Election Day Special: Female Heads of State

Today is Election Day here in the United States which got me thinking about the fact that we are one of the few Western nations that has never had a female head of state.  In our 200+ years as a nation, we have had two women run for Vice President, three female Secretaries of State, and one female Speaker of the House.  Yet we still haven’t managed to have a female at the top of the ticket, although we’ve come close.  Here is just salute to some of the female Heads of State in recent history (check out this link on Wikipedia for the complete list of current and former Female Heads of State). Some of these women were the first female heads of state in their countries.  Some came from political dynasties but all fought hard-won elections to become the head of State in their countries.  What surprised me was how many Latin American countries have female Presidents.  Yes, those macho countries have female Presidents!  Here’s hoping that we in the US won’t have to wait to long for a female President.  Here's to 2016!

Golda Meir:  Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974.  Israel's first and the world's third woman to hold such an office.  Former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion used to call Meir "the best man in the government"; she was often portrayed as the "strong-willed, straight-talking, grey-bunned grandmother of the Jewish people".

 Margaret Thatcher:  Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990.  She is the longest-serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of the 20th century and the only woman ever to have held the post.  A Soviet journalist nicknamed her the "Iron Lady", which became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As Prime Minister, she implemented Conservative policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.

Indira Gandhi – Prime Minister of India from 1966 to 1977. Third Prime Minister of India for three consecutive terms (1966–77) and a fourth term (1980–84). Gandhi was the second female head of government in the world after Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, and she remains as the world's second longest serving female Prime Minister as of 2012. She was the first woman to become prime minister in India.

 

Mary Robinson – President of Ireland from 1990 to 1997. Robinson served as the seventh and first female President of Ireland.  She first rose to prominence as an academic, barrister, campaigner and member of the Irish Senate (1969–1989). She was the first elected president in the office's history not to have had the support of Fianna Fáil.

 

Corazon Aquino – President of the Philippines from 1986-1992. Aquino was the 11th President of the Philippines, the first woman to hold that office, and the first female president in Asia. She led the 1986 People Power Revolution, which toppled Ferdinand Marcos and restored democracy in the Philippines. She was named "Woman of the Year" in 1986 by Time magazine.

Benazir Bhutto:  Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1988-1990, and from 1996 to 1999.  She was the eldest daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan and the founder of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), which she led.  In 1982, at age 29, Benazir Bhutto became the chairwoman of PPP – a center-left, democratic socialist political party, making her the first woman in Pakistan to head a major political party. In 1988, she became the first woman elected to lead a Muslim state and was also Pakistan's first (and thus far, only) female prime minister

The Pink Lady: Helen Gahagan Douglas

Politics is a dirty game, and if you're a woman it’s even twice as rough. Women in politics tend to be held to higher standards then men; they have to be tougher without seeming to lose their femininity. They are judged not only on the issues, but how they look. While their opponents may keep on the kid gloves against them, their supporters can come out swinging. Helen Gahagan Douglas (1900-1980) found that out the hard way when she ran for the United States Senate in California against future Vice-President & President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon.

The year was 1950, World War II had been over for five years, and Harry Truman was President, having been elected in his own right in 1948. It was the beginning of the post-war baby boom, but there was a storm cloud that was hanging over the country, and that was the threat of communism. The Soviets who had been allies during the War were now being looked at as the enemy. Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin has just started his anti-communist witch-hunt, declaring that he had a list of known subversives in the US government, Klaus Fuchs had admitted to selling atomic secrets to the Russians, and the Hollywood Ten, a group of directors and screenwriters, had just been cited for contempt of congress and were facing jail time. In the US, if you wanted to be elected, you had to be anti-communist; to be otherwise was to be seen as Anti-American.

This was the climate in the country when Helen Gahagan Douglas threw her hat into the ring for the US Senate. She was in the middle of serving her third term in the House of Representatives when she decided to run. If she had won, she would have been only the 4th woman elected to the Senate. Helen was getting bored with the slow pace of the House and decided it was time to run for Senator. From the beginning she faced opposition with the Democratic Party, who wanted her to wait until at least 1958 before she ran, gaining a few more years in the House under her belt. But Helen was determined, once she made up her mind to do something, it was done. In 1950, there was only one woman in the Senate who had been elected in her own right, not been appointed to serve out her husband's term, and that was Margaret Chase Smith from Maine.

