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, in 1988, is already approaching 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 has displayed at any suggestion of encroachment on the royal role on her own part. She is obviously well aware of the resentment she might unleash.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 th
e 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 has entailed exactly that kind of screeching in making herself heard most disliked by men (and many women).
Mrs Thatcher has 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.
There is no obvious solution to this particular problem of the female leader’s voice except of course more women members of Parliament – after the 1987 general election, there were forty-one women to six hundred and nine men. But another lingering problem, the problem which will not go away (to judge from Geraldine Ferraro’s experience) – how resolute can a female leader be expected to show herself against a nation’s enemies? – was solved for Mrs Thatcher from an unexpected quarter: the Soviet Union, ironically enough the most likely candidate at the time for the title of Britain’s enemy.
In January 1976, just under a year after she had been elected leader of the Conservative Party, Mrs Thatcher made a major speech in London which described the Soviet Union as a serious threat, both military and political, to which threat it was vital that the West should respond with strength and confidence. It was the Soviet Union’s response, attacking her as the ‘Iron Lady’ in Red Star, the official journal of the Red Army, which presented Mrs Thatcher with what rapidly became, for good tactical reasons, her favourite sobriquet. It was immediately given wide prominence, not only in the Western Press, but by the victorious victim herself. ‘I have the reputation of being the Iron Lady’, she would say on US television at the time of the Falklands War. ‘I have great resolve.’ (A cartoon in the Daily Express of her visit to the United States on this occasion showed Mrs Thatcher as Boadicea, long sword raised, iron breastplates prominent, with President Reagan at her chariot wheels in a cowboy hat.)34
Even if Mrs Thatcher had been variously dubbed ‘Iron Maiden’ and ‘Iron Lady’ by Marjorie Proops in the London Daily Mirror as early as 1973, it was the Soviet Union’s adoption (or spontaneous invention) of the phrase which gave it exactly the endorsement which Mrs Thatcher needed to emerge as a Warrior Queen, at any rate in the estimation of Britain’s ‘enemies’. As Bruce Arnold wrote in a hostile work, Margaret Thatcher: A Study in Power, published in 1984 (that memorable line ‘the female of the species is more deadly than the male’ acts as the epigraph), Mrs Thatcher’s baptism as the Iron Lady ‘effectively created the political reputation on international affairs which, by their dismissal, her Labour opponents had denied her, up to that point’.35 ‘The Iron Lady of the Western World! Me? A Cold Warrior?’ she was able to riposte publicly. ‘Well, yes – if that is how they [the Russians] wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.’36
What propaganda had so felicitously – from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view – begun, war itself was to confirm. Certainly the fact that the Falklands campaign would be the crucible of Mrs Thatcher’s reputation as a leader was appreciated in advance. In the House of Commons in the opening debate following the Argentinian invasion, on 3 April 1982, Enoch Powell (no longer a member of the Conservative Party) actually referred to the phrase ‘Iron Lady’ in order to add: ‘In the next week or two this House, the nation and the Right Honourable Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.’ It is said that Mrs Thatcher nodded her head in agreement.37
Another observer of the political spectrum hostile to Mrs Thatcher, Anthony Barnett, author of Iron Britannia: Why Parliament Waged its Falklands War (the epigraph this time was merely the biblical name JUDITH in heavy black type) wrote cogently that Mrs Thatcher remained ‘a misfit’ until the 3 April debate ‘elevated her into the war-leader of a bipartisan consensus’. An important inside testimony, on the other hand, is that of Patrick Cosgrave, the author of three successive biographical studies of Mrs Thatcher, since he worked for her as her Special Adviser for four years. In 1985 Cosgrave wrote that not only did the period between 2 April and 14 June 1982 show the Prime Minister at her most typically daring and resolute, but ‘the war in the South Atlantic will undoubtedly be seen in the future, as it was at the time, as bearing witness to Margaret Thatcher as most truly herself’.38
As a result the British campaign in the South Atlantic to recover the Falkland Islands from the Argentine invader saw Mrs Thatcher’s personal popularity as a leader jump from 36 per cent approval in March 1982 to 59 per cent after the war – a staggering leap. There can be no starker illustration of the continuing potency of the image of the Warrior Queen in a nation’s consciousness. As for the armed forces themselves, and the men who lead them, they have been described as responding to her as a war-leader ‘in a way that hasn’t been known since the time of Elizabeth I, with a passion and loyalty that few male generals have ever inspired or commanded’. For the army at least Mrs Thatcher has begun to have her own mana as a goddess: an apparition transcending that of the Armed Figurehead, for example, holy or otherwise, because of its sheer personal strength. It was suggested (by Selina Hastings in the Sunday Telegraph) that in vi
ew of ‘the aphrodisiac pull of power itself … for the armed forces she is far and away the favourite object of sexual fantasy’.39
Equally, for those for whom power is not necessarily thrilling (Mrs Thatcher being the most powerful woman in the world), she sometimes seems like Kali, ‘the grim Indian goddess of destruction’, as she ruthlessly demolishes ‘old ideas, policies and personalities’, while at the same time exercising her other talents as ‘the great creative stateswoman, the Blessed Margaret’. This remarkable double-headed comparison to the goddess-destroyer on the one hand and the sainted female was that of the historian and political journalist Paul Johnson on the eve of the Conservative Party Conference in 1987. He warned discontented Tories: ‘Don’t get caught under the wheels of the juggernaut. Blessed Margaret the creative–radical is driving it, but Kali-Thatcher the Destroyer is at hand – if required.’40
Opinions vary about what use Mrs Thatcher has actually made of her own unavoidable femininity, consciously or unconsciously, and what difference the whole intricate topic has made to her premiership. Commentators of both sexes and all shades of political opinion have gazed at her with fascinated awe: some seeing in Mrs Thatcher that Medusa on the ‘snaky-headed Gorgon shield’ wielded by ‘wise Minerva’, which froze her foes to stone; others viewing her with more admiration as wise Minerva herself, whose own ‘rigid looks of chaste austerity and noble grace’, as Milton pointed out in Comus, were enough to dash ‘brute violence’ without need of any Gorgon shield. But there has been remarkable unanimity among commentators and biographers that it has made some difference. Hugo Young and Anne Sloman, for example, in The Thatcher Phenomenon of 1986, agreed that her style of leadership turns heavily on her being a woman – without being sure how.41
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