The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  For Mrs Bandaraneike, Rani-like, was the widow of the veteran Sri Lankan statesman Solomon W. R. D. Bandaraneike, eighteen years her senior, who had acted as premier for three and a half years before he was assassinated in 1959 by a Buddhist monk. An inconclusive political election the following March was followed by an invitation to Mrs Bandaraneike to head the government: ‘she was the symbol, the figurehead that was necessary; the spark to ignite the flame’, in the words of her biographer.17 (There is an obvious modern comparison to be made with Mrs Corazon Aquino, grieving widow of an assassinated opposition Filipino leader, whose symbolic presence heading a political party, at a time when her remarkable personal qualities were largely unknown, provided the spark to sweep away President Marcos in 1986.)

  As for Indira Gandhi, coming from a Kashmiri brahmin family, the only child of Pandit Nehru, she could in a sense be said to have been born to rule: a princess who inherited from her parent, as Matilda of Tuscany inherited from her father Boniface II, or Tamara of Georgia from Giorgi III. Prior to her election, Indira Gandhi, the shy child of a brilliant father, absent much of her childhood in prison, and of an uneducated mother of lower social standing, had indeed held only one political position: she had been President of the Congress Party in 1959, but resigned after less than a year in favour of her maternal duties. Indira Gandhi actually became Prime Minister when Lal Bahadour Shastri died suddenly in office of a heart attack. In this uneasy situation, it was a symbol of that same continuity which Queen Elizabeth I constantly sought to establish with references to her sire ‘Great Harry’, that the crowds in 1966 shouted not only ‘Indira ki jai!’ (Long live Indira!) but also ‘Jawa-harlal ki jai!’ (Long live Nehru!).18

  Mrs Gandhi, the beneficiary of the Appendage Syndrome, quickly became part of another familiar syndrome – that of the Better-Man: in her first year of office, for example, she was described as ‘the only man in the cabinet of old women’. She also received much of the same ‘heroic’ treatment concerning her youth from her admiring biographers, as well as herself stressing such early heroic self-identifications in what was surely a calculated manner. An early girlhood identification with Joan of Arc for example is frequently mentioned even by her family, and confirmed by Mrs Gandhi herself in a letter to her lifelong friend Dorothy Norman: she was ‘a great heroine of mine … one of the first people I read about with enthusiasm’.19

  In other interviews, as with the celebrated Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Mrs Gandhi underlined a tomboy past: she revealed that her very doll play had been militarily oriented: ‘I had many dolls. And I played with them, not necessarily seeing them as babies to feed. In fact I used them as men and women to perform insurrections, battles and so on.’ She told a would-be biographer that sometimes her dolls were arranged to perform a struggle between the Satyagrahis and the police, with the bridegroom doll playing the Satyagrahi leader, while the little Indira shouted slogans such as ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ Mrs Gandhi’s ‘male’ aggressive role was by her own account encouraged by her mother, who had resented the constrictions on her own life, as well as by her father: ‘I was brought up as a boy when I was small. I climbed trees, I ran and I never had any feeling of inferiority or weakness.’20

  It was politically adroit of Mrs Gandhi, faced with the problem of being a woman premier in a country which was 83 per cent Hindu, to hint at the honorary male in such statements about herself. Officially however she took a slightly different stance: ‘As Prime Minister, I am not a woman. I am a human being.’ (Although her confidence to Dorothy Norman – ‘I am in no sense a feminist but I believe in women being able to do everything’ – may have come nearer to representing her real feelings on this complicated subject.) Again she stated: ‘I do not regard myself as a woman but as a person with a job to do.’ Golda Meir’s version of this, incidentally, when asked how it felt to be a female Foreign Minister, was to crack back, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been a male Foreign Minister.’ A short biography of Mrs Gandhi ‘for young boys and girls’ by R. Sundara Raju, published in New Delhi in 1980, begins with the prophecy of a dying old man, Sarojini Naidu, at her birth that she would be the ‘Nightingale (the new soul) of India’. Later Indira Gandhi declared that ‘Being a woman has neither helped nor hindered me. During the struggle for independence, nobody was concerned about being beaten up or shot at or anything. Nobody said: “This is a woman and we won’t shoot.” It would be unfair if, later on, this question were to crop up.’21

