It was a startling speech coming from a first lady - indeed, Hillary Rodham Clinton's 1995 speech at the United Nations Conference for Women in Beijing is credited as a watershed moment.

    "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," the first lady told the international gathering. "... 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."

    Clinton's support for the Iraq war resolution probably cost her the presidency and left some Democrats grumbling that Barack Obama has abandoned his principles in naming her secretary of state. But Clinton's "women's rights are human rights" speech, and her work on international women's rights and rural development causes, may make her the cabinet member who has the most in common with Obama's own mother, Ann Dunham, an early champion of the same kinds of projects advancing women's economic development and microcredit for the poor.

    Obama has argued that national security is embedded in human security, and that promoting social and economic development may often be as important a guarantor of peace as a strong military.

    "They completely understand each other," said Ellen Chesler, director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative at Hunter College and a longtime Clinton friend. "He [Obama] understands the issue of advancing women's status in the world because he grew up with that."

    The Clintons' star power and old friendships will certainly give Hillary clout in her meetings with foreign heads of state.

    But human rights advocates say it is her relentless plugging away on behalf of the unglamorous and invisible that has made her the world's most admired woman in a dozen Gallup polls, a person whose portrait may be spied in remote south Indian hovels and the steppes of Asia.

    "I was in Nicaragua last week on vacation with my kids, and people were talking about [Clinton's appointment] everywhere we went," said Rep. James McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat and early Clinton supporter who co-chairs the House human rights commission.

    Her appointment, he said, signals that Obama intends to restore the U.S. role as a compassionate voice for human rights. "This is a big deal around the world, and it just changes everything, instantly."

    One of Clinton's most lasting efforts as first lady was to lead a State Department initiative called Vital Voices, aimed at boosting the economic and political role of women in new post-Soviet democracies and elsewhere.

    Since 2000, it has continued as a bipartisan nonprofit headed by her former chief of staff, Melanne Verveer.

    Verveer recalled visiting Nicaragua back then and being met at the airport by a group of women who were eager to tell the first lady about their success with a microcredit program launched a year earlier.

    "They unfurled a banner that read 'Welcome to the Ambassador of the Poor,'" Verveer said.