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As she foundered, Hillary largely shut out overtures from the Beltway's Democratic intelligentsia, including women who had joined the Administration in large part because of her. A top Administration woman says of the First Lady, "She doesn't travel with her peers." Says Morris: "She's very headstrong and very stubborn, and ultimately very brittle." Her bitterness would occasionally seep out. At the Democratic Convention she told the Arkansas delegation that a friend had told her she would have everything but the kitchen sink thrown at her. "Well," she said, "I just saw it go by."
It is not surprising that Hillary began to regain her voice and her footing far from home, on the other side of the world, at the U.N.'s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September 1995. That was a delicate time in U.S.-Chinese relations, so tense that some in Washington had argued she should not even attend. When Hillary took the podium, she unleashed the most stinging human-rights rebuke ever by a prominent American speaking for this government on Chinese soil. "It is time to break our silence," she declared. "It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights." Without mentioning China by name, the First Lady offered an unsparing litany of abuses there and elsewhere: forced abortion and sterilization, denial of political rights, suppression of speech. The address had an odd, disjointed rhythm, losing bits here and there in translation as it made its way to the headphones of women from more than 180 countries. But if at times her words took a moment or two to register, Hillary's message got through clearly enough. Delegates cheered, others leaped from their seats and pounded the tables. The applause lasted more than 20 minutes after she left the stage. Women she has met since in Soweto, Budapest and Manila can recite the lines she delivered that day.