  Yet since inevitably it did crop up and would always do so, Mrs Gandhi also employed that other expedient of the Warrior Queen by which she made a virtue of necessity with wonderful dexterity. That is to say, she assumed the role, even the title, of ‘The Mother’, so deeply embedded in the Hindu consciousness, with the aura of those goddesses bright and dark, Durga and Kali, rulers of fertility and destruction, hovering about her. History, or folk memories of history as described in Chapter Sixteen with regard to the Rani of Jhansi, could be said to be on her side, to make of her in the minds of the less educated the last in a long line of queens and empresses, rather than the first woman Prime Minister. Moreover in 1966 Mrs Gandhi possessed to the simple mind the hopeful imperial quality of being the mother of sons – Rajiv Gandhi, later Prime Minister of India in his turn after his mother’s assassination in 1986, was twenty-two at the time. One remembers Isabella of Spain, bolstered up in authority by the birth of an heir during the civil war.

  It was however war – the successful Indian war against Pakistan of 1971 – which gave Mrs Gandhi her ultimate prestige and also her ultimate kind of deification, as Durga on the one hand, an imposing leader of her country on the other. Afterwards, as Dom Moraes wrote, ‘She had achieved the status of a myth. She was Joan [of Arc] without the inconvenience of prison, fire and cross.’22 It was not a war of Mrs Gandhi’s seeking (in fact it can be argued that the female premiers of the twentieth century, like the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century queens regnant, have not been of their nature belligerent – merely determined to do their belligerent best in war when it comes – that is to say, to be as good as men if not better). Yet following the first Pakistani air raids against India in December 1971, no one could ever again ask, in India at least: how will this woman react in a crisis? Will she be too timid, or if not too timid, too tender?

  Golda Meir, born in 1898, and thus nearly twenty years older than Indira Gandhi, became Prime Minister of Israel in 1969, having served as Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1956 to 1965. She had previously been the first Israeli Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Minister of Labour and would also serve as Secretary-General of the Labour Party. Early in her career Golda Meir had also shown herself capable of oratory on the (imagined) Boadicean scale. On 21 January 1948 she spoke eloquently to the Council of Jewish Federations in Chicago, appealing for funds without which the future state could not survive. It was a speech subsequently praised by the first premier of Israel, David Ben-Gurion: ‘Some day when history will be written, it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible.’23 To British ears, at least, it has a Churchillian ring: ‘I am not exaggerating when I say that the Yishiv in Palestine will fight in the Negev and will fight in Galilee and will fight on the outskirts of Jerusalem till the very end. You cannot decide whether we should fight or not. We will … You can only decide one thing: whether we shall be victorious in this fight or whether the Mufti will be victorious. That decision American Jews can make. It has to be made quickly within hours, within days …’ Golda Meir returned to Palestine with promises of fifty million dollars.

  As with Mrs Bandaraneike, the choice of Mrs Meir was intended to be a healing one, in view of the rival claims of Moshe Dayan and Yigel Allon; and once again Mrs Meir’s elevation followed an unexpected death, that of the premier Levi Eshkol. Otherwise, there was one very important difference: here at last was a female leader who owed nothing to the Appendage Syndrome, one who was neither the daughter or widow of a famous man, nor the
regent-mother for some form of infant princeling. To secure her place without the benefit of any specific male connection was in itself a remarkable achievement on the part of Golda Meir; and one far rarer in the history of women than is generally supposed. One can appreciate the judgement of Mrs Meir’s political adviser Simcha Dinitz, later Director-General of the Prime Minister’s Office (and Ambassador to Washington 1973 to 1978), that she had ‘the best qualities of a woman – intuition, insight, sensitivity, compassion – plus the best qualities of a man – strength, determination, practicality, purposefulness’.24