Helen's opponent Republican candidate Richard Nixon couldn't have been more different. She was glamorous, charismatic and effervescent while Nixon was intense, shy, with shifty eyes and a chip on his shoulder the size of Mt. Rushmore. From an upper middle class family who lived in a mansion in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Helen was a former actress and opera singer married to the actor Melvyn Douglas. Nixon came from a far more modest background in Whittier, CA; his father ran a grocery store. While Helen had dropped out of Barnard College to pursue her acting career, Nixon went to a small local college before attending Duke University Law School where he had his first brush with the criminality that would be his downfall (he orchestrated a break-in to find out his class standing which turned out to be third). While she had grown up in a Republican family, over the years she had become more progressively liberal. Helen was everything that Nixon despised, a rich liberal who was also a woman. As far as Nixon was concerned, women didn't belong in politics, they belonged in the home like his wife Pat.

When Helen entered Congress in 1945 she was one of 9 women out of a total of 435 members. Helen made a name for herself in the House immediately scoring a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee. She wasn't demure or winsome, following the leadership of the men. Helen was smart and beautiful and not afraid to speak her mind. Passionate about civil rights, Helen broke the color barrier, when she hired an African-American woman, the daughter of one of her constituents, as a secretary. She was against the arms race, believing that the atomic bomb shouldn't have been shared with the Soviets and other countries. Nor was she for loyalty oaths or outlawing the communist party, not popular stances in the house. Although she never co-authored or sponsored any legislation while in the House, she was considered impressive enough to be thought of as a potential Vice Presidential candidate in 1948, and many thought that she was Presidential material.

During the campaign for Senate, Nixon stressed his humble roots, his pretty wife Pat and two adorable daughters Julie and Tricia, a solid middle class family. So different from Helen's life, whose husband was on tour with a play during her campaign, and her two children who were in boarding school. She was painted as an elitist East Coast liberal with a Jewish husband. Even her talent was called into question by Nixon’s supporters. Why wasn’t she a famous movie-star like her husband? For the record, Gahagan had starred in one Hollywood movie, She in 1935, playing Hash-a-Motep, queen of a lost city. The movie, based on H. Rider Haggard's novel of the same name, is perhaps best known for popularizing a phrase from the novel, "She who must be obeyed." While the film received mixed reviews, it has since become a cult classic. Finding that movie making didn’t agree with her, all that waiting around, Helen had focused more on the stage and radio.

Helen hoped to focus on the domestic issues, particularly those that pertained to Californians, Civil Rights, equal pay for equal work, the rights of the migrant workers, tax cuts for low income families, all the things that Nixon had voted against. As far as Richard Nixon was concerned there was only one important issue, fighting communism. While Helen believed that communist sympathizers weren't a threat, Nixon was responsible for putting Alger Hiss behind bars. He was tight with Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. While Nixon didn't create the climate of fear that existed in the US in 1950, he sure as hell exploited it using tactics that he sure as heck didn't learn at the knee of his Quaker mother, who no doubt was rolling over in her grave at his need to win at any cost. It was Manchester Boddy, owner and publisher of The Los Angeles Daily News, who lost the Democratic primary to Helen, who first smeared with the nickname "The Pink Lady,” claiming that she was “pink right down to her underwear.”

Nixon began alluding to her alleged Communist sympathies, pointing out that her husband had belonged to several groups that turned out to be Communist fronts. He hinted that she was a fellow traveler, citing as evidence her supposed Communist-leaning votes in Congress. He also made vaguely anti-Semitic comments referring to her as Mrs. Hesselberg (Melvyn Douglas’ real last name) Nixon’s campaign manager, Murray Chotiner, ran with the idea; he had flyers printed up on sheets of pink paper to emphasize the point. While Helen fought hard, Nixon kept her continually off balance, having to defend her record instead of being able to focus on the issues. She also had a problem raising money. Nixon was in the pocket of the big businesses of California, in particular the oil industry. Even Joseph and Robert Kennedy donated money to Nixon’s campaign. People she had counted on in the past such as Ronald Reagan had switched allegiances to the Republican Party. Helen wasn’t helped by the fact that the US had gone to war against Northern Korea or by the arrests of the Rosenbergs for passing secrets to the Soviets. Helen’s biggest mistake was in misjudging the very real fear that Americans had about a communist threat to the country.

