
Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton were married in
Fayetteville, Arkansas; she kept her name as Hillary Rodham. They
lived there briefly and then moved to the state capital of
Little Rock, from which Bill conducted his
first campaign, for U.S. Congress. Rodham
joined the venerable Rose Law Firm in 1976,
specializing in intellectual property while
working pro bono in child advocacy. In 1978,
President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the
board of the Legal Services Corporation.
In 1978, with the election of her husband as
Governor of Arkansas, Rodham became First Lady
of Arkansas, her title for a total of 12 years.
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