BBC ON THIS DAY | 7 | 1969: Israel elects first female leader About This Site | Text Only 1969: Israel elects first female leader Golda Meir, the "grand old woman of Israeli politics", is to become the first female prime minister of Israel. The 70-year-old's candidature was officially accepted by the Labour Party in Tel Aviv after she received 287 votes from her own central committee. Forty-five MPs abstained. On Sunday she will formally succeed her political friend and colleague Levi Eshkol, who died of a heart attack last week. I have faced difficult problems in the past but nothing like the one I'm faced with now in leading the country Golda Meir Mrs Meir, who has come out of retirement to take up the role, pledged to maintain national unity and called on the people who worked with Mr Eshkol to "continue in the same framework" in her government. She added: "I have never failed to accept party decisions and I shall not refuse now.

"I have faced difficult problems in the past but nothing like the one I'm faced with now in leading the country." With her party controlling the largest faction in parliament, Acting Prime Minister Yigal Allon and Defence Minister Moshe Dayan have agreed to step aside and reserve their own bids for power until later in the year. Following their decision, she was the only nominee put forward before the central committee. Mrs Meir, a former schoolteacher in America, previously served as Israeli foreign minister for 10 years before she retired following ill health. Because of her age and condition, her appointment is regarded by many as a stop-gap, intended to maintain national unity before the Labour Party chooses a leader for the October general elections. Many supporters within the party consider General Dayan to be a more suitable candidate. Acting Prime Minister Mr Allon also has substantial backing within the party leadership. Both are younger than Mrs Meir and considered national heroes. Despite such opposition, General Dayan, who is expected to retain his post as defence minister, said he would be honoured to work with Mrs Meir. Her government is expected to reflect the same parties and ministers who previously served under Mr Eshkol. Details of her new cabinet will be announced in the next few days.

This Week in Israel's History: Golda Meir Elected first Female Prime Minister of Israel | United with Israel Iranian Revolution Feb 16, 2015 This week in Israel’s history includes the founding of Hezbollah; Israel elects its first female prime minister. February 16, 1985: The Founding of Hezbollah In the Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979, the US-supported leader, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (Shah of Iran), was ousted. The revolution was a rebellion against the Shah’s increasingly oppressive regime as well as the perception that the Shah’s government was simply a puppet of the secular, “corrupt” West. Since much of the Shah’s legislation involved secularizing and Westernizing Iranian society, the backlash resulted in a government that was religiously extreme. The Shah was replaced by Shi’ite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ushering into power a conservative, religious Islamic Republic. As part of this post-revolution transformation, and as a response to Israel’s operations in Lebanon, Hezbollah was born. Hezbollah’s original mission was to attack the Israeli military.

The United States, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Canada, and Israel classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. The European Union and New Zealand have condemned Hezbollah’s military wing, but do not classify Hezbollah on the whole as a terrorist organization. From the beginning, the elimination of the State of Israel has been one of Hezbollah’s primary goals. Hezbollah’s 1985 Arabic-language manifesto announces, “[O]ur struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated”. According to Hezbollah’s Deputy-General, Na’im Qasim, destroying Israel is a core belief and the central reason for Hezbollah’s existence. Here is a partial list of the terrorist attacks for which Hezbollah has been held responsible: Hezbollah terrorists.

Photo: thewhizzer.blogspot.co – Hijacking TWA flight 847 in 1985; – The Lebanon hostage crisis from 1982 to 1992; – The 1992 Israeli Embassy attack in Buenos Aires, Argentina, involvement in which Hezbollah operatives boasted (29 killed); – The 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Argentina, for which Hezbollah claimed responsibility (85 killed); – The 1994 Alas Chiricanas flight 901 attack in Panama, for which Hezbollah claimed responsibility (21 killed); – The 1994 London Israeli Embassy attack (29 injured); – The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia (19 US servicemen killed); – Providing “direct assistance” to al Qaeda, including training and explosives, to orchestrate the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings; – The January 15, 2008 bombing of a U.S.

Embassy vehicle in Beirut; – The 2009 Hezbollah plot in Egypt, which led to the arrest of 49 men for planning attacks against Israeli and Egyptian targets in the Sinai Peninsula; – The 2012 Burgas, Bulgaria bus bombing (6 killed); and – Training Shi’ite insurgents against US troops during the Iraq War. February 17, 1969: Golda Meir Sworn in as Israel’s First Female Prime Minister Golda Meir was born Goldie Mabovitch on May 3, 1898, in Kiev, Russia. In 1906, she immigrated with her family to the United States. In high school, she became an active member of Young Poale Zion, which later became Habonim, the labor zionist youth movement. She spoke at public meetings, embraced socialist zionism and hosted visitors from Palestine. In 1913, she began dating Morris Myerson. Before they married in 1917, Goldie made settling in Palestine (Israel) her precondition for marriage. Sixteen year-old Golda in Milwaukee.