Nixon won the election in a landslide with 59% of the vote. Helen threw in the towel on her political career. It would take more than forty years before California elected a woman to the Senate, and as if to make up for lost time, they sent two. After it was over, Helen tried to analyze what had gone wrong, before putting the whole thing in the past. She kept active, protesting against the Vietnam War (a stance which ended her friendship with Lyndon Johnson), and against the nuclear arms race. When Watergate went down in 1973, a popular bumper sticker in California at the time, read “Don’t Blame Me, I voted for Helen Gahagan Douglas.

She died in 1980 at the age of 79 from breast and lung cancer.


Sources:

Sally Denton. The Pink Lady: The Many Lives of Helen Gahagan Douglas, Bloomsbury Press (2009)
Greg Mitchell. Tricky Dick and The Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas - Sexual Politics and The Red Scare (1998)

January 2009 - Scandalous Women in Presidential History

January 2009 brings a new administration to our nation's capitol. To celebrate, Scandalous Women will be bringing you all the women who made the capitol so scandalous. Look for posts on FDR and his women, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Edith Galt Wilson, Mary Todd Lincoln, and more.

Also, head on over to Edwardian Promenade for a behind the scenes look at Washington, DC during the Edwardian era.

Christine Keeler and the Profumo Affair

In the wake of the recent revelations that the now former Governor of New York, Elliot Spitzer, had been having relations for years with a series of high class call girls, it made me think of other sex scandals, and who does a sex scandal better than the British? Particularly when it involves politics. Charles Stewart Parnell and Kitty O'Shea, Jeffrey Archer, but the biggest sex scandal ever in Britain was the Profumo Affair. By the time the dust cleared, the Prime Minister had resigned due to 'ill-health' and the Labour party was swept into office with Harold Wilson as its leader and the new Prime Minister.


Let's go back into time shall we to 1963. Long before the swinging 60's were in force, and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones launched the British invasion, England was still recovering from the devastation it suffered during WWII. Rationing had only ended in the late 1950's. King George VI had died and his daughter Elizabeth II was celebrating her tenth year on the throne. She'd given birth to a son, Andrew, the future Duke of York in 1960 and would give birth to her last son, Edward, in the next year.

1960 was also the year that the publisher Penguin was prosecuted for publishing D.H. Lawrence's racy novel (for the time) Lady Chatterly's Lover. Penguin won the case and was able to publish 200,000 copies as people raced to get their hands on it. The old order was being challenged and a new order was just beginning. The children born just before and during the war were coming of age. Ian Fleming's spy novels had hit the screen starring the very sexy Sean Connery as 007. The newest actors in Britain were not Hollywoodized versions of British men, but actors like Albert Finney and Michael Caine who were working class.

New magazines like Private Eye which poked fun at everyone and everything was established. Beyond the Fringe starring Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller hit the West End. And David Frost became a national celebrity hosting the hit TV show That Was the Week that Was (a more topical version of VH-1's Best Week Ever).

Politically however, things were much less happier. Although Harold Macmillan had swept into office in 1959 with a majority in the House of Commons, there was discontent in the country. While Japan and Germany had recovered nicely from the war, the economy in Britain was stagnant. There was inflation and labor unrest. Unlike America, with its young, vibrant president, Irish-Catholic, war-hero with a beautiful young wife, and two adorable children, it seemed that politicians in office reflected a by-gone era, the era of Churchill and Lloyd-George, old school politicians.

Still for all the changes, Britain was stuck in the 1950's. This was still the era when unmarried girls who found themselves in the family way were packed off to places where they could have their babies in secret and then give them up for adoption. The pill didn't come out until the end of 1960 in the States. If you've seen Mike Leigh's movie Vera Drake, you know that back-street abortions were still in existence. Promiscuity was something that the Upper Classes indulged in, not nice middle-class girls and boys.

It was the height of the Cold War, and Britain was still reeling from the revelations that Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were Soviet spies. The idea that a British politician was not only cheating on his wife, but sharing her with a Soviet diplomat sent the public reeling. In 1963, Kim Philby would be revealed as the Third Man in their spy ring and would also defect to the Soviet Union.

