Meghan Markle's Empowered Speech Goes Viral

Meghan Markle has become the subject of a new viral video, as a speech delivered before her marriage to Prince Harry on gender equality and female empowerment has resurfaced on social media site, TikTok.

Women's advocacy has been a central part of Meghan's philanthropic work throughout her adult life, being a core element of her public outreach as a working member of the royal family, and again something she has continued to engage with since her split from the monarchy and move to the U.S. in 2020.

The duchess has received a number of awards from women's groups, including a Women of Vision award from the Ms. Foundation for Women in 2023.

One of Meghan's most important women's advocacy speeches to date took place in 2015, when as an actress prior to her marriage to Prince Harry, she was an advocate for women's political participation with the United Nation's Women group, also known as the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.

In this capacity, the future royal was invited to participate in a UN Women-hosted event in New York City, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women that took place in Beijing. The event was used to launch a campaign aiming to achieve worldwide gender equality by the year 2030.

Meghan attended the event with her mother, Doria Ragland, and gave a speech in a lineup that also included former first lady Hillary Clinton and then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Uploaded to TikTok by user, lady_frances1997, on January 17, footage from Meghan's speech has seen a revived interest on the social media site, gaining over 400,000 views in 48 hours.

During the speech, Meghan told an anecdote which she has repeated several times since, describing how at the age of 11, she wrote to home product conglomerate Procter & Gamble to complain about sexist language used in one of their ads for dishwashing soap.

"When I was just 11 years old, I unknowingly and somehow accidentally became a female advocate ," she said. "See I had been in school watching a TV show in elementary school and this commercial came on with the tag line for this dish washing liquid and the tag line said, 'Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.'

"Two boys from my class said, 'Yeah, that's where women belong, in the kitchen'...I went home and told my dad what had happened, and he encouraged me to write letters, so I did, to the most powerful people I could think of."

Referencing one of the high-profile attendees of the event, Meghan told the audience that one of the people she'd written to, in addition to the soap company, was the "first lady."

"So off I went, scribbling away to our first lady at the time, Hillary Clinton," she said, revealing that she had received a letter of "encouragement" in response from the White House and others.

The viral clip also shows footage of Meghan as a child discussing the incident for a kids TV channel.

"The kids news show, they sent a camera crew to my home to cover the story," Meghan said in her UN Women speech. "And it was roughly a month later when the soap manufacturer, Procter & Gamble, changed the commercial for their ivory clear dish washing liquid...It was at that moment that I realized the magnitude of my actions. At the age of 11, I had created my small level of impact by standing up for equality."

This moment in Meghan's early years is clearly one she marks as a milestone and takes pride in. She has referenced it on several occasions since the 2015 speech, including in her 2022 podcast series Archetypes and Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan.

The story has not been met with universal praise. In 2022, critics questioned the validity of the claims made by Meghan after biographer Tom Bower wrote in his book Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors that it had been omitted from a Vanity Fair profile in 2017 because the details could not be verified.

In 2021, Procter & Gamble partnered with Meghan through her Archewell Foundation to further joint missions to "build a more equitable and just future for women and girls."

At the time, a spokesperson for the company told Newsweek: "We were moved to hear that, even as a young girl, The duchess was motivated to speak out about gender equality.

"As one of the world's largest advertisers, we recognize the power of advertising to shape culture, spark dialogue and change perception.

"That's why we strive to use our voice in advertising as a force for good, raising awareness of, and sparking conversation around, topics including gender bias."

James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek's royal reporter, based in London. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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