Living History (62 page)

That meant listening to Americans.

In 1994, I had promoted the largest survey of working women ever conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor. Called “Working Women Count,” the survey reflected the worries of millions of working women, who comprise nearly half of our nation’s labor force. Regardless of income or background, the women had two dominant concerns: affordable quality child care and balancing work and family life. While raising Chelsea, I had relied on friends, family and a series of caregivers who came into our home when Bill and I were at work. Most parents are not so fortunate.

I met with women who had participated in the survey to learn more about their lives.

One single mother from New York City described the key to her daily survival: “Everything is timed,” she said. She outlined her schedule: rise at 6:00 A.M., get ready for work, make breakfast, feed the cat and wake up her nineyear-old son. Catch up on ironing while he gets ready for school. Walk her son to school, go to work until 5:00 P.M., and then pick him up from his afterschool program. Make dinner, help with homework, pay the bills or straighten up the house and then fall into bed. She took pride in the fact that she could support her family and had managed to work her way up from part-time bookkeeper to fulltime executive secretary, but it was a demanding and exhausting schedule.

As one thirty-seven-yearold intensive care nurse from Same Fe told me, “We have to be a wife, a mother and a professional, and to be ourselves, which usually takes last place.”

The New York mother was grateful for the afterschool program run by the Police Athletic League (PAL). Local police told me they supported such programs because they understood that if a working parent wants to keep a child out of trouble, there has to be a safe, productive environment in the afterschool hours. Yet many parents did not have access to good afterschool programs or quality care for preschool children. Not enough workplaces provided or subsidized child care; day care centers often turned away sick kids; and most charged high fees for late pickups. A mother from Boston told me that she sometimes skipped her lunch break so that she could leave work in time to pick up her three-year-old from day care. Hers was a common predicament. An assistant bank vice president I met in Atlanta told me, “I nearly kill pedestrians trying to get to the day care center on time, trying to avoid the late fees after 6:00 P.M.” A federal judge and mother explained: “When I was a lawyer, all of the partners had wives who didn’t work.

They didn’t have to worry about picking up the dry cleaning or picking up the kids.” That sounded like what Albert Jenner had said to me in 1974 when I suggested that I might want to be a trial lawyer and he told me I couldn’t because I didn’t have a wife.

In 1994, Dr. David Hamburg, President of the Carnegie Corporation, encouraged me to use my role as First Lady to highlight the deficiencies in American child care and encourage greater federal support for working parents. During the welfare reform debate in 1996, I had insisted that the administration retain access to child care as an essential ingredient in helping poor mothers move from welfare to work. I would later broaden my message as I studied the results of new research indicating the importance of stimulating children’s brains in the early years. The idea was to learn how child care could reflect this research and enhance early childhood development in the early years. I supported the innovative program, Reach Out and Read, which encouraged doctors to “prescribe” that adults read to babies and toddlers. I met with numerous child care experts and key children’s advocacy organizations and traveled around the country to see different approaches to improving the quality of child care and remedying the paucity of child care options available to working parents. In Miami, I met with business leaders to discuss corporate responsibility for child care, and followed up with a White House event highlighting the successful programs of different businesses. At the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, I visited one of the U.S. military’s impressive child care centers for military families, which I hoped would be seen as an example for the rest of society.

I convened two White House conferences, the first on Early Childhood Development and Learning and the second on Child Care. We assembled experts, advocates, business leaders and politicians to focus the nation’s attention on critical areas of family life and outline federal initiatives to give working men and women the help they needed to be productive employees and responsible parents. My staff continued to work closely with the President’s domestic policy advisers to develop the groundbreaking policies that Bill announced in his 1998 State of the Union Address. I was proud that the Administration put forward a $zo billion investment in improving child care over the next five years. The funds would be used to increase access to child care for low-income working families and afterschool opportunities for older children, expand Head Start and provide tax incentives for businesses and institutions of higher education that invest in child care. An Early Learning Fund was established to provide financial assistance to states and communities in their efforts to improve the quality of child care providers, reduce child-to-staff ratios and increase the number of licensed providers. I worked hard to make afterschool care more accessible, and in 1998, the Administration introduced the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which provides enriching afterschool and summer school opportunities to approximately 1.3 million children. Afterschool care has been shown to increase achievement in reading and math; it also decreases youth violence and drug use and gives parents much needed peace of mind.

I continued to promote domestic initiatives through public appearances, speeches and in meetings and phone calls with members of Congress as well as outside organizations. Over the course of eight years, my talented domestic policy staff-Shirley Sagawa, Jennifer Mein, Nicole Rabner, Neera Tanden, Ann O’Leary, Heather Howard and Ruby Shamir―was invaluable. Bill and I also convened White House strategy sessions on how to curb media violence directed at children, improve education for Hispanic students who had a high dropout rate and expand work and learning opportunities for American teenagers.

The first piece of legislation Bill signed into law in 1993 was the Family and Medical Leave Act, sponsored by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, which allowed millions of working people to take up to twelve weeks o£ unpaid leave for family emergencies or to care for a family member who was sick, without fear of losing their jobs. Millions of Americans took advantage of the protections of the law and discovered the profound difference it made in their lives. A woman in Colorado wrote me that her husband had recently died of congestive heart failure after several years of illness. Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, she had been able to take time off from work to transport him to doctor appointments and hospital visits, and to comfort him at the end.

She did not have to spend the critical last months of her husband’s life worrying that she would not have a job after he died.

I urged my staff to come up with ideas to improve the law, and we worked with the Department of Labor, the Office of Personnel Management and the National Partnership for Women and Families to modify family and medical leave so that federal workers could use up to twelve weeks of accrued paid sick leave to care for an ill family member.