The chief players in our little drama:

John Profumo - Secretary of State for War, married to the actress Valerie Hobson
Harold Macmillan aka Supermac - Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Christine Keeler - goodtime girl and model
Mandy Rice-Davies - fellow goodtime girl and model
Stephen Ward - osteopath and panderer
Lord Astor - owner of Cliveden, the great estate (now a posh hotel where anyone can come and stay. Kenneth Branagh got married there) where the shenanigans took place.
Yevgeny "Eugene" Ivanov - senior naval attache at the Soviet Embassy

Christine Keeler was one of those babies born during the war in 1942. She grew up in Middlesex, where she was raised by her mother and stepfather. She never knew her real father who left during the war. After an unhappy childhood (she felt threatened by her step-father although she admits that he never touched her), she left home at sixteen, finding work as a model in a dress shop in Soho in London. At 17, after having a brief affair with an African-American servicemen stationed in the UK, she gave birth to a baby that died after a few days (earlier she had tried to abort the baby using a knitting needle but it didn't work).

While working as a waitress, she met Maureen O'Connor, who worked at a club in Soho. Through her, she started working as a topless dancer. While working at Murray's Cabaret Club she was introduced to Stephen Ward, the unwitting architect of the Profumo Affair as well as another showgirl, Mandy Rice-Davies.

Ward was an osteopath and socialite. His father was the canon of Rochester Cathedral and he was educated at Highgate School in London before qualifying to practice as an osteopath in Missouri of all places. Ward used his social skills and his job as an osteopath to work his way into the homes of the rich and power members of London society. He was also a portrait artist who had several members of the Royal Family including Prince Philip, sit for him.

Ward was attracted to pretty girls from a lower-class background and Christine Keeler fit the bill. Soon she was living with him, along with Mandy Rice Davies, although she claimed that it was more platonic than anything else. Ward and Keeler had a tumultuous relationship, breaking up and getting back together several times. He introduced his new friends, Christine and Mandy into his circle of wealthy, sophisticated older men.

In July of 1961, Ward held a pool party at Cliveden, the home of Lord Astor. It was at this party that Christine Keeler met John Profumo, the British Secretary of State for War. Profumo was the son of Albert Profumo, a prominent barrister, who held the title 4th Baron Profumo (originally awarded to the family by the Kingdom of Sardinia). On his father's death in 1940 Profumo inherited this title, but did not use it. He was educated at Harrow School and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he took his degree in agriculture and political economy. He had served in the army during WWII, and was awarded the OBE for services on Field Marshal Alexander's staff. He was highly regarded in the Conservative party having won his first election in 1945, becoming the youngest MP at the time.

Profumo and Christine started having an affair, but what he didn't know at the time was that Christine was also sharing her favors with Yevgeny Ivanov, among many others. But it was Ivanov who was the problem. It turned out that Ward was involved in helping MI-5 to entrap Ivanov. Sir Norman Wood warned Profumo about his affair with Keeler, and to warn him to be careful around Ward who was known to be indiscreet. When MI-5 tried to recruit Profumo to help them trap Ivanov by compromising him sexually, so that Ivanov would be enouraged to either defect or pass secrets, and informed him that Keeler was also involved with Ivanov, Profumo refused. Instead he dropped her but the damage was already done.

The affair came to light when Christine Keeler was involved in a shooting incident at the home of Mandy Rice-Davies. She had been involved with two other men, 'Lucky' Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe, two West Indians who were living in London. Gordon had been Keeler's lover and was a bit obsessed with her. She enlisted Johnny Edgecombe as a sort of bodyguard to protect her. In October of 1962, Gordon and Edgecombe got into a fight at a London club, and Edgecombe slit Gordon's face with a knife. Edgecombe went into hiding from the police, and asked Keeler to help him find a lawyer before he turned himself in. But Keeler refused out of jealously that Edgecombe had found another girlfriend. She told Edgecombe that she wouldn't help him and that she would testify against him at the trial. Incensed, Edgecombe showed up Mandy Rice-Davies flat where Christine was living, and blasted the door with a revolver when Christine refused to let him in. Hearing the commotion, someone called the police, and soon the Wimpole Street flat was crawling with police and reporters.

