Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: From man-made mess to a better future – the truth about global inequality and how to unleash female potential. Catherine Mayer

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СКАЧАТЬ competence if they show emotion – a behaviour deemed feminine – yet any women who conduct themselves in ways judged masculine are punished too. Leaked emails written by former Secretary of State Colin Powell described Clinton as ‘a friend I respect’ but then went on to list supposed defects that included ‘a long track record’ and ‘unbridled ambition’. Researchers at Yale investigating differing voter reactions to male and female candidates found that voters felt ‘moral outrage’ against women who seek power because ‘power and power-seeking are central to the way masculinity is socially constructed and communality is central to the construction of femininity, [so] intentionally seeking power is broadly seen as anti-communal and inconsistent with the societal rules for women’s behaviour.’¹² For many women in politics, this creates the catch-22 described by Ann Friedman in a piece about Clinton’s travails: ‘To succeed, she needs to be liked, but to be liked, she needs to temper her success.’

      For Thatcher, downplaying her force of character or pretending to match any culturally generated ideals of femininity was never a serious option. Occasionally her advisers persuaded her to give interviews in which she awkwardly described a domesticity that was clearly inauthentic. She preferred to ignore her sex, but the men around her seemed unable to forget it. ‘She has the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe,’ observed French President François Mitterrand, creepily. His successor Jacques Chirac whined about Thatcher during a confrontation at a summit: ‘What more does that housewife want from me? My balls on a plate?’

      Veteran Conservative MP and former Cabinet minister Ken Clarke, forgetting he was wearing a microphone ahead of a TV interview with another former Cabinet minister, Malcolm Rifkind, voiced a milder version of this sentiment in a discussion of Theresa May that he did not intend for broadcast. ‘Theresa is a bloody difficult woman,’ he said. Clarke’s thought train continued to its obvious conclusion: ‘But you and I worked for Margaret Thatcher.’ Britain’s first female Prime Minister is the model by which the second female Prime Minister, and all other female leaders, continue to be judged.

      Facile though these comparisons are, female leaders, as a class, tend to resemble Thatcher in one respect. There is less show-offery. Women more often appear to thrive on the exercise of power than the attendant publicity. Think how Angela Merkel compares to Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi, or Theresa May to her one-time leadership rival Boris Johnson, or Hillary to Bill or Donald. Thatcher never sought press coverage for its own sake.

      There is a commonality between Thatcher and Merkel that is also worthy of mention: a background in science. When Thatcher entered politics, she forged a new path. The elite of society imbued their sons with the expectation of leadership, and trades unions provided an alternative training ground for political talent. Family ties delivered the world’s first female Prime Minister, Sri Lanka’s Sirimavo Bandaranaike, to power and installed the world’s longest-serving female leader, India’s Indira Gandhi, in office. Political dynasties produced Aung San Suu Kyi, Sheikh Hasina, her predecessor Khaleda Zia, Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, Indonesia’s Megawati Sukarnoputri, Argentinian Presidents Isabel Martínez de Perón and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Cory Aquino of the Philippines, and South Korea’s Park Geun-hye. Thatcher had no such advantages. She studied chemistry and went on to work in the field at the food manufacturer Lyons (where, legend has it, she helped to invent soft-scoop ice cream).

      Angela Merkel found a calm berth in East Germany as a researcher in physical chemistry. These parallels are noteworthy because the duo also gained a reputation for the kind of evidence-based decision-making more routinely associated with laboratories than parliaments. Even so, Thatcher and Merkel will be remembered for big, bold projects rooted in ideology and emotion rather than cold calculation. Thatcherism held, at its core, an instinctive and visceral moral certitude that branded opposing ideologies as not just wrong but malign. Merkel’s pivot from cautious consensus-builder to passionate advocate of European engagement in solving the refugee crisis drew deep on her own experience. She too had been the wrong side of the barbed wire.

      Germany’s 2005 elections ended in deadlock. Neither Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats nor Gerhard Schröder’s left-leaning Social Democrats, could muster a workable majority. Merkel consulted, forged alliances, held her nerve until Schröder withdrew, leaving her to head a grand coalition. She was not only the first woman to occupy the Chancellery, but the first leader of reunited Germany raised behind the Iron Curtain. As TIME scrambled late at night to produce a cover story, international editor Michael Elliott composed a headline that almost went to print before we noticed its double meaning: ‘Not Many Like Her’.

      There still aren’t many – if any – like her, and these days you’d be forgiven for assuming that not many of her colleagues or compatriots like her either. Four successive state elections in 2016 saw the Christian Democrats lose votes, primarily to the hard-right Alternative für Deutschland. The AfD started as a protest party campaigning against German commitments to bail out floundering Eurozone countries, but found fresh purpose on 4 September 2015, when Merkel responded to the press of refugees from Syria stranded in Hungary by opening the border and issuing a welcome. ‘Wir schaffen das’, she said: we will manage.¹³ At first most Germans agreed, but since more than a million refugees and migrants sought to make new lives in Germany, that consensus has melted.

      Mass assaults on women in Cologne during the final hours of 2015 tested German hospitality. There is still little clarity about the nature of these attacks: to what extent these were planned and whether most perpetrators were, as initially reported, foreigners. The authorities continue to pursue prosecutions but have admitted they do not expect to identify the majority of those responsible. If they did, bringing them to justice would be difficult. Germany’s antiquated laws on sexual assault put the burden on women to show they had physically resisted their attackers.

      A narrative about Merkel gained traction inside the country and out: she was a busted flush. Germany’s first female Chancellor had broken Germany and, far from helping German womenfolk, had exposed them to danger.

      Pretty much everything about that narrative was wrong, although Merkel did make one key miscalculation. Until the refugee crisis, the criticism routinely levelled against her was that she used her power too sparingly – that she had responded too slowly to the Eurozone crisis and with too much focus on German national interests at the expense of poorer countries such as Greece. She put a different gloss on her approach: she preferred to govern in ‘many small steps’, rather than big ones.¹⁴ This fitted with the legacy of her early life, in a police state where she learned to achieve without attracting attention. It was also pragmatic: the German voting system creates coalitions rather than outright majorities, and deploys multiple checks and balances. German history warns against unfettered power. Even so, Merkel confronted the migrant crisis as Europe’s strongest leader, the only one with political capital. In finally spending that capital, she sought to instill in other European leaders a sense of collective responsibility. This was, as she saw it, ‘a historic test of globalisation’.

      Merkel alone rose to it. She had overestimated Europe’s capacity for solidarity. Her remarks at a press conference after her party’s poor showing in the September 2016 Berlin state elections, widely misreported as a mea culpa, instead restated her convictions. She did regret the phrase ‘we will manage’, which ‘makes many people feel provoked, though I meant it to be inspiring’.

      However, she had followed a humanitarian imperative and a strategy that, despite flaws, had started to bear fruit. Signs of progress did nothing to quiet her critics, especially within the ranks of her Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). They had never really accepted her; now, with federal elections due in September 2017, they began to treat her as a liability. Her approval ratings did drop, from 67 per cent in September 2015 – an astonishingly lofty figure for a politician in her third term of office – but have risen again to only a few points shy of that level. Her popularity is international. When I posted the news on Twitter that she had decided to run for СКАЧАТЬ