Gender Politics - Global Edition
Lydia Polgreen and Larry Rohter write in the New York Times of two recently elected presidents:
In almost every sense of the word, there is a vast distance between this impoverished West African country and prosperous, sophisticated Chile. But they share a legacy of bloodshed and oppression that color the politics of today. And in both countries last week, it became clear that voters had chosen female presidents not despite - but at least in part because of - their sex.
For Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, an economist and banker who was inaugurated Monday and is the first woman elected president in Africa, and for Michelle Bachelet, a general’s daughter who was elected as Chile’s first female president, a key to victory was the power of maternal symbolism - the hope that a woman could best close wounds left on their societies by war and dictatorship.
Unlike Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, the strong women of the previous generation, Ms. Bachelet and Ms. Johnson Sirleaf have embraced what they have both called feminine virtues and offered them as precisely what countries emerging from the heartbreak of tyranny and strife need.
