When Women Rule

Blema S. Steinberg’s Women in Power is subtitled “The Personality and Leadership Style of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher.” The author has admittedly not met her subjects personally and I am wary of such long-distance psychoanalysis because, having been a leader, I was the subject of similar attempts. I read this treatise through the eyes of someone who had experienced this: when I was in politics and was addressing an audience of my close supporters, I would sometimes end with the phrase “as my father would say, ‘Consider yourselves hugged.’” My father had seen a bumper sticker that said, “Have you hugged your kids today?” and, struck by its message, called his two (adult) daughters who no longer lived at home to give them a “hug,” and he used the phrase to conclude all telephone conversations with us thereafter. When he died in 2002, the obituary writer in...