Women in Power: The Personalities and Leadership Styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher.

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality.

People sell books. Biographies abound, and even a whole television channel is devoted to the biography. Men in particular are drawn not only to the successful but also to those showing leadership.

McGill University political scientist Blema Steinberg wants to help us think about the links between personality and political leadership in new and more systematic ways. Focusing on the three best known women leaders of the last century—Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom, Indira Gandhi of India, and Golda Meir of Israel—Steinberg employs a theoretical instrument called the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria to establish a ranking scale. This index allows the author to reveal the interplay of personality and leadership in a consistent manner because it charts 12 personality patterns across eight attribute domains.

The three principal sections of the book are devoted to each of three women individually, beginning with an introductory chapter to orient readers to the leader’s career and milieu. As a practising psychoanalyst, Blema Steinberg probes deeply into the recesses of personality using the terminology in which she has been trained. Psychoanalysis has recently been assaulted as an unscientific enterprise incapable of being either proved or disproved, but its insights allow the author to make perceptive and sometimes grating comments on facets of the three leaders.

The final chapter ties together the links between personality and leadership established in each of the three instances. Since Gandhi, Meir, and Thatcher were known as strong women, it is hardly surprising that they score high on the scale for dominance, though Margaret Thatcher falls at the other end of the scale in regard to dauntlessness. Indira Gandhi is shown to be the most contentious—consider her imposition of martial law in India—but also as the most aggrieved, reticent, and retiring.

Scholars interested in personality and leadership will find interest in this book as it attempts to move beyond more impressionistic approaches generally taken in explaining the relationship between these two elements. As studies such as this are only as good as the theoretical construct employed and the data assembled, the author provides a full explanation of the Millon Inventory in an appendix. Blema Steinberg is conscientious in assembling biographical information as inputs for the theoretical model, but her efforts reflect human strengths and weaknesses rather than being infallible. Only further studies of other leaders along these lines will ultimately establish their usefulness in adding to our knowledge about personality and leadership.