My mailbox has been having so much fun lately and I plan to share with you the goodies that have landed there soon.
Today, I’m dropping by to wish you “Happy International Women’s Day” and to share with you the two postcards I created in support of women’s rights.

United Nations Women’s Theme for 2015
This first card was created for the “Yellow Flowers for International Women’s Day” swap in which swappers send yellow flowers in the form of postcards out into the world. I talked about this in last year’s IWD post. This year’s postcard features the UN Women’s theme for 2015, which points to building on and speeding up the momentum of the UN’s Fourth Conference on Women 20 years ago (also known as the Beijing conference). Let’s “picture a world where gender equality is a reality for every woman and girl” (UN Women). See UN Women for more information about the theme, Beijing+20 and women’s rights in general.
The second postcard incorporates a quote from Hillary Clinton’s speech at the the Beijing Conference in September 1995. This statement has been chanted worldwide ever since.

Hillary R. Clinton: “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights”
Here’s an excerpt from Clinton’s speech:
It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.
It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution for human greed — and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice should no longer be tolerated.
It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.
It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.
It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own relatives.
It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.
It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.
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. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely — and the right to be heard.
For the full text (and video) of Clinton’s speech, click here.
I am hopeful that this vision will be realized fully in my lifetime.
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