Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, born on October 26, 1947 in Illinois, is the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving in the administration of President Barack Obama. She was born to Hugh E. Rodham, who managed a successful small business in drapery making, and Dorothy Howell Rodham, a full-time homemaker. Both of them were Republicans.

When she was 14 years old, inspired by Alan Shepard, the first American to journey into space, Hillary wrote to NASA, asking how she could become an astronaut. She got a curt reply: Girls are not being recruited by the nation's space program. Later, she recalled, "It had never crossed my mind up until that point that there might be doors closed to me simply because I was a girl".

In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she majored in political science. During her freshman year, she became head of the local chapter of the Young Republicans. There she slowly turned leftward in politics, and became a supporter of the anti-war presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy. She graduated in 1969 and wrote her senior thesis on poverty and community development. As the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley College, she received a standing ovation, appeared in Life magazine and attracted national attention after shocking the audience by criticizing the first speaker, Senator Edward W. Brooke.

While at Yale, Hillary met and fell in love with her lifelong political spouse Bill Clinton. She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973, having stayed on an extra year to be with Clinton. She began a year of postgraduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center. Clinton first proposed marriage to her but she declined.