Seventy-three women in 53 states have served as presidents or prime ministers between 1960 and 2010. Female executives have governed in democratic, authoritarian and post-conflict states, with varied tenures (several months to several decades) and complex legacies. Torild Skard's impressive volume, Women of Power, presents well-researched biographical sketches of these 73 women. Drawing her data from secondary sources and 14 in-person interviews with former female leaders, Skard presents portraits of long-serving and influential female executives, such as Margaret Thatcher (UK), Angela Merkel (Germany) and Michelle Bachelet (Chile), alongside stories of temporary or lesser-known figures, such as Beatriz Merino (Peru), Lidia Güeiler Tejada (Bolivia) and Elisabeth Domitien (Central African Republic). Women of Power thus offers a complete accounting of female top leaders over the past 50 years, meriting praise for its breadth and depth. At 499 pages, this volume will appeal to scholars and practitioners interested in the life stories of these pioneering women.
Skard organises her biographical sketches into regional chapters, with chapters summarising global trends coming at the beginning and end of the volume. Though female leaders’ profiles vary greatly, Skard notes some trends: no women have governed in military or communist regimes, most (three-quarters) have wielded power in Christian-majority countries and none in the Arab States or the Pacific Islands, and very few (one-quarter) have presided in non-crisis conditions. Nearly all female executives, including those attaining largely symbolic positions, boast exceptional educational and professional qualifications. Their résumés include careers in electoral politics, revolutionary struggles, peace movements and civil society organisations. Every female leader broke significant structural, political and social barriers related to gender, and all negotiated vicious gender stereotypes. For example, detractors referred to Violeta Chamorro as a ‘useless old bag of bones’ and to unmarried Beatriz Merino as a lesbian.
Despite attending to female executives’ backgrounds and triumphs, Skard struggles over the question of merit. Her Latin America chapter offers a chronological account of Violeta Chamorro (Nicaragua), Lidia Güeiler Tejada (Bolivia), Janet Jagan (Guyana), Mireya Moscoso (Panama), Beatriz Merino (Peru), Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (Argentina), Dilma Rousseff (Brazil), and Laura Chinchilla (Costa Rica) – Isabel Perón appears in an earlier chapter on initial breakthroughs. Unlike Sub-Saharan Africa, where women commonly received the less-powerful prime minister position in a dual executive, women in Latin America typically ascended to the presidency in a single executive. However, Skard inexplicably states, ‘only Güeiler, Merino and Bachelet went to the top on their own merits’ (p. 245). The remainder she discounts because powerful men, whether family members or political mentors, facilitated their rise. For instance, Skard highlights how Fernández attained the presidency after her husband declined to seek re-election, and how Rousseff and Chinchilla won because they were the ideological protégés of popular outgoing leaders. Yet connections to powerful men cannot negate the women's decorated careers, as Skard's biographical narratives also show: Chamorro served on the Executive Council during the Sandinista regime and later led the influential newspaper La Prensa; Moscoso founded and headed an opposition party; and Jagan, Fernández, Rousseff, and Chinchilla were career politicians, with long histories of party activism and service in cabinets, the legislature, or both.
Skard thus adopts a tired double standard: though male and female executives both usually emerge from the elite (often familial) networks that dominate politics, only women find their merit undermined by membership in the inner circle. The book's typology of female executives’ pathways to power demonstrates a similar lack of nuance. Skard argues that female executives are either substitutes who take over from family members, insiders promoted from within the party, or outsiders from grassroots movements or non-governmental organisations. But again, Skard's careful biographical sketches belie this easy categorisation. Fernández followed her husband, but as a long-time congresswoman, she was a recognised party leader. Rousseff crosses all three categories: she succeeded her father-like mentor (Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva), but she also participated in the Marxist resistance to the Brazilian dictatorship before becoming a career politician – curiously, Skard ignores Rousseff's history as a Marxist rebel. The Latin American cases in particular demonstrate that women can follow powerful men while having their own history of leadership, activism and struggle both inside and outside the party.
Likewise, Skard creates awkward categories to capture whether female executives acted for women. Skard describes the women leaders as either conformists who act as men without engaging women's issues, compromisers who distance themselves from women while pursuing a tough-yet-caring agenda, and feminists who take critical action as women and for women. Skard correctly notes that very few female executives explicitly identify as feminists. However, those that did so – Bachelet in Chile and Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, for example – also made significant compromises. For example, Bachelet backpedalled on both gender quotas and liberalising abortion restrictions during her first term, and Bhutto oversaw Pakistan's adhesion to CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women), but with reservations to appease her government's conservative and Islamist factions.
Skard's analysis is strongest when she explains women's loneliness at the top. Surrounded by men, female leaders cannot govern without their support – but internecine power struggles and sexist resentment of women's authority often combine to place female executives in precarious positions. Male dominance further reveals itself in the tendency for female executives to arrive in moments of crisis, conflict or instability. Skard's biographical sketches reveal that women often emerge as compromise or saviour figures, stepping in when party systems collapse, armed conflict, democratic transitions or other emergencies have created power vacuums or governability crises. With catastrophe looming, talented men become unable or unwilling to serve. Female executives thus inherit challenging and often untenable political situations, clearly indicating the ‘glass cliff’ phenomenon (though Skard does not use this term). Further, female firsts find that their missteps become ascribed not to them as individuals, but to women as a group. Women disproportionately govern in difficult times, and bear disproportionate blame for failing to rescue their nations. Skard's volume helps researchers make sense of these complex figures and the gendered legacies of their rule.
