Hillary Clinton Photo Archives - LIFE

Young Hillary Clinton Learned About Strong Women “By Reading LIFE”

Bill Syken — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 16:17:39 +0000

At an event at the New York Public Library on March 27, 2024, Hillary Clinton was asked about the women she admired when she was growing up. And she talked about how she had been reflecting with a friend recently that when she was going to school in the 1950s and ’60s, she wasn’t taught much about women in history, with figures such as Joan of Arc or Martha Washington being the rare exceptions.

Her primary source for learning about accomplished women, she said, was the pages of LIFE.

Here’s how the former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator and First Lady explained it to a packed house at the library (Ms. Clinton’s entire, wide-ranging conversation with author Jennifer Weiner can be viewed here, with Clinton’s comment about LIFE coming at the one-hour mark):

“I learned about women not in school but by reading LIFE magazine every week. And you have to be of a certain age. But that magazine would come to my house every week, and it was a big magazine with great photographs in it, and I’d come home from school and it would be sitting there on the table, and I would read it faithfully. And that’s where I learned about Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Margaret Chase-Smith, Margaret Bourke-White, I mean… Maria Tallchief. I had a lot of exposure to women who I read about and really admired by reading in the magazines.”

While Ms. Clinton talked about LIFE, she did not mention that the magazine was where she just so happened to make her first national splash, when she was an undergraduate at Wellesley and she included in a 1969 story about students’ college commencement speeches. (You can see young Hillary’s commencement speech here.)

This gallery includes images from when she appeared in the magazine herself, and also photos of the women that she learned about as a reader of LIFE.

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, shown on the day she announced her 1964 candidacy for president at the Women’s National Press Club, was the first woman to have her name placed into nomination at the convention of a major party.

Francis Miller/Life Photo Collection/Shutterstock

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress, spoke with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles during a Senate committee meeting, 1957.

Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt walks with children en route to a picnic, 1948.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Eleanor Roosevelt addressed delegates at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, where she supported Illinois’ Adlai Stevenson over the party’s eventual nominee, John F. Kennedy.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Eleanor Roosevelt talking to another UN delegate near a mural by artist Fernand Leger, 1952.

Lisa Larsen/The LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock© Meredith Corporation

Portrait of LIFE’s first hired and first female staff photographer, Margaret Bourke-White. She was on assignment in Algeria, standing in front of Flying Fortress bomber in which she made combat mission photographs of the U.S. attack on Tunis, 1943.

(Margaret Bourke-White/ LIFE Picture Collection /Shutterstock)

Margaret Bourke-White with her camera during her later years, when the LIFE staff photographer was struggling with Parkinson’s disease.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ballerina Maria Tallchief (right) performing the Nutcracker Ballet at New York’s City Center, 1954.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Maria Tallchief in rehearsal for ” Swan Lake,” 1963.

Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ballerina Maria Tallchief performing in Swan Lake, 1963.

Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Aviator Amelia Earhart in 1932, five years before her plane disappeared in the Pacific.

Life Photo Collection

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The post Young Hillary Clinton Learned About Strong Women “By Reading LIFE” appeared first on LIFE.

Hillary Clinton’s First National Splash: LIFE, 1969

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 12:02:03 +0000

Long before Yale Law, before Arkansas, before her marriage to Bill, before the Senate, the White House, her own runs for the White House, the State Department, and so many other highlights (and lowlights) of her remarkable life, she was Hillary Diane Rodham, the older sister of two brothers, and the over-achieving daughter of loving, politically conservative parents from suburban Park Ridge, Ill.

Intelligent, intensely curious and, from a young age, driven to find a way to contribute to the world around her, Hillary Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College in the fall of 1965. It was there, in Massachusetts, that the moderate Republican underwent her transformation (she might characterize it as “an evolution”) to committed Democrat.

By the time she graduated from Wellesley in May 1969, Hillary Rodham was already such a notable figure that she was featured, along with four other speakers from four other schools and excerpts from their commencement addresses in the June 20, 1969, issue of LIFE, in an article titled, simply, “The Class of ’69.”

Her speech was, perhaps not surprisingly, less strident and confrontational than those of the other student speakers quoted in the issue. As early as 1969, Hillary was showing signs of her ability to modulate her message without diluting or compromising it that helps explain so much of her success in public life. The other student speakers featured in that June 1969 issue included Yale’s William Thompson; Justin Simon at Brandeis; Mills College’s Stephanie Mills, an author; and Brown University’s Ira Magaziner, a high-profile student activist who went on to become a business strategist and a senior adviser in the Clinton White House.

Here, LIFE.com presents a series of pictures by photographer Lee Balterman, only one of which ran in the June 20 issue of LIFE. The images were captured at the Rodham home in Park Ridge in mid-June 1969, a week and a half after she graduated from Wellesley. Leaving aside the insights into late-Sixties fashion that these pictures afford, the LIFE archives also contains insights into the younger Hillary that never made it into the magazine. For instance, in a note dated June 11, 1969, that accompanied Balterman’s film when it was sent from Illinois to LIFE’s offices in New York, we learn that Hillary told reporter Joan Downs that “press accounts of her commencement speech were vastly different from what she actually said because the speech wasn’t written out and taped transcripts were unavailable until several days after commencement.”

“She’s also quite concerned” the note continues, “that it be made clear she was not attacking Senator Brooke personally.” Senator Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the Senate and the last Republican Senator elected from Massachusetts until Scott Brown’s election in 2010, spoke before Hillary Rodham at Wellesley’s commencement, and she deviated from her prepared remarks to address at least part of what he said.

Another Balterman note in the archive, meanwhile, written in the photographer’s own hand, points to a less dramatic, if no less revealing, element of the photo shoot: “Had to go for nothing more than informal portraits, but should be some good expressions & hand gestures, etc.,” the note reads, before ending with a simple, gentle suggestion: “Her glasses helped.”

—Photo gallery edited by Liz Ronk

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This image appeared in the June 20, 1969, issue of LIFE.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

hillary-clinton-in-1969-14

Life Magazine

LIFE magazine, June 20, 1969, “Class of ’69” page spreads.

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