A Conspicuous Silence: American Foreign Policy, Women, and Saudi Arabia

Hillary Rodham Clinton was the first to clearly state that: "the subjugation of women is a direct threat to the security of the United States." This declaration has come to be known as the Hillary Doctrine, and it was formally incorporated into the first Quadrennial Diplomatic and Development Review of U.S. foreign policy in 2010. If the Hillary Doctrine is justified, then how is it that Secretary of State Clinton never addressed issues of extreme gender inequality in Saudi Arabia? And how has Saudi Arabia sought to export that inequality to other states, such as Yemen? This chapter explores the complexities of the Hillary Doctrine in practice, the realities of pursuing gender equality on the national stage, the strategies Clinton and those working under her innovated to introduce gender issues diplomatically into a resistant country, and other key developments from this encounter and its reverberations across international channels.

Valerie M. Hudson is Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is the author or editor of several books, including (with Andrea Den Boer) Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population (MIT Press, 2004), which won the American Association of Publishers Award for the Best Book in Political Science, and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Best Book in Social Demography. Hudson was named to the list of Foreign Policy magazine's Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2009, and in 2015 was recognized as Distinguished Scholar of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA/ISA). Hudson is one of the Principal Investigators of the WomanStats Project, which includes the largest compilation of data on the status of women in the world today, and her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Minerva Initiative of the U.S. Department of Defense. Her most recent book is Sex and World Peace, co-authored with Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad Emmett (Columbia University Press, 2012), was listed by Gloria Steinem in 2014 as one of the top three books on her "Reading Our Way to the Revolution” list.
Patricia Leidl is a Vancouver-based international communications advisor who splits her time between in Vancouver, Canada and as faculty with the College of Communication Arts at Michigan State University. Leidl has spent the last 16 years working with various United Nations agencies and more recently advising various USAID-funded projects in Afghanistan and Yemen. She formerly headed the Communications Department at the Geneva-based HIV/AIDS Department of the World Health Organization and was Senior Editor/Media Advisor with the New York-based United Nations Population Fund, in addition to consulting with numerous other multilateral organizations and international NGOs. She has served as Editorial Director of the Vancouver-based Human Security Report and has worked as a communications risk management strategist, illustrator, graphic designer, and crime reporter.