‘The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power’
By Pnina Lahav
Princeton University Press, 376 pages

Israel’s fourth prime minister, Golda Meir (1898-1978) has been called the “iron lady” — a sobriquet also applied to Margaret Thatcher, whose name never appears in Pnina Lahav’s biography. Both leaders wished to believe that being a woman had nothing to do with their ascent and descent from the highest political offices.

So much of Ms. Lahav’s speculation about her subject’s motivations is just that: speculation. It is riddled with so many possibilities put as questions and phrased as what Meir “must have experienced,” “must have thought,” and what “must have been” that no coherent portrayal is possible. A better approach would have been to show from her actions what motivated Meir.

This biography reaches its low point when summing up the prime minister’s plight: Blamed for heavy losses of Israeli soldiers in the Yom Kippur War, suffering from shingles and other ailments, she thinks of her mentor and lover, David Remez: “Lonely and dejected, she must have yearned to be in his arms.” 

Even though Ms. Lahav effectively demolishes as unfair — and, I would add, stupid — male attacks on Meir saying she was an emotional woman who could not decide matters rationally, Ms. Lahav cannot help turning Meir into a romance novel heroine.

Maybe Meir was mooning over Remez, but we don’t know that, and this is the kind of presumptuous imagining that Ms. Lahav elsewhere demolishes. Such a moment in the biography reflects a frustration with a subject who would not let the biographer inside of her life. 

Both Meir and Thatcher attacked feminists because feminism got in the way of their careers as effective politicians. Early on, as Ms. Lahav shows in describing Meir’s time in a kibbutz, Golda (as everyone called her) sided with the men. If women belonged in the kitchen, as men would have it, then Golda was going to make it the best kitchen those men had ever seen.

Her actions tell us that to have done otherwise — to harp on how the men always had it their way — would have sidelined an ambitious woman who wanted to be in charge, who wanted to be, as Lahav puts it, the only woman in the room. It would be up to other women to do as Meir had done, and not up to Meir to argue on their behalf.

Golda Meir was a committed socialist and Zionist. Women’s rights would have to be taken up after socialist goals were achieved. Her position is open to criticism, but too often Ms. Lahav’s speculations amount to special pleading — a supposition that privately Meir was on the feminist side even if she could not publicly say so.  

That in some sense Golda Meir was a closet feminist could be true, but we do not have the evidence to say it is so. No matter how much the biographer interrogates her subject’s motives, we always come around to the same point: Golda Meir was not going to tell us what was in that closet — not in her ghost-written autobiography and not in any letters she wrote. 

Golda Meir did not husband herself in a diary, saving some inner self that a biographer could decipher. She did not speak in code — that was one of her attractions as a politician. She was sometimes criticized for having a limited vocabulary, but another way to put it is that she was plain spoken.  A biography as a psychological novel of Golda Meir does not work.

What made the “iron lady” successful was her administrative ability as a labor minister and party leader, as a fund raiser, and as a stalwart prime minister who earned the respect of macho soldier/politicians like Moshe Dayan, who made fun of her before joining her cabinet and then never did again so long as she was in charge. What counted was power, even if your family suffered, even if you had to divorce your husband, as Golda Meir did. 

She was not only ruthless but beloved, as Ms. Lahav shows. She lost no dignity, by the way, in being called Golda. Quite the contrary, she became the familiar face of power and, near the end of her life, said that she had sacrificed nothing to attain her political goals because her goals were political. 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Private Life of Michael Foot”

Correction: Lahav is the spelling of the last name of the biographer. The name was spelled incorrectly in an earlier version.