Woman Prime Minister Research Articles

Benazir Bhutto, Negotiating Politics amidst Misogyny: A Study of Daughter of the East

The present research paper analyzes the struggles of Benazir Bhutto as detailed in her autobiography, Daughter of the East (1987), highlighting her confrontations with political challenges, a dictatorial regime, and numerous hardships in her quest to restore and strengthen democracy in Pakistan. Bhutto navigated adverse circumstances, including male chauvinistic politics, orthodox religious ulamas, entrenched military dictatorship, and bureaucratic elitism. The paper delves into her political challenges, patriarchal social obligations, and Islamic ideological commitments, which she managed as the first woman Prime Minister of Pakistan during her tenures from 1988-1990 and 1993-1996. This era is critical to understanding her efforts to extract Pakistan from military dictatorship's grip, vividly portrayed in her autobiography Her eloquent narrative not only chronicles her ascent as the first female Prime Minister of a Muslim-majority country but also encapsulates the relentless adversities she faced as a woman in a deeply patriarchal society. Bhutto's poignant reflections on her political odyssey inspired me to delve deeper into her life, illuminating her as a warrior in real sense and a paragon of female fortitude amidst a turbulent political landscape.

Political Memoir, Celebrity, and the Reclamation of Feminism: Gendered Self-representation in Julia Gillard’s My Story and Hillary Clinton’s What Happened

Abstract Offering a close textual analysis of My Story (2014), the memoir of Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and What Happened (2017), by the 2016 US Democratic Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, this article explores their attempts—as is becoming common for celebrities—to use the memoir form to attempt to regain some control over their public personas and their feminisms. Focusing on the kind of feminist selves they seek to bring into being through these memoirs, this article examines the rhetorical strategies they each deploy to disrupt the dominant gendered narratives that came to circulate during their time in power and beyond.

From Opposition Leader to Prime Minister: Giorgia Meloni and Women’s Issues in the Italian Radical Right

Under the motto “God, homeland, and family”—but also by stressing one further important marker of social identity, i.e., gender—Italian radical right party leader Giorgia Meloni multiplied her party seats in parliament from 2013 onwards. After the 2022 elections, she became the first woman prime minister in Italy. Starting from an overview of the figure of Giorgia Meloni as a radical right woman leader, we explore her and her party’s position on women-related issues and their relevance while exploring, in opposition, two different contexts: representative institutions and social media. To do that, we draw on parliamentary data—bills and parliamentary questions introduced in parliament by Fratelli d’<em>Italia</em>—and on Meloni’s public discourse—examined in an analysis of all the tweets posted by her official Twitter account, between 2013 and 2021. As expected, a low saliency of women’s issues appears in all the types of data examined, although some of them are more exposed to the shift in attention caused by the rise of related trend topics. Both Meloni and her party are strong supporters of the “natural family” and make use of women’s issues in claiming femonationalist arguments, especially on social media. However, Meloni and her party cannot be considered as fully “neo-traditional,” as are other similar parties in Europe, but rather as a combination of “neo-traditional” and “modern-traditional.”

Édith Cresson is the First Woman Prime Minister in the History of France

The paper is dedicated to the first woman Prime Minister Édith Cresson in the history of France. She entered the path of a political career, joining the socialist movement in the 60s. Cresson already held key posts in the socialist party founded by François Mitterrand ten years later, and after he became the president of the country, she repeatedly became the Minister. Cresson was appointed head of government in 1991 and held this position for about a year. Her activities as Prime Minister were not successful. Nevertheless, she went down in history, because for the first time she became Prime Minister of France. After leaving the second person of the state, Cresson worked for some time in the European Commission, and since the 2000s, gradually moved away from politics.

The Iron Lady’s Capitalist Christianity: Margaret Thatcher’s Rhetorical Theology

Margaret Thatcher made history in 1979 when she became the first woman prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom. Unlike many of her predecessors, Thatcher regularly drew on her religious faith in her rhetoric and her approach to shaping policy. This article argues that Margaret Thatcher’s public speeches, memoirs, and official biographies of her life, when taken together, offer a coherent statement of her understanding of Christianity that we call a rhetorical theology. Thatcher’s rhetorical theology offers a justification for her fiercely individualistic public policies from within her articulated religious perspective. We analyze fragments of discourse by and about Thatcher that we argue constitute her rhetorical theology: an understanding of Christianity that offers a muted British version of the prosperity gospel to justify conservative economic and social policies.

