Georgette Bennett, Ph.D., accepts the 2019-2020 AARP Purpose Prize award, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019, in Washington. (Paul Morigi/AP Images for AARP Purpose Prize)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
It’s been 25 years since then-First Lady Hillary Clinton stood up at the U.N.’s World Conference on Women and declared, “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”
Though women are still broadly underrepresented among those who fight for human rights around the globe (according to one recent analysis, just one-third of the the U.S. government’s 800,000-person foreign policy staff identifies as female), some of the most prominent and effective voices in foreign policy and human rights advocacy in recent years have come from women—and, in particular, women over the age of 50.
And so, as part of our regular segment on “Morning Joe” highlighting women over the age of 50 who are changing the world, Forbes and Know Your Value want to shine a light on the women who have broken barriers in foreign policy and achieved seats at some of the most important tables in history. They are:
Condoleezza Rice, 66: Two months after her 50th birthday, in January 2005 Rice was named the 66th U.S. Secretary of State. She was the second woman and first African American woman to hold the position, a role to which she ascended after serving as President George W. Bush’s national security adviser since his 2001 inauguration.
Her career in foreign policy wasn’t preordained: Rice grew up, in a segregated Birmingham, Alabama, wanting to be a concert pianist. A class on international politics taught by Dr. Josef Korbel (former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s father) during her junior year of college helped change her path, and Rice eventually received a Ph.D in political science from the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel’s School of International Studies.
As Secretary of State, Rice helped negotiate an Israeli withdrawal from the opening of the Gaza border crossings in 2005 and the August 14, 2006 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. In 2007, she organized the Annapolis Conference, which attempted to find a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Rice’s career is not without some controversy; she was a proponent of invading Iraq in 2003, a decision she broadly stands by today, though she allows there were things the government “could have done better.” But she also believes in America’s influence on the world stage: “Every foreign policy crisis,” she has said, “will be worse if the United States doesn’t play its role.”
Susan Rice, 56: Rice first ventured into foreign relations—and advocating for human rights—in 1986, as an undergraduate at Stanford University. That year she and a few other graduating seniors established an “alternative endowment” funded by donations to a “Free South Africa Fund.” The move was a protest against the university’s stock holdings in companies doing business in South Africa, which she and others argued should be divested until the country ended apartheid.
Rice went on to work for Michael Dukakis, President Clinton and Madeleine Albright, but her biggest jobs came with the election of Barack Obama. In 2009, President Obama appointed her to be the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.; during her four-year tenure, she used the position to encourage international cooperation on the referendum for independence in Southern Sudan and help reform the U.N. Human Rights Council. In 2013, Obama named Rice as his national security adviser. “I think everybody understands Susan is a fierce champion for justice and human dignity, but she’s also mindful that we have to exercise our power wisely and deliberately,” Obama said at the time.
In 2020, Rice was considered one of the front-runners to be President Biden’s Secretary of State, but the role ultimately went to Antony Blinken. She is now the head of Biden’s domestic policy council.
Dr. Najat Arafat Khelil, 83: A scientist and academic who has dedicated her life to advocating for Arab issues and women in science, Khelil is the chair of the National Arab American Women’s Association and a founding member of the Union of Palestinian American Women; she served as the organization’s first president.
Born in Nablus (in the West Bank, then called Palestine), Khelil excelled as a young student, and in 1962 was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in the U.S. She arrived at Ohio State (where, five days after her arrival, she met the man who would become her husband), and went on to complete a Ph.D in nuclear physics from the State University of North Texas, becoming the first woman in Texas history to receive a doctorate in the speciality.
In 1982, Khelil founded the National Arab American Women’s Association with the goal of “just presenting the proper image of the Arab woman, which is very much misunderstood and misconstrued.”
Throughout the late 80s, 90s and early 2000s, Dr. Khelil led workshops on leadership training and conflict resolution for Arab women in Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Morocco, among other countries. Her work received two State Department grants, and her program in Syria marked “the first time that a project or a program was done officially, above board, between the Syrian government and United States Embassy,” Khelil explained in 2002. “The minister of labor public works in Syria opened the workshop… they told us they considered it a groundbreaking event that happened.”
Dr. Georgette Bennett, 74: Bennett is the founder of two organizations that are devoted to the idea that religious pluralism, and acceptance, is the key to a truly free society: the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, and the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees, an organization of more than 100 partner organizations that has focused on delivering humanitarian aid to hard-to-access parts of Syria.
“At the age of 67, in 2013, I read a report on the Syrian crisis issued by the International Rescue Committee. As a child of the Holocaust and a refugee myself, I was stunned by the magnitude of Syrian suffering,” she says of her decision to start the Multifaith Alliance. (Bennett and her family had been Hungarian refugees who settled in Queens’ Kew Gardens neighborhood, and describes the move as having escaped “the worst of two worlds; that is, both fascism and communism.”)
To date, she says, the Multifaith Alliance has accrued $12 million in grants, donations and investments that have yielded $170 million worth of aid. By Bennett’s count, this aid has helped more than two million war victims. She says her Jewish faith has been a help, not a hindrance, to her work in the Middle East: “My engagement with the other helped to debunk stereotypes about Jews and changes expectations, but the way in which it’s been the most help is because I lean on my Jewish values,” she said in a recent podcast. “This idea that every human being is made in the sacred image of God and worthy of infinite respect and dignity, it’s a foundation of all human rights.”
