x9781728411798-9

A Ukrainian immigrant living in the US, Zionist Golda Meir was drawn to take part in the creation of Israel, the Jewish state. In 1921 she and her first husband immigrated to the area of the Middle East known as Palestine, and she became a major political force there, even signing the Israeli Declaration of Independence that established the state as an independent country. Meir served on the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and was the bearer of the country’s first issued passport for her work as the Moscow ambassador. In 1969 the Israeli prime minister died in office and Meir was elected to replace him on a temporary basis. She served in the position for five years. Meir held the country together during a turbulent time but was criticized for her administration’s treatment of the Palestinians.

This Russian Jewish native of New York City was a civil rights lawyer before she ran for US Congress at the age of fifty. Abzug’s winning campaign motto was, “This woman’s place is in the House . . . the House of Representatives.” She proposed a bill to end the Vietnam War (1957–1975) on her first day on the job in 1973. She sponsored the Equality Act, which would have been the country’s first gay rights bill if it had passed. She also coauthored Title IX, a groundbreaking legislation that banned gender discrimination in schools. Abzug was known as Battling Bella, and she always wore a hat—because, according to her, it was the only way to get her male colleagues to treat her as a professional.

Britain’s famed Iron Lady was a lifelong conservative who grew up above her family’s grocery market and started her professional life as a chemist. She married rich, yet successfully portrayed herself as a penny-pinching housewife and became Britain’s prime minister in 1979. Thatcher was a powerful advocate for free markets and became infamous for disassembling social welfare programs—she once cut free milk for schoolkids from the education budget. Though her legacy’s effectiveness remains up for debate, she’s generally regarded as one of Britain’s most self-confident recent leaders.

Ann Richards was a wildly charismatic, hard-drinking Texas feminist teacher. She was recruited to run for county commissioner and then won her bid for state treasurer in 1982, becoming the first woman elected to statewide office in fifty years. Her sparkling conversational skills made her a talented politician, one particularly given to memorable one-liners, as when she defended her infamous whorl of snow-white locks: “I get a lot of cracks about my hair, mostly from men who don’t have any.” After overcoming her alcohol addiction, she was selected to one term as governor in 1991. There, she advocated for a progressive “New Texas,” racially integrating the Texas Rangers law enforcement agency and pushing for legislation that prioritized the rights of women, LGBTQ people, and people of color—whose political careers she tended to promote whenever possible.

This pastor’s daughter from Houston’s Fifth Ward had a deep voice some thought of as God-like. More importantly, she broke ground for Black women in US politics with her unprecedented rise to Congress. She was not a radical so much as a political master who learned the system inside and out, charming and outmaneuvering political adversaries. At the end of her first Texas state senate session in 1967, the thirty other members—all of them white men, mind you—gave her a standing ovation. She was thirty-six years old when, in 1973, she became the first southern Black woman elected to US Congress. Jordan did important work expanding the Voting Rights Act, and her reasoned denouncement of President Richard Nixon’s crimes in the Watergate scandal remains one of her most famous speeches.

Bhutto served as Pakistan’s prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and then again from 1993 to 1996. Leadership ran in the family—her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was president and then prime minister in the 1970s. The hypereducated politician (she held degrees from both Harvard and Oxford) was the first Muslim woman to lead an Islamic country, and she pushed hard for privatization and industrial development. Her administrations were plagued by corruption charges, and she was assassinated in 2007, but she was also the first modern head of state to have a child while in office. She worried about political opponents gunning to remove her from office, so she hid the pregnancy from everyone and was back on the job the day after giving birth.