The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and her Path to Power
By Pnina Lahav
Princeton University Press £28

Among the many biographies of Golda Meir, Pnina Lahav takes a different path in this new analysis, offering a psychological rather than a straightforwardly political history. Evaluating Meir’s accomplishments through the lens of her gender, Lahav offers, in her words, “a new perspective on a series of events that shaped her development”.

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Lahav’s approach creates a new context, in which she sometimes engages in rhetorically questioning (and more occasionally answering) her subject. Each episode of Meir’s already familiar journey to and through becoming Israel’s fourth and only woman Prime Minister is subjected to a commentary that binds her public to her hitherto considerably more private life.

She recounts her earliest years in a shtetl in Czarist Russia — her first memory was of her father boarding up their front door in the anticipation of another pogrom — and her adolescent battles with him as a student in Milwaukee. Aged 19, Meir embarked on an impetuous and unhappy marriage from which she later baled, leaving her husband and children.

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Meir

She began her political career as a youth member of the Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion) party while still in high school before working her way into the mainstream, becoming a founder of the State of Israel in 1948 and Prime Minister from 1969 to 1974.

She resigned in the wake of catastrophic Israeli losses following the Arab coalition’s surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War.


Lahav is not uncritical of the woman she regards as having achieved her aims primarily by modelling herself on the only available examples: men. Attracted to those with power, at times in relationships with prominent public figures or fellow ministers, Meir demanded the same sexual freedoms as her male peers.

Yet this did not, according to Lahav’s careful analysis, make her a feminist other than in narrowly political terms. In 1948, and in her first ministerial post as Minister for Labour and Social Security, Meir used her position to legislate for workers’ rights, social security and maternity leave for women.

By 1973, and in the wake of the international impact of the second wave women’s liberation movement, Lahav observes that she “refused to challenge the othering of women”, and was scathing about mythologised “bra burners”.
Lahav emphasises that although Meir had had to fight hard and long to “deflect misogyny”, she appeared consistently unwilling to call it out on others’ behalf.

Indeed, in her speech to the Knesset in January 1974, Meir “did not address women’s issues as central”, and referenced only the usefulness of child day-care centres in passing.

In her final section on Golda and the Revival of Feminism, Lahav examines her pugnacious relationship with Shulamit Aloni, the civil rights activist and declared feminist who, working with the support of the women’s movement, formed a new party she named Ratz (“Running”) and won three Knesset seats from Meir’s Alignment Party on an independent ticket.

Meir hated David Ben Gurion’s (in)famous description of her as “the only man in the Cabinet”, intermittently extended by others into “the only person in the room with balls”.

Just as she no doubt hated Aloni’s adaptation of “mother of the nation” into “the big mother” which Lahav describes as being “a thinly veiled attack on Golda’s age”, she being 29 years older than Aloni. Lahav concludes with: “The 110 male members of the Knesset were treated to a bizarre spectacle — two women, each formidable in their own way, crossing swords.”

Whether or not Meir deliberately sought to pull up the ladder once she had established her own version of liberation, no woman has been elected prime minister of Israel in her wake, and she remains the only woman to rest in the burial spaces reserved for the country’s leaders.

Lahav’s historical approach is an original one whereby the author analyses then speculates on events as they occurred: a fascinating account by a contemporary feminist elucidating the life of a woman who forged and changed the course of her country’s history.