It’s a man’s world at the top: gendered media representations of Julia Gillard and Helen Clark

ABSTRACT Australia’s first woman prime minister, Julia Gillard, experienced widespread sexism and misogyny in the media coverage of her ascension. Only a decade previously New Zealand’s first elected woman prime minister, Helen Clark, rose to the top job with comparably little gendered coverage. This article compares how the print media portrayed Gillard and Clark in the first three weeks of their respective prime ministerial terms to understand why, despite both being leaders from centre-left Labor/Labour parties, there was such a significant difference in their media treatment. Three newspapers from each country were analysed using a feminist content analysis, in addition to interviews conducted with Gillard and Clark, to understand why this was the case. This study establishes that there were two key reasons: the political context in which both leaders ascended and the stark differences in the print media landscapes, particularly the conservatism of the Australian press.

İngiliz Feminist Oyunlarındaki Thatcher’cı Kadınların Sosyal Feminist Açısından Okunması

This study focuses on the representation of women in British feminist drama that challenges gender roles and gets stuck in having obsessive power as an outcome of the policy of the first British woman Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The study discusses excessively ambitious women who question patriarchal order and subvert gender roles to get power and finally left alone on the top like Thatcher. Marlene in Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls, Marion in Churchill’s play Owners, Mary Traverse in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play The Grace of Mary Traverse are discussed throughly. Marlene, Marion, and Mary are the representatives of the destructive effects of the ambition for power that characterize Thatcher’s Britain. Socialist/materialist feminism is applied to the plays both to criticize selfish Thatcherite powerful women figures and to express the lack of collaboration among women to improve their position.

Leopard in kitten heels: The politics of Theresa May’s sartorial choices

This article discusses the clothing choices of Theresa May as a female Member of Parliament (MP) and as the second woman prime minister of Great Britain. A Conservative MP since 1997 with a conservative background growing up a Vicar’s daughter and grammar school education, Mrs May’s sartorial choices have evolved to conform with an understanding of female MP’s as proxy men and to reflect British national dress as defined by tradition. However, within this conservative persona, a discordant note is struck by her choice of shoes. Not always neutral, in this article, her choice of fabric is examined as a form of ‘everyday resistance’. Compromised as these choices are, her choice of leopard print kitten heels is suggested as a form of subaltern resistance.

A gendered media analysis of the prime ministerial ascension of Gillard and Turnbull: he’s ‘taken back the reins’ and she’s ‘a backstabbing’ murderer

ABSTRACTIn contemporary Australian politics, challenges to the Prime Ministerial role have become more common. Australia saw five Prime Ministers from 2010 to 2015 including Australia’s first ever woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. A stark contrast is evident in media portrayals of Gillard and her male counterparts, apparent most recently in the response to Malcolm Turnbull’s ascension to the Prime Ministership. A range of evidence has been produced, in disciplines including political science and media studies, suggesting the existence of systemic gender bias in the mainstream media in English-speaking democracies. This article is the first to compare the media portrayals of Gillard and Turnbull’s respective ascensions to leadership, which it does drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and using a content and discourse analysis. It contributes further evidence of gender bias in the coverage of political leaders.

Political battlefield: aggressive metaphors, gender, and power in news coverage of Canadian party leadership contests

ABSTRACTOur study analyzed aggressive figures of speech used by the Globe and Mail to describe the personas, performances, and prospects of women and men leadership candidates for the (Progressive) Conservative Party of Canada in 1976, 1993, and 2004. We codified four distinct forms of power communicated by the aggressive metaphors—power over, power to, power with, and power as—to investigate what these battleground metaphors communicate about gender and political power. Our content analysis and discourse analysis of the phrases applied to each of the candidates revealed gendered assumptions about political leadership. All three women candidates in our study—Flora MacDonald (1976), Kim Campbell (1993), and Belinda Stronach (2004)—were discussed as formidable foes, capable of using considerable force in their efforts to win. Indeed, Campbell became Canada’s first and only woman prime minister. Yet, much of the aggressive mediation confirms the gendered mediation thesis that aggressive metaphors exclude women and reconstitute politics as masculine. Many of the combative phrases cast doubt on a woman candidate’s ability to successfully compete on the political battlefield.