Photo: Wikimedia As a committed labor zionist and a dedicated socialist, Goldie and Morris left their jobs in America in 1921 to join a kibbutz in Palestine (Israel) together. Throughout her young career, Golda held many political positions, including head of the Jewish Agency. She attended the Évian Conference and even dressed up as an Arab woman so she could travel to Jordan to meet with King Abdullah I to try to persuade him not to join the other Arab states in attacking Israel. Golda considered it a great honor to have been one of 24 signatories (including two women) of the Israeli Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948. The first person to receive an Israeli Passport, Golda served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Minister of Labor and Foreign Minister before finally being elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1969. She was the first female prime minister and served from 1969 to 1974. Although her party won the 1973 elections, she resigned on April 11, 1974, and was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin.

By: Penina Taylor, United with Israel Subscribe to Our FREE Newsletter for More Great Stories Like This One United with Israel publishes stories like this every day. We believe that our work allows a more balanced view of Israel to emerge. With so much anti-Israel media bias out there from outlets like CNN and the BBC, helping the Holy Land means getting our message out to as many people as possible. You can help. Subscribe to our free newsletter to ensure that you get the latest and best stories from United with Israel. Together we can make a difference, and it starts with communication. Golda Meir Biography (Prime Minister of Israel) Prime Minister of Israel Died: 8 December 1978 (cancer) Birthplace: Kiev, Russia(now the Ukraine) Best known as: The first female prime minister of Israel Name at birth: Goldie Mabovitch Golda Meir was the fourth prime minister of Israel and one of the most visible women in international affairs for nearly two decades. Born in Russia but raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she settled on a kibbutz in British Mandate Palestine with her American husband, Morris Meyerson, in 1921.

As Golda Meir (her adopted name), she became active in Zionist politics, and after Israel gained independence in 1948 she served as ambassador to the Soviet Union (1948), was elected to the Knesset (1949) and was named the country's foreign minister (1956-65). Strong-willed and fiercely protective of Israel, she became an international symbol of Israeli resolve. After the death of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in 1969, Meir came out of retirement to become, at age 71, prime minister. Her handling of the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 (the Yom Kippur War) was widely critized, as were her attempts to garner peace for Israel after the war, and she resigned in 1974. She was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin . Meir published an autobiography, My Life, in 1975. Extra credit: Meir and Meyerson were married in 1917. They separated in 1928, but never divorced. They had two children: Menaham (b. 1924) and Sara (b.

1926)… She was played by Ingrid Bergman in the 1982 TV movie A Woman Called Golda… In the stage play, Golda, she was portrayed by Anne Bancroft . Copyright © 1998-2017 by Who2?, LLC. All rights reserved. Golda Meir - The First Female Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir Golda Meir The First Female Prime Minister of Israel Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir at a London Press Conference. (November 5, 1970). (Photo by Harry Dempster/Express/Getty Images) By Patricia Daniels, Contributing Writer Updated July 01, 2016. Who Was Golda Meir? Golda Meir's deep commitment to the cause of Zionism determined the course of her life. She moved from Russia to Wisconsin when she was eight; then at age 23, she emigrated to what was then called Palestine with her husband. Once in Palestine, Golda Meir played key roles in advocating for a Jewish state, including raising money for the cause.

When Israel declared independence in 1948, Golda Meir was one of the 25 signers of this historic document. After serving as Israel’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, minister of labor, and foreign minister, Golda Meir became Israel's fourth prime minister in 1969. Dates: May 3, 1898 -- December 8, 1978 Also Known As: Golda Mabovitch (born as), Golda Meyerson, "Iron Lady of Israel" Dates: May 3, 1898 -- December 8, 1978 Golda Meir’s Early Childhood in Russia Golda Mabovitch (she would later change her surname to Meir in 1956) was born in the Jewish ghetto within Kiev in the Russian Ukraine to Moshe and Blume Mabovitch. continue reading below our video 4 Tips for Improving Test Performance Moshe was a skilled carpenter whose services were in demand, but his wages were not always enough to keep his family fed. This was partly because clients would often refuse to pay him, something Moshe could do nothing about since Jews had no protection under Russian law.

