Speaking to the Professional Businesswomen of California conference in San Francisco Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton gave her first major speech since the November election, and she spoke on topics ranging from Trumpcare, to Bill O'Reilly's comments on Rep. Maxine Waters' hair, to the lack of women in tech. The speech, announced two weeks ago, was delivered to a mostly female audience of 6,000 at SF's Moscone Center, and Clinton arrived onstage in a black leather jacket, greeting a standing ovation saying, "I am thrilled to be out of the woods. And there’s no place I’d rather be... other than the White House."
As the Washington Post noted this week, Clinton is on a bit of a "comeback tour," first with this appearance at the annual conference for California businesswomen, and on Friday at a ceremony at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security in D.C., where an award is being named in her honor. Tuesday's speech indicates that Clinton plans to remain a vocal critic of the Trump Administration and the Republican agenda, though her comments focused primarily on women's issues.
Clinton spoke to President Trump's own hiring pattern, noting that the number of women in the current administration was "the lowest in a generation," as the Associated Press reports though she never mentioned Trump by name. And she pointed to events of just this week, as Politico notes, saying "Just look at all that’s happened in the last few days to women who are simply doing their jobs," talking about Waters being "taunted with a racist joke about her hair," and about Press Secretary Sean Spicer reprimanding African-American journalist April Ryan for simply "doing her job" in a press briefing. "Too many women, especially women of color, have had a lifetime of practice taking precisely these kind of indignities in stride,’" Clinton said. "But why should we have to?"
As CNet notes, Clinton also spoke to the "woeful lack of women in the upper reaches of science and technology," specifically making reference to Susan Fowler's public upbraiding of Uber executives. "More and more women have been sharing their experiences in Silicon Valley," she said, adding that Fowler's actions "spurred [Uber] to publicly address this problem."
The former Secretary of State urged the audience of women to "resist, insist, persist and enlist," and suggested that the first accomplishment of the resistance came last week with the defeat of the GOP's health care bill. Per Politico, she spoke of Republicans' effort to "jam through a bill that would have kicked 24 million people off their health insurance," and she declared, "when this disastrous bill failed, it was a victory for all Americans."
Clinton was joined on stage after the speech by longtime friend and fundraiser Susie Tompkins Buell, the co-founder of the Esprit clothing brand who lives in San Francisco. According to Politico, Buell closed by saying to Clinton, "It’s clear you’re out of the woods, for us. I always knew you would be. Nobody’s going to take you down."
Hillary Clinton talked about @MaxineWaters and @AprilDRyan earlier today. #BlackWomenAtWork (h/t @yashar)
— Beatrice-Elizabeth (@MissBeaE) March 28, 2017
pic.twitter.com/pUS3z4N92p
Everybody scrambles for a selfie with @HillaryClinton pic.twitter.com/CT83WAHE9c
— Tommy Christopher (@tommyxtopher) March 29, 2017
Previously: Hillary Clinton Coming To Speak In San Francisco In Two Weeks