Tis the season for commencement speeches! Who gave yours? Do you remember anything they said?

Hopefully the ladies of women’s college Barnard will remember this year’s speech given by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (herself a graduate of Wellesley, also a women’s college).

Sec. Clinton spoke at length about the cold hard fact’s of women’s lives:

Although not always acknowledged by governments, businesses, or society overall, women and girls bear a disproportionate burden of most of the problems we face today. In the midst of this global economic crisis, women who are already the majority of the world’s poor are driven deeper into poverty. In places where food is scarce, women and girls are often the last to eat, and eat the least. In regions torn apart by war and conflict, women are more likely to be refugees or targets of sexual violence.

And just yesterday in a column by one of the former honorees by Barnard, Nick Kristof, we learned that one of the most dangerous places for women to be in the world is in childbirth.

I’m not sure childbirth is a “place” but I appreciate Clinton’s highlighting of just how dangerous giving birth is for a huge population of women. According to the UN, “Globally, more than 500,000 women die in pregnancy or childbirth annually. In the developing world, the risk of dying in childbirth is one in 48, even though virtually all countries now have safe motherhood programmes.”

I especially appreciated this bit:

And women’s progress is more than a matter of morality. It is a political, economic, social and security imperative for the United States and for every nation represented in this graduating class. If you want to know how stable, healthy, and democratic a country is, look at its women, look at its girls.

takepart by checking out the National Organization for Women.