In late 19th century Russia, Czar Nicholas II made life very difficult for the Jewish people. The czar publicly blamed many of Russia's problems on Jews and enacted harsh laws controlling where they could live and when -- even whether -- they could marry. Mobs of angry Russians often participated in pogroms , which were organized attacks against Jews that included destruction of property, beatings, and murder. Golda's earliest memory was of her father boarding up the windows to defend their home from a violent mob. By 1903, Golda's father knew that his family was no longer safe in Russia. He sold his tools to pay for his passage to America by steamship; he then sent for his wife and daughters just over two years later, when he had earned enough money. A New Life in America In 1906, Golda, along with her mother (Blume) and sisters (Sheyna and Zipke), began their trip from Kiev to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to join Moshe. Their land journey through Europe included several days crossing Poland, Austria, and Belgium by train, during which they had to use fake passports and bribe a police officer.

Then once on board a ship, they suffered through a difficult 14-day journey across the Atlantic. Once safely ensconced in Milwaukee, eight-year-old Golda was at first overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of the bustling city, but soon came to love living there. She was fascinated by the trolleys, skyscrapers, and other novelties, such as ice cream and soft drinks, that she hadn’t experienced back in Russia. Within weeks of their arrival, Blume started a small grocery store in the front of their house and insisted that Golda open the store every day. It was a duty that Golda resented since it caused her to be chronically late for school. Nevertheless, Golda did well in school, easily learning English and making friends. There were early signs that Golda Meir was a strong leader. At eleven years old, Golda organized a fundraiser for students who could not afford to buy their textbooks. This event, which included Golda's first foray into public speaking, was a great success. Two years later, Golda Meir graduated from eighth grade, first in her class.

Young Golda Meir Rebels Golda Meir's parents were proud of her achievements, but considered eighth grade the completion of her education. They believed that a young woman's primary goals were marriage and motherhood. Meir disagreed for she dreamed of becoming a teacher. Defying her parents, she enrolled in a public high school in 1912, paying for her supplies by working various jobs. Blume tried to force Golda to quit school and began to search for a future husband for the 14-year-old. Desperate, Meir wrote to her older sister Sheyna, who by then had moved to Denver with her husband. Sheyna convinced her sister to come live with her and sent her money for train fare. One morning in 1912, Golda Meir left her house, ostensibly headed for school, but instead went to Union Station, where she boarded a train for Denver. Life in Denver Although she had hurt her parents deeply, Golda Meir had no regrets about her decision to move to Denver. She attended high school and mingled with members of Denver's Jewish community who met at her sister's apartment.

Fellow immigrants, many of them Socialists and anarchists, were among the frequent visitors who came to debate the issues of the day. Golda Meir listened attentively to discussions about Zionism, a movement whose goal it was to build a Jewish state in Palestine. She admired the passion the Zionists felt for their cause and soon came to adopt their vision of a national homeland for Jews as her own. Meir found herself drawn to one of the quieter visitors to her sister's home -- soft-spoken 21-year-old Morris Meyerson, a Lithuanian immigrant. The two shyly confessed their love for one another and Meyerson proposed marriage. At 16, Meir was not ready to marry, despite what her parents thought, but promised Meyerson she would one day become his wife. Golda Meir Returns to Milwaukee In 1914, Golda Meir received a letter from her father, begging her to return home to Milwaukee; Golda’s mother was ill, apparently partly from the stress of Golda having left home. Meir honored her parents' wishes, even though it meant leaving Meyerson behind. The couple wrote each other frequently and Meyerson made plans to move to Milwaukee.

Meir's parents had softened somewhat in the interim; this time, they allowed Meir to attend high school. Shortly after graduating in 1916, Meir registered at the Milwaukee Teachers' Training College. During this time, Meir also became involved with the Zionist group Poale Zion, a radical political organization. Full membership in the group required a commitment to emigrate to Palestine. Meir made the commitment in 1915 that she would one day immigrate to Palestine. She was 17 years old. World War I and the Balfour Declaration As World War I progressed, violence against European Jews escalated. Working for the Jewish Relief Society, Meir and her family helped raise money for European war victims. The Mabovitch home also became a gathering place for prominent members of the Jewish community. In 1917, news arrived from Europe that a wave of deadly pogroms had been carried out against Jews in Poland and the Ukraine. Meir responded by organizing a protest march. The event, well-attended by both Jewish and Christian participants, received national publicity. More determined than ever to make the Jewish homeland a reality, Meir left school and moved to Chicago to work for the Poale Zion.

Meyerson, who had moved to Milwaukee to be with Meir, later joined her in Chicago. In November 1917, the Zionist cause gained credibility when Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration , announcing its support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Within weeks, British troops entered Jerusalem and took control of the city from Turkish forces. Marriage and the Move to Palestine Passionate about her cause, Golda Meir, now 19 years old, finally agreed to marry Meyerson on the condition that he move with her to Palestine. Although he did not share her zeal for Zionism and didn't want to live in Palestine, Meyerson agreed to go because he loved her. The couple was married on December 24, 1917 in Milwaukee. Since they didn’t yet have the funds to emigrate, Meir continued her work for the Zionist cause, traveling by train across the United States to organize new chapters of the Poale Zion. Finally, in the spring of 1921, they had saved enough money for their trip.