I hoped this federal system would become a model around the country, and I pushed for a regulation permitting states to use their unemployment insurance system to offer paid leave to new parents. At least sixteen state legislatures were considering such proposals when the Bush Administration eliminated the regulation, foreclosing an avenue of support for new parents.

Proposed bankruptcy reform moving through Congress threatened to undermine the spousal and child support many women depended on. The number of Americans filing for bankruptcy had risen 400 percent in twenty years, a staggering statistic with important implications for our nation’s economic stability. Were a growing number of Americans simply using bankruptcy as a financial planning tool to escape mounting personal debts?

Was the rise due to an irresponsible banking and credit card industry that solicited, and recklessly approved, unqualified cardholders? Or were responsible Americans facing mounting personal expenses that they simply could not manage on their own, such as health care bills that were not covered by insurance? How politicians answered these questions drove the policy solutions they favored. Those who believed that the credit card industry was largely to blame for the increased debt carried by Americans favored solutions that limited aggressive tactics to sign up cardholders who were known credit risks.

Those who thought that people were using the system to avoid paying debts they rightly owed preferred solutions that would make it more difficult to declare bankruptcy or would limit the amount of debt forgiven in bankruptcy cases.

Missing from this debate, I discovered, was any discussion of what happens to women and children who depend on legally required child and spousal support that is not being paid. Hundreds of thousands of bankruptcy cases were bringing women into court because they were trying to collect child and spousal support withheld from them by deadbeat dads and ex-husbands who had declared bankruptcy. I recognized that changes in the bankruptcy law would have profound implications for women and families. In cases of bankruptcy, credit card companies wanted unpaid credit card bills to have the same priority as spousal and child support obligations. That meant that single women would have to compete with Visa and MasterCard to collect legally owed child support. I believed that child support obligations should come first and that bankruptcy reform must be balanced, expecting more responsibility from debtors and creditors alike. In 1998, 1 weighed in on the President’s decision to veto one version of the bill that disproportionately favored the credit card industry over consumers, and later I worked with members of Congress to enhance the law’s consumer protections and to add provisions to protect women and their families. In the Senate, one of the first measures I passed increased protections for women and children.

Women’s economic empowerment also meant continuing the fight for equal pay and retirement security. Women are still not being paid equally to men, and many working women do not receive any or adequate income from pensions but rely on Social Security.

The structure of Social Security is based on outdated notions of women as secondary breadwinners, or not as breadwinners at all. The payment that a person receives is determined by the contributions that he or she makes during his or her years of employment.

Most women not only earn less than men and often do not receive private pensions, they are more likely to work part time, spend time outside of the labor force and live alone in their retirement years because, on average, they live longer than their husbands. For many elderly women, Social Security is all that stands between them and abject poverty. Determined to preserve the solvency of this essential safety net, I chaired a panel at the White House Conference on Social Security in 1998 to explore the system’s structural discrimination against women.

Women and children also suffer from inequities in our health care system, one of my original motivations to work on reform. I led the Administration’s efforts to end the practice of “drive-through deliveries,” in which hospitals discharged new mothers twentyfour hours after giving birth. Now, women can stay for forty-eight hours after a normal delivery and ninety-six hours after a cesarean section.

Inspired by the life of AIDS activist Elizabeth Glaser, I also began working for better testing and labeling of pediatric drugs, including drugs to treat children with HIV/AIDS. I first met Elizabeth at the Democratic convention in 1992, where she spoke movingly about having contracted HIV through a blood transfusion while giving birth to her daughter, Ariel, in 1981. Unaware that she was infected, Elizabeth passed the disease on to her daughter through her breast milk and later to her son, Jake, in the womb. Elizabeth was outraged that medications available to her were denied to her daughter and son because they hadn’t been tested for safety and efficacy for children. She and her husband, Paul Glaser, watched helplessly as their daughter succumbed to AIDS at age seven.

Elizabeth turned her personal loss into a mission on behalf of children with HIV/AIDS, founding the Pediatric AIDS Foundation to support and encourage research into the prevention and treatment of childhood AIDS. Until her death in 1994,I worked with Elizabeth to require that medications were being properly tested and administered to children, and then I continued the cause in her memory. Jake has benefited from the advances in treatment and is doing well.

While some drugs are not available for desperately ill children, others are routinely prescribed with little understanding of the proper dosages or potentially harmful side effects.

Jen Klein, my staffer who headed the successful White House effort to improve pediatric labeling and testing, was keenly aware of the issue because her own son, Jacob, was taking medications for asthma. In 1998, the Food and Drug Administration introduced requirements that pharmaceutical companies test drugs for use in children, but some companies sued, and a federal court ruled that the FDA did not have the authority to require testing. As a Senator I’ve been working to pass a law that gives the FDA the power it needs to do what Elizabeth advocated.

Because of my Beijing speech the year before, my visibility around the world had dramatically increased, and my office was bombarded with requests for me to make speeches and attend meetings on my own to discuss issues affecting women in the countries we visited. Prior to Beijing, when we traveled on official visits abroad, I accompanied Bill where appropriate and attended the spouses programs. In mid-November, when we made state visits to Australia, the Philippines and Thailand, I followed my own agenda as well as Bill’s. We also scheduled some necessary R&R. We visited the Great Barrier Reef while we were in Australia after stops in Sydney and Canberra. At Port Douglas, Bill announced American support for the International Coral Reef Initiative, to stem the erosion of reefs around the world, and then we took a boat out to the reef in the Coral Sea. I was anxious to get in the water. “C’mon you guys!” I said to my staff. “Life is too short to worry about getting your hair wet!”