‘Women and Leadership: Navigating Change from Ancient Times to the Present’
Edited by Karen Christensen, George Gothals, Crystal Hoyt
Berkshire Publishing Group, 370 pages

“It is the best of times. It is the worst of times.” What the editors of “Women and Leadership” have in mind is “a greater interest in shared and distributed forms of leadership” and the “global rise in autocratic leadership,” a reassertion of “‘strongman style’ masculinities.”

This is by no means a programmatic collection of histories and biographies. Included, for example, is a chapter on “Conservative Women Leaders,” concerning what is “taught in schools but also in battles connected with sexuality, such as pornography, birth control, and abortion.”

There is, as well, a chapter, “#MeToo and Its impact,” in the context of a broader term, “sexual aggression,” and how it affects women and men in “positions of leadership in many domains.”

The book includes less well-known figures, such as Soong Mei-ling and Jiang Qing, and famous ones — Susan B. Anthony, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Rachel Carson, and, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt, observed by one of FDR’s advisors, after sitting down next to the president, “holding his eyes firmly [and saying] to him, ‘Franklin, I think that you should. …’”

She provoked strong reactions from men. William Faulkner, I learned while working on his biography, named one of his mules after her. Cole Porter made fun of her effort to create her own financial independence by endorsing Simmons’ mattresses in national magazines. One version of his classic “Anything Goes” includes the lyric: “So Mrs. R with all her trimmin’s can broadcast a bed from Simmons, ’cause Franklin knows, anything goes!”

This book, an expansion of the 2016 edition, is divided into four parts: “Women in an Evolving Society”; “Women in Politics”; “Women and Social Change”; and “The Spectrum of Women’s Leadership.”

As comprehensive as the organization of this book seems, the editors suggest that yet another edition would include a former German chancellor, Angela Merkel, “widely seen as the most powerful woman in the world, the unofficial leader of the West,” which would entail considering the invasion of Ukraine and her “blind spot when it came to dependence on Russian oil and gas.”

Why not make “Women and Leadership” a multi-volume enterprise? I have some suggestions: Until recently, Marilyn Monroe would not have been considered as a leader or someone with power. Yet she formed her own production company and broke her Hollywood contract, and was openly supportive of civil rights and figures who suffered from discrimination, such as Ella Fitzgerald, which made it difficult to book her into the most important performing venues. Sylvia Plath, by the way, dreamed and wrote about Monroe with a respect unusual for women and men in the 1950s and early 1960s. 

My next candidate is Rebecca West, quoted once in this volume: “People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.” She befriended Paul Robeson and a CIA chief, Allen Dulles, and in her 50s had a passionate affair with FDR’s attorney general, Francis Biddle, a Nuremberg prosecutor. She made the cover of Time and inspired a generation of women like Martha Gellhorn, who was also there at Nuremberg, continuing West’s example of reporting on world events. 

An entire volume could be devoted to consequential women whose leadership was subtle and often behind the scenes — like Irita Van Doren, editor of the New York Herald Tribune and the lover of Wendell Willkie. My friend Ann Waldron wanted to write Van Doren’s biography but could not find enough of a paper trial. Yet I’m sure an essay, a sort of cultural biography, is feasible.

Would it be too frivolous to nominate Eve Arden? For decades she was the epitome of the tough-talking “career woman,” as they were called then, who held her own with men but sacrificed nothing — so far as I can see — of her femininity.

This is turning into one of those reviews in which the reviewer starts conceiving of a book he would have written, rather than the one at hand, which deserves the deepest respect for the depth and breadth of its subjects and contributors, who inspire the desire to look for other examples of leadership and how those examples play out in the lives of women all over the world.

Mr. Rollyson has written biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, Jill Craigie, Amy Lowell, and Sylvia Plath.