“This has literally been, not figuratively, the cause of my life”, Biden said, adding that issues such as sexual violence and denying women and girls opportunities stems from a broader, systemic bias in our shared culture.
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“He’s gotten very swagalicious”, The First Lady confided to 5,000 mostly-but-not-entirely women in the hall, and many more via livestream.
It’s men, the vice president said. “Just making that connection for you”. “It’s easy to brush that off because I know who I am”, Michelle Obama said. And if a fraternity member sees a brother taking a clearly incapacitated woman to an upstairs bedroom?
“The countless ordinary people every day who are bringing us closer to our highest ideas”, he said.
At a summit on the “United State of Women”, Michelle Obama had advice for the men in the audience: Be better.
Obama cited recent progress in advancing women’s rights and interests, including Hillary Clinton’s rise to become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee as well as the Equal Pay Pledge, a White House initiative signed by 28 major businesses, including Amazon, PepsiCo and Johnson & Johnson, to work toward company-wide pay equality.
“I may be a little greyer than I was eight years ago”, the president said. “But this is what a feminist looks like”. “Of course in my household there’s no choice”, he added to a room full of laughter.
Charting the progress of women since his birth, from access to contraception to women in space, Obama said, “We have to celebrate it, but we have to remember that progress is not inevitable”. “The answer isn’t to shame women for drinking”. Many women are being raped and sexually abused by the men and the cruelty of them is not in the position to listen to anybody.
“It was an everyday expression of a longstanding, traditional gender ideology that tethered a woman’s social value to her chastity”, Juliet Williams, gender studies professor at the University of California, said. “It’s about women getting to the point where they feel someone might listen to them”.
“We can end this”, Biden said. We’re never done. We can never be complacent and think that we have arrived as women. “You are the ones who are going to impact the change in the culture”. “Her lemonade got picked up by Whole Foods Market”. Biden went a step further, saying bluntly that men must play a role in stopping violence against women – and that when they don’t, they are “accomplices”. “Be the school that fixes it”. Women empowerment is the situation where a female is in a situation where she is free to do anything which is happy for her personal life and also society.
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Nor should law enforcement and elected officials be let of the hook, speakers said.