The mother’s picong: A discursive approach to gender, identity and political leadership in Trinidad and Tobago

The Caribbean twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago entered a new era on 24 May 2010 by electing its first woman Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar. Breaking out of the country’s rigid bipolar political mold, the East Indian Persad-Bissessar won a landslide victory as the leader of the People’s Partnership, a new coalition party that comprised both East Indian and African political forces and movements. Adopting a Discourse-Historical Approach, this study sets to analyze how Persad-Bissessar discursively constructed her claim to leadership in the election speeches of the 2010 We Will Rise Campaign. Both the processes of bonding with her electorate and demontage of her opponent Patrick Manning are achieved by Persad-Bissessar with careful linguistic choices, encompassing the use of the ritual picong satire and strategic switching to Trinidadian English Creole. This article investigates complexities, struggles and contradictions of the Trinbagonian political scene by integrating a detailed analysis of political discourse and the investigation of the social and political environment within which discourse as social practice is embedded.

Julia Gillard and the Gender Wars

The Australian news media used the metaphor of the gender war(s) to describe Julia Gillard's political strategies and speech acts in the final nine months of her term as that nation's first woman prime minister. In particular, the metaphor was mobilized in response to Gillard's October 9, 2012, parliamentary speech on sexism and misogyny. Based on a critical discourse analysis of the gender wars allegory as it was applied to Gillard by three Australian newspapers, my article analyzes the meanings revealed by metaphoric constructions of the former prime minister's speeches as unusual and unjust forms of political warfare. I argue that the trope of the gender wars cast Gillard's political tactics as a violation of deeply held cultural norms about appropriate behavior on the so-called political battlefield, and it worked both to discipline Gillard for raising issues of sexism and gender inequality in politics and to bracket gendered power relations out of everyday understandings of political competition.

Margaret Thatcher: power and personality

As Britain's first woman Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher brought about the biggest social and political revolution in the nation's post-war history. She achieved this largely by the driving force of her personality - a subject of endless speculation among both her friends and her foes. Jonathan Aitken has an insider's view of Margaret Thatcher's story. He is well qualified to explore her strong and sometimes difficult personality during half a century of political dramas. From first meeting her when she was a junior shadow minister in the mid 1960s, during her time as leader of the Opposition when he was a close family friend, and as a Member of Parliament throughout her years in power, Aitken had a ring side seat at many private and public spectacles in the Margaret Thatcher saga. From his unique vantage point, Aitken brings new light to many crucial episodes of Thatcherism. They include her ousting of Ted Heath, her battles with her Cabinet, the Falklands War, the Miners' Strike, her relationships with world leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and the build up to the Shakespearian coup inside the Conservative Party which brought about her downfall. Drawing on his own diaries, and a wealth of extensive research including some ninety interviews which range from international statesmen like Mikhail Gorbachev, Henry Kissinger and Lord Carrington to many of her No.10 private secretaries and personal friends, Jonathan Aitken's Margaret Thatcher - Power and Personality breaks new ground as a fresh and fascinating portrait of the most influential political leader of post-war Britain.

What Was Margaret Thatcher's Legacy for Women?

This article considers the legacy for women of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), Britain's first and to date only woman prime minister. It is suggested that although Thatcher had to struggle against many of the sexist prejudices of her day to achieve her political ambitions, she was no feminist. The hard ladder up which she had climbed was drawn up and not extended to other women. Yet for some women, such as the Spice Girls, she was the pioneer of their ideology of girl power. Overall, it is concluded that Thatcher was a polarising figure whose legacy is one of much divisiveness, in which the divisions between women is only one of many strands.