  Nevertheless for all the self-made quality of her position, the kind of questions – sometimes innocent, sometimes not – which Mrs Meir faced concerning the implications of her reaching high office have as ever a familiar ring. In My Life, published in 1975, Golda Meir described a visit to the National Press Club in Washington when she was Foreign Minister: ‘there were only two queries that were at all new’. The first concerned Israel’s intention – or otherwise – to employ nuclear weapons if its survival was in jeopardy. The second went as follows: ‘Mrs Meir, your grandson Gideon says you make the best gefilte fish in the world. Would you reveal your recipe to us?’ This was naïve behaviour at worst, and it made Mrs Meir laugh at the time. On the other hand the Jordanian newspaper which mocked Mrs Meir in 1969 for asking for negotiations before war, as ‘a grandmother, telling bedtime stories to her grandchildren’ (she was indeed a grandmother at this point, not surprisingly for a woman in her early seventies), was not naïve but calculating.25 Once again, it is impossible to envisage a male leader being subject to this particular diatribe.

  And yet the ambiguity at the centre of the whole subject of the Warrior Queen remains. Mrs Meir also derived strength, surely, from her ‘grandmotherly’ image, not least among her own strongly matriarchal people. It was after all perfectly possible that the president of the Washington Press Club genuinely wanted that recipe, and admired Mrs Meir for her alleged skill: months later in Los Angeles, when she answered a question on television about her chicken soup, 40,000 people wrote in for the recipe! That juxtaposition of Israel’s survival with a recipe could have been evinced only by the sight of a woman minister. And there was indeed something matriarchal – grandmotherly even – about the way she ran her government. To quote Chaim Herzog (later President of Israel), another who knew her well and worked under her, Golda Meir had a particular style of government in which her personality was the deciding factor: and that personality was very much that of ‘the overbearing mother who ruled the roost with her iron hand’.26

  This was not always, in his opinion, to the benefit of her government. With little idea of orderly administration, she preferred to work closely with cronies in an ad hoc framework that soon came to be known as her ‘kitchen’ – so named for good reason, since Golda Meir was wont to make coffee and tea there for her associates throughout the long night hours (as well as making coffee at 4 a.m. for her guards). At the same time one might most easily rebut the Jordanian sneer by observing that in the Arab–Israeli War of 1973 – the War of Atonement – the ‘grandmother’ acquitted herself both gallantly and expertly. To quote Chaim Herzog again on her conduct during the war: ‘on many occasions she [Golda Meir], a woman who had reached seventy-five, found herself thrust into a position where she had to decide between differing military options proposed by professionals. She decided, and invariably decided well, drawing on a large measure of common sense which had stood her in good stead.’27 Her stubborn decisiveness proved a national asset during the war, even if her doctrinaire approach to problems and to the operation of government contributed to the failings of that government before it.

  And then there was that special rapport which Golda Meir had with the ordinary soldiers of Israel, something bringing her close to Isabella of Spain or Tamara of Georgia. When Golda Meir wept at the Wailing Wall on the fifth day of the Six Day War for the sacrifices of Israel’s youth, the soldiers watched her and wept too.28 There is however one twentieth-century female political leader who has had to be extremely cautious at any overt suggestion of queenship – warrior or otherwise. That is not to say that the subject in all its emotive strength does not arise. Margaret Thatcher, then aged fifty-three, became Prime Minister of Great Britain in May 1979, the first woman to occupy the position, as five years earlier she had been the first woman to lead any British political party. By this date, Queen Elizabeth II, a mere six months younger than the new Prime Minister, had already been on the throne for over twenty-seven years.

  ‘This nation loves a monarch’, a committee of the House of Commons had advised Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell in 1657, suggesting that he should regularize his position by accepting a crown himself. In the words of Secretary Thurloe advocating the same course: ‘it’s the office which is known to the laws and this people. They know their duty to a King and his to them.’29 Certainly the British love their monarchy, and certainly they love their present monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, who regularly tops polls as the most admired British woman. They also know their duty to her: just as she knows hers to them, the Queen’s conspicuous sense of duty being among the qualities which have endeared her to her subjects in the course of a reign whose span, at the celebration of her golden jubilee in 2002, surpassed by several years that of her illustrious predecessor, the first Elizabeth. It is Queen Elizabeth II who enacts the role of the Holy (Armed) Figurehead to her people in her frequent ceremonial appearances at military parades, naval reviews and so forth; of which her presence for many years in uniform and on horseback at the Trooping of the Colour is probably the best-known.

