POLITICS: For Women, Leaning Doesn’t Make For Leading
By Miren Gutierrez**
ROME, Jan 9 (IPS) – “A woman who enters politics changes; a thousand women who enter politics change politics,” Chilean President Michelle Bachelet told the Spanish television channel TVE in a recent interview.It is the former that seems to ring more true. Most powerful women, particularly though not only in developing countries, are or have been members of elite families: widows, daughters, wives of powerful men, in societies where women do not have equal access to most things.
The list of female rulers who have derived their leadership from men is a long and telling one.
Mireya Moscoso (president of Panama from 1999-2004) was widow of three times former president Arnulfo Arias (who was deposed each time by the military). Before her, Isabel Martínez de Perón was president of Argentina from 1974-1976, following the death of her husband, President Juan Domingo Perón. Argentina has just elected its second woman president: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who succeeded her husband Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) in December.
The success — or succession — of women began in Asia in recent times with Sühbaataryn Yanjmaa, widow of Mongolian hero Sühbaatar. She was the equivalent of head of state from Sept. 23, 1953 to Jul. 7, 1954. “If we consider such a post as having a real ruling status, she would have been (excepting queens) the absolute first woman political ruler in contemporary history,” says Zárate’s Political Collections (ZPC), a record of worldwide leadership.
Corazon Aquino was president of the Philippines from 1986 to 1992, after her husband Benigno Aquino — the leader of the opposition against dictator Ferdinand Marcos — was assassinated. Chandrika Kumaratunga, Sri Lankan president from 1994-2005, followed in the footsteps of her mother Sirimavo Bandaranaike, three times prime minister, a rare instance of a woman taking leadership after another female family member.
Benazir Bhutto, assassinated Dec. 27, was Pakistani prime minister from 1988-1990 and again from 1993-1996. She was the daughter of former premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Sukarno (Indonesia’s first post-colonial president 1945-1967), led the world’s largest Muslim country from 2001-2004, and is expected to seek the post again in 2009. In Bangladesh, arch-enemies Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia have both served as prime ministers and as heads of the two largest political parties. Hasina’s late father and Zia’s late husband ran the country at different times.
“These women share dynastic origins and ‘inherited’ political leadership,” says the German government-funded research report ‘Dynasties and Female Leadership in Asia’.