Misogyny and misrepresentation

Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was sworn into office in 2010. In 2012 she was driven to make a powerful speech on misogyny, which reverberated around the world. This research note explores the circumstances prompting the Prime Minister’s speech and argues that the arrival of a woman Prime Minister helped bring into the open the gendered nature of politics. At a more formal level, sexist commentary focused on issues such as the Prime Minister’s decision to be ‘deliberately barren’. On talkback radio and the internet, sexual vilification took on more sexualized and violent forms. Increased awareness of the hostility being expressed about women in public life led to a feminist counter-campaign in 2012 using social media.In addition to the main argument, data is presented about the representation of women in Australian politics and the way that this has recently declined. It shows that electoral victories by parties that do not use gender electoral quotas have been largely responsible; Australia slipped from 15th to 45th place in the Inter-Parliamentary Union ranking for representation of women in national parliaments between 1999 and February 2013. The renewed attention to gender in politics is unlikely to halt this slippage in the short term.

The Amazing Mrs Politician: Television Entertainment and Women in Politics

The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard was the first British television series production that featured a woman Prime Minister, backed by an all-women party and elected by the large majority of voters. This article investigates whether the series was an attempt to provide a feminist portrayal of women politicians. It addresses three main issues: whether and how the series inscribes gender frames to place expectations upon women leaders; if it constructs sex stereotypes with regard to political womens presentation and policies, which distort the roles that these women play in public life and finally it problematises the kind of visibility given to women politicians in the series.

Commonwealth update

In India President Bush makes a nuclear deal with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. After elections in the Solomons Honiara's Chinese business district is burned down. Australia holds a successful 18th Commonwealth Games as the New South Wales parliament becomes the first to abolish allegiance to the Queen. Jamaica chooses its first woman prime minister and the UK its first woman Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary. New Zealand appoints its first Maori head of the armed forces. Nigeria's Senate votes against a third term for the president. Zambia booms as copper prices soar. And a tortoise that belonged to Robert Clive dies in an Indian Zoo aged about 250.

Women and Democracy: The New Political Activism in Africa

Until the 1990s, it was unheard of for an African woman to run for the presidency of her country. To be sure, Africa had a few female rulers earlier in the twentieth century, but none had been elected. Empress Zauditu, for instance, ruled Ethiopia from 1917 to 1930; Queen-regents Dzeliwe Shongwe (1982–83) and Ntombi Thwala (1983–86) reigned over Swaziland; and Elizabeth Domitien of the Central African Republic was appointed as Africa’s first female prime minister, serving in 1975– 76. It was only in the 1990s, however, that significant numbers of African women began aspiring to positions of national leadership. In the 1990s, women ran for president in Kenya and Liberia, while others sought party nominations for the presidency in Angola, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Nigeria, Sa‹o Tome and Principe, and Tanzania. Although all were unsuccessful in their bids for power, these women set important precedents in their respective countries. The first woman to become an African head of state in a nonmonarchical regime was Liberia’s Ruth Perry, who chaired her country’s six-member collective presidency, the Council of State, in the mid1990s. In 1994, Uganda’s Wandera Specioza Kazibwe became Africa’s first female vice-president. Rwanda and Burundi elected female prime ministers in the mid-1990s, and Senegal chose a woman prime minister in 2001. By the end of the 1990s, legislative bodies in Ethiopia, Lesotho, and South Africa had all appointed female house speakers, while those in Uganda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa had female deputy speakers. Aili Mari Tripp is associate professor of political science and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and director of its Women’s Studies Research Center. She is the author of Women and Politics in Uganda (2000) and Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (1997).

A Woman Prime Minister in Turkey

ABSTRACT This paper examines if Tansu filler, the first woman prime minister in Turkey, made a difference in how political power was used in that country. Even though women leaders have signaled change, they have also been known to perpetuate the status quo. Tansu (filler has perpetuated the status quo with her opportunistic quest for power and dismissal of women's issues when she was in office; yet, she has also expanded the framework within which political authority could be culturally coded, because she was a new role model of a woman politician with clout who did not deny her feminity. She also brought a female constituency to the foreground of electoral discourse prior to the 1995 elections.

A woman prime minister in Turkey: Did it matter?

A woman prime minister in Turkey: Did it matter?