  Under the circumstances one can understand the alarm, both public and private, which Mrs Thatcher displayed at any suggestion of encroachment on the royal role on her own part. She was obviously well aware of the resentment she might have unleashed.30 ‘You don’t do that to me, my dear, I’m only in politics’, she observed hastily to an unwary Spanish tourist who curtseyed to her, when the Prime Minister was glimpsed on a shopping tour in 1987.31

  But, once again, the issue is not so simple. The existence of queens regnant in British history, and the tradition of national prosperity under two of them, the long-reigning Elizabeth I and Victoria, means that every British schoolchild – the one who knows about the knives on the wheels of Boadicea’s chariot – also knows that it is not out of the question for a woman to rule Britain, much as Mrs Gandhi benefited from Hindu traditions of powerful women in religion, literature and history, despite the theoretically inferior position of women in Hindu society.

  In January 1988, when Mrs Thatcher became the longest-serving Prime Minister in twentieth-century Britain, there was a plethora of commentaries and comparisons: but after lip-service had been paid to Prime Minister Asquith – whose record she had just beaten – the main comparisons were made unashamedly to British reigning queens. As Robert Harris wrote rather despairingly in the Observer: ‘It is not sexist to use a regal analogy to describe her impact on the country. It is not particularly facetious. It is simply the nearest thing we have to an historical parallel.’ Lord Hailsham, Lord Chancellor in Mrs Thatcher’s government for eight years, openly described his premier as being in the same category as Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, Queen Anne and Queen Victoria, favouring Elizabeth I especially ‘in her handling of men’.32

  So Mrs Thatcher, without visibly seeking it – rather to the contrary – did benefit from that tradition expressed long ago by Tacitus concerning the Britons and Boadicea: ‘they did not discriminate against women in matters of command’. There is a kind of justice in this. For Mrs Thatcher also had to contend with many of those problems special to the Warrior Queen – or Queen Regnant – which have been mentioned throughout this book.

  The female voice of command, which grates on the male ear for reasons which are as much psychological as physiological, is one of these problems, from Boadicea’s allegedly ‘harsh’ voice onwards. The disadvantage to Mrs Thatcher of her female lightly timbred voice
in a massively male-dominated House of Commons – which means of course deep-male-voice-dominated – is not one to be dismissed lightly, since it entailed exactly that kind of screeching in making herself heard most disliked by men (and many women).

  Mrs Thatcher acknowledged this herself: ‘Yes, I do have to shout to make myself heard,’ she admitted in an interview in 1986, ‘and sometimes I say, “I am not going to shout any more like I did last time, I will just stand there until they are quiet”.’ In the same year the Labour Shadow Minister Gerald Kaufman drew attention to what he called Mrs Thatcher’s ‘fishwife’ act in the House of Commons: ‘screaming away in a shrill, strident voice, with her face absolutely contorted’. The Liberal leader David Steel made the same point – and independently used the same epithet: ‘I don’t personally like her House of Commons style. I don’t think that the “fishwife” approach … is at all effective or impressive.’ It was however in vain that Kaufman hoped his own comment was made ‘in an unsexist way’: for the point is indeed a sexist one, whether intended as such or not, in that no man could possibly be subject to the same criticism. (One cannot help recalling Leonardi Bruno’s quattrocento advice to Battista Malatesta about a woman who ‘increases the volume of her speech with greater forcefulness’: she will appear ‘threateningly insane and requiring restraint’.)33 A man bellowing to make himself heard in the House of Commons, as many men do, does not sound either to his own side or to his opponents like a ‘fishwife’ – that traditional English misogynist term of abuse going back to the fourteenth century – let alone as though requiring restraint.