People | July 24, 2015 05:00 PM EDT

50 facts about Hillary Rodham Clinton

Hillary Rodham Clinton 50 things.

1. Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is an American politician.

2. Hillary Rodham Clinton was United States Secretary of State in the administration of President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, a United States Senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, and, as the wife of President Bill Clinton, First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001.

3. A leading candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination to the 2008 presidential election, she has announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential election.

4. A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham was the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley College in 1969 and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973.

5. After a stint as a Congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas and married Bill Clinton in 1975.

6. She cofounded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in 1977, she became the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978, and became the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979.

7. The National Law Journal twice listed her as one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America.

8. During her tenure as First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992, she led a task force that reformed Arkansas's education system and sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart and several other corporations.

9. As First Lady of the United States, her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan of 1993, failed to gain approval from the U.S. Congress.

10. In 1997 and 1999, she played a leading role in advocating the creation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act.

11. Her marriage to the president was subjected to considerable public discussion following the Lewinsky scandal of 1998.

12. After moving to New York, Clinton was elected in 2000 as the first female senator from the state; she is the only First Lady ever to have run for public office.

13. Following the September 11 attacks, she supported military action in Afghanistan and the Iraq Resolution, but subsequently objected to the George W. Bush administration's conduct of the Iraq war.

14. Clinton was re-elected to the Senate in 2006.

15. Running in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, Clinton won far more primaries and delegates than any other female candidate in American history, but narrowly lost the nomination to Obama.

16. As Secretary of State in the Obama administration from January 2009 to February 2013, Clinton was at the forefront of the U.S. response to the Arab Spring and advocated the U.S. military intervention in Libya.

17. She encouraged empowerment of women everywhere and used social media to communicate the U.S. message abroad.

18. Leaving office at the end of Obama's first term, she authored her fifth book and undertook speaking engagements before announcing her second run for the presidency in April 2015.

19. Hillary Rodham Clinton was born on October 26, 1947, at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.

20. She was raised in a United Methodist family, first in Chicago and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois.

21. Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham (1911-1993), was of Welsh and English descent.

22. Her father managed a successful small business in the textile industry.

23. Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell (1919-2011), was a homemaker of English, Scottish, French, and Welsh descent.

24. Hillary has two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony.

25. As a child, Hillary Rodham was a teacher's favorite at her public schools in Park Ridge.

26. She participated in sports such as swimming and baseball and earned numerous awards as a Brownie and Girl Scout.

27. Hillary Rodham Clinton attended Maine East High School, where she participated in student council, the school newspaper, and was selected for National Honor Society.

28. For her senior year, she was redistricted to Maine South High School, where she was a National Merit Finalist and graduated in the top five percent of her class of 1965.

29. Her mother wanted her to have an independent, professional career,[8] and her father, otherwise a traditionalist, felt that his daughter's abilities and opportunities should not be limited by gender.

30. Raised in a politically conservative household, Rodham helped canvass Chicago's South Side at age thirteen following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she found evidence of electoral fraud against Republican candidate Richard Nixon.

31. She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964.

32. Rodham's early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anticommunist), who introduced her to Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw and met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in Chicago in 1962.

33. In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science.

34. During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans; with this Rockefeller Republican-oriented group, she supported the elections of Mayor John Lindsay and Senator Edward Brooke.

35. She later stepped down from this position, as her views changed regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.

36. Rodham wrote her senior thesis, a critique of the tactics of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, under Professor Schechter.

37. In 1969, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, with departmental honors in political science.

38. Following pressure from some fellow students, she became the first student in Wellesley College history to deliver its commencement address.

39. Her speech received a standing ovation lasting seven minutes. She was featured in an article published in Life magazine, due to the response to a part of her speech that criticized Senator Brooke, who had spoken before her at the commencement.

40. She also appeared on Irv Kupcinet's nationally syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New England newspapers.

41. Rodham then entered Yale Law School. There she served on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action.

42. During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center, learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973).

43. She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free legal advice for the poor.

44. In the summer of 1970 she was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. There she researched migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education. Edelman later became a significant mentor.

45. In the late spring of 1971 she began dating Bill Clinton, also a law student at Yale. He first proposed marriage to her following graduation but she declined, uncertain if she wanted to tie her future to his.

46. Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton bought a house in Fayetteville in the summer of 1975 and Hillary finally agreed to marry.

47. Their wedding took place on October 11, 1975, in a Methodist ceremony in their living room.

48. On February 27, 1980, Rodham gave birth to their daughter Chelsea.

49. Upon entering the Senate, Clinton maintained a low public profile and built relationships with senators from both parties. She forged alliances with religiously inclined senators by becoming a regular participant in the Senate Prayer Breakfast.

50. Along with Senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, she introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, intended to protect children from inappropriate content found in video games.

Source: Wikipedia.org

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