The press began to investigate Keeler, and soon found out about her simultaneous affairs with Profumo and Ivanov. Because of Ivanov's connection to the Soviet Embassy, a simple sexual affair took on a National Security Dimension.

Things might have turned out differently if Profumo hadn't made the fatal mistake of lying to House of Commons. Instead in March of 1963, Profumo told the House that there was "no impropriety whatever" in his relationship for Keeler and to make it even worse he said that writs would be issued for libel and slander if the allegations were repeated outside of the House.

Profumo's denials didn't stop the press from continuing with their stories on Christine Keeler. On June 5th, Profumo finally admitted that he had lied to the House, which was an unforgivable sin in British politics. He not only resigned from office but also from the House as well. Before his public confession, Profumo told his wife, and she stood by him (shades of Silda Wall Spitzer). In spite of the scandal, it was never proven that his relationship with Keeler had led to a breach in national security (presumably Profumo was too busy doing other things to whisper state secrets to his lover). Profumo never talked about the scandal for the rest of his life, even when the movie Scandal came out in 1989, and when Keeler published her memoir of the affair. After his resignation, he worked as a volunteer at the Toynbee Hall, a charity in the East End of London, cleaning toilets. Eventually, he ended up the charity's chief fundraiser. Fortunately for him, he was independently wealthy, and had no need to work for a living. He died in 2006 at the age of 91, after receiving the OBE from the Queen. Like Richard Nixon, another disgraced politician, he learned that career rehabilitation was entirely possible.

The biggest fallout of the scandal was not Profumo, but Stephen Ward, who was prosecuted for living on immoral earnings. To make matters worse MI-5 denited that Ward had informed them of Keeler's affair with Profumo and Ivanov. On the last day of his trial, he took an overdose of sleeping pills. He was in a coma when the jury reached its verdict, that he was guilty. He died a few days later from the overdose. Harold Macmillan resigned in September of 1963 due to ill health. He was replaced by the foreign secretary, Sir Alec Douglas Home.

Keeler was found guilty of perjury in the trial of Johnny Edgecombe and sentenced to 9 months in prison. Mandy Rice-Davies was the only one to escape prosecution, becoming famous for her statement at the trial "Well he would, wouldn't he?" when she was told that Lord Astor had denied her version of events.

An official report was released 2 months after Stephen Ward's death. Hundreds of people queued up for copies. But like the Warren commission or the Starr Report, there was no dirt to be had, just a lot of criticism for the government failing to deal with the affair quickly.

Mandy Rice-Davies traded on the notoriety the trial brought her, comparing herself to Nelson's mistress, Lady Hamilton. She married an Israeli businessman, Rafi Shauli, and went on to open a string of successful nightclubs and restaurants in Tel Aviv. The restaurants and nightclubs, which bore her name, were called: Mandy's, Mandy's Candies and Mandy's Singing Bamboo. Rice-Davies also parlayed her minor fame into a series of unsuccessful pop singles for the Ember label in the mid-'60s, including Close Your Eyes and You Got What It Takes.

As for Christine Keeler, she claims that the true story never came out during the height of the scandal. She wrote a book (ghost-written of course) claiming that not only did Profumo knock her up, but that Stephen Ward was a leading Soviet agent and that Sir Roger Hollis, who was then the head of MI-5, was working alongside him. Of course there is no proof of any of this, but it has kept her name in front of the public over the years as she works to 'clear her name.' After her prison term, she has repeatedly tried to restart her life, but the scandal continues to hang over her head like a sword of Damocles. She married and divorced twice, and had two sons. Over the years, she's held various jobs as a receptionist, and as a dinner lady in a school in London, all under an assumed name.

The 1989 movie Scandal starring Joanne Whalley as Christine Keeler, Ian McKellan as Profumo, and John Hurt as Stephen Ward introduced the story to a new generation. The Profumo Affair opened the door in Britain to the type of tabloid journalism its now become famous for. No more were politicians coddled, their foibles covered up by the press. Now it was open season on everyone.

This post was prepared using sources including Wikipedia.

Derek Brown - 1963: The Profumo Scandal

1989 - Scandal - movie based on The Honeytrap by Stephen Dorrill