After bidding a tearful farewell to their families, Meir and Meyerson, accompanied by Meir's sister Sheyna and her two children, set sail from New York in May 1921. After a grueling two-month voyage, they arrived in Tel Aviv . The city, built in the suburbs of Arab Jaffa, had been founded in 1909 by a group of Jewish families. At the time of Meir's arrival, the population had grown to 15,000. Life on a Kibbutz Meir and Meyerson applied to live on Kibbutz Merhavia in northern Palestine, but had difficulty getting accepted. Americans (although Russian-born, Meir was considered American) were believed too "soft" to endure the hard life of working on a kibbutz (a communal farm). Meir insisted on a trial period and proved the kibbutz committee wrong. She thrived on the hours of hard physical labor, often under primitive conditions. Meyerson, on the other hand, was miserable on the kibbutz.

Admired for her powerful speeches, Meir was chosen by members of her community as their representative at the first kibbutz convention in 1922. Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion , present at the convention, also took notice of Meir's intelligence and competence. She quickly earned a place on the governing committee of her kibbutz. Meir's rise to leadership in the Zionist movement came to a halt in 1924 when Meyerson contracted malaria . Weakened, he could no longer tolerate the difficult life on the kibbutz. To Meir's great disappointment, they moved back to Tel Aviv. Parenthood and Domestic Life Once Meyerson recuperated, he and Meir moved to Jerusalem, where he'd found a job. Meir gave birth to son Menachem in 1924 and daughter Sarah in 1926. Although she loved her family, Golda Meir found the job of caring for children and keeping house very unfulfilling. Meir longed to be involved again in political affairs.

In 1928, Meir ran into a friend in Jerusalem who offered her the position of secretary of the Women's Labor Council for the Histadrut (the Labor Federation for Jewish workers in Palestine). She readily accepted. Meir created a program for teaching women to farm the barren land of Palestine and set up child care that would enable women to work. Her job required that she travel to the United States and England, leaving her children for weeks at a time. The children missed their mother and wept when she left, while Meir struggled with guilt for leaving them. It was the final blow to her marriage. She and Meyerson became estranged, separating permanently in the late 1930s. They never divorced; Meyerson died in 1951. When her daughter became seriously ill with kidney disease in 1932, Golda Meir took her (along with son Menachem) to New York City for treatment. During their two years in the U.S., Meir worked as the national secretary of Pioneer Women in America, giving speeches and winning support for the Zionist cause.

World War II and Rebellion Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933 , the Nazis began to target Jews -- at first for persecution and later for annihilation. Meir and other Jewish leaders pleaded with heads of state to allow Palestine to accept unlimited numbers of Jews. They received no support for that proposal, nor would any country commit to helping the Jews escape Hitler. The British in Palestine further tightened restrictions on Jewish immigration in an effort to appease Arab Palestinians, who resented the flood of Jewish immigrants. Meir and other Jewish leaders began a covert resistance movement against the British. Meir officially served during the war as a liaison between the British and the Jewish population of Palestine. She also worked unofficially to help transport immigrants illegally and to supply resistance fighters in Europe with weapons. Those refugees who made it out brought shocking news of Hitler's concentration camps . In 1945, near the end of World War II, the Allies liberated many of these camps and found evidence that six million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust . Still, Britain would not change Palestine's immigration policy. The Jewish underground defense organization, Haganah , began to rebel openly, blowing up railroads throughout the country.

Meir and others also rebelled by fasting in protest of British policies. A New Nation As violence intensified between British troops and the Haganah, Great Britain turned to the United Nations (U.N.) for help. In August 1947, a special U.N. committee recommended that Great Britain end its presence in Palestine and that the country be divided into an Arab state and a Jewish state. The resolution was endorsed by a majority of U.N. members and adopted in November 1947. Palestinian Jews accepted the plan, but the Arab League denounced it. Fighting broke out between the two groups, threatening to erupt into full-scale war. Meir and other Jewish leaders realized that their new nation would need money to arm itself. Meir, known for her passionate speeches, traveled to the United States on a fund-raising tour; in just six weeks she raised 50 million dollars for Israel. Amid growing concerns about an impending attack from Arab nations, Meir undertook a daring meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan in May 1948.

In an attempt to convince the king not to join forces with the Arab League in attacking Israel, Meir secretly traveled to Jordan to meet with him, disguised as an Arab woman dressed in traditional