Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
What does it take for a woman to reach the pinnacle of political power? Certainly, she needs strength, stamina and the ability to withstand criticism.
But there's more, according to political scientist and psychoanalyst Blema S. Steinberg. In Women in Power, she deconstructs the personalities of three female political leaders — Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher — and shows that they shared a marked tendency to dominate and control others.
Indeed, Steinberg, a McGill University professor emerita, notes that in psychological leadership profiles, U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and even embattled Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe scored much lower on the domineering-and-controlling scale than her book's subjects.
Why? Perhaps the men have a sense of entitlement that comes from being men in a man's world. Or maybe it's that women who make it to the top need to have strong, assertive, abrasive personalities.
Whatever the case, the book — part biography and part analysis — makes fine, if occasionally dense, reading.
Steinberg puts these women on the proverbial psychoanalyst's couch, with results that may not surprise but are fascinating nonetheless. It's also timely, given Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's run to become the Democrats' presidential nominee. One suspects that Clinton, who really believes she knows best and refuses to quit, would have been another suitable subject for Steinberg.
The author explains that she decided to write the book to help fill gaps in the literature about female political leaders and about how personality can shape leadership styles. She says she chose her subjects because they had extraordinary careers, often beset by political upheaval and war, and because they all had to navigate within the confines of a parliamentary government, which can be more volatile, complex and dynamic than one built around a presidency.
Much of the biographical information has been culled from other sources, but it is framed within the context of what made these women both successful and their own worst enemies.
Steinberg writes of Gandhi's grandiose fantasy of becoming a modern-day Joan of Arc; of the contrast between Meir's public persona as a plain, dogmatic politician and her busy sex life; and of Thatcher as a middle-class daddy's girl who perpetuated her father's conservative ideas about frugality, personal responsibility and how to run a country.
All three women had to fight male opposition and sexism throughout their lives, some of it from within their own parties. Meir, for example, was excluded from Israel's first multi-party provisional government in 1948 after David Ben-Gurion marginalized her as a candidate who was, in effect, a spokesperson for women.
Steinberg notes that none of her subjects had older brothers who might have drawn away the attention they received from their elders. Thus, they learned early on what they were capable of and stuck to their visions, convinced to the end that they were right.
No comments yet.