Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (née Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, lawyer, and diplomat. She was the 67th United States secretary of state in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, a U.S. senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, and the first lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001 as the wife of Bill Clinton. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee in the 2016 presidential election, becoming the first woman to win a presidential nomination by a major U.S. political party and the only woman to win the popular vote for U.S. president. However, she lost the electoral college to Republican Party nominee Donald Trump. She is the only first lady of the United States to have run for elected office.

Born in Chicago, Rodham graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 and from Yale Law School in 1973. After serving as a congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas and, in 1975, married Bill Clinton. In 1977, Clinton co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and in 1979 she became the first woman partner at Little Rock's Rose Law Firm. Clinton was the first lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992. As the first lady of the U.S., Clinton advocated for healthcare reform. In 1994, her health care plan failed to gain approval from Congress. In 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a leading role in promoting the creation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. In 1998, Clinton's marital relationship came under public scrutiny during the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, which led her to publicly reaffirm her commitment to the marriage.

Clinton was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000, becoming the first female senator from New York. As a senator, she chaired the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee from 2003 to 2007. Clinton ran for president in 2008, and lost to Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries. During 2009, she resigned from the Senate to become Obama's secretary of state. She responded to the Arab Spring by advocating the 2011 military intervention in Libya, but was harshly criticized by Republicans for the failure to prevent or adequately respond to the 2012 Benghazi attack. Clinton helped to organize a regime of international sanctions against Iran in an effort to force it to curtail its nuclear program, which eventually led to the multinational Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. The strategic pivot to Asia was a central aspect of her tenure. Her use of a private email server as secretary was the subject of intense scrutiny; while no charges were filed, the controversy was the single-most-covered topic during her second presidential run in 2016. She won the Democratic nomination, but lost the general election to her Republican Party opponent, Donald Trump, in the United States Electoral College, while winning the popular vote.

Following her loss, she wrote multiple books and launched Onward Together, a political action organization dedicated to fundraising for progressive political groups. In 2011, Clinton was appointed the Honorary Founding Chair of the Institute for Women, Peace and Security at Georgetown University, and the awards named in her name has been awarded annually at the university. Since 2020, she has served as Chancellor of Queen's University Belfast. In 2023, Clinton joined Columbia University as a Professor of Practice at the School of International and Public Affairs.

Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. She was raised in a Methodist family who first lived in Chicago. When she was three years old, her family moved to the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. Her father, Hugh Rodham, was of English and Welsh descent, and founded a small but successful textile business. Her mother, Dorothy Howell, was a homemaker of Dutch, English, French Canadian (from Quebec), Scottish, and Welsh descent. She grew up with two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony.

As a child, Rodham was a favorite student among her teachers at the public schools she attended in Park Ridge. She participated in swimming and softball and earned numerous badges as a Brownie and a Girl Scout. She was inspired by U.S. efforts during the Space Race and sent a letter to NASA around 1961 asking what she could do to become an astronaut, only to be informed that women were not being accepted into the program. She attended Maine South High School, where she participated in the student council and school newspaper and was selected for the National Honor Society. She was elected class vice president for her junior year but then lost the election for class president for her senior year against two boys, one of whom told her that "you are really stupid if you think a girl can be elected president". For her senior year, she and other students were transferred to the then-new Maine South High School. There she was a National Merit Finalist and was voted "most likely to succeed." She graduated in 1965 in the top five percent of her class.

Rodham's mother wanted her to have an independent, professional career. Her father, who was otherwise a traditionalist, felt that his daughter's abilities and opportunities should not be limited by gender. She was raised in a politically conservative household, and she helped canvass Chicago's South Side at age 13 after the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election. She stated that, while investigating with a fellow teenage friend shortly after the election, she saw evidence of electoral fraud (a voting list entry showing a dozen addresses that was an empty lot) against Republican candidate Richard Nixon; she later volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election.

Rodham's early political development was shaped mostly by two people. Her high school history teacher, Paul Carlson, was one. Like her father, Carlson was a fervent anti-communist, who introduced her to Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative. Another was Donald Jones, her Methodist youth minister, who, like her mother, was concerned with issues of social justice. She was with Jones' youth group when she saw and afterwards briefly met civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. when he gave a speech in 1962 at Chicago's Orchestra Hall. Carlson and Jones came into conflict in Park Ridge; Clinton would later see that as "an early indication of the cultural, political and religious fault lines that developed across America in the [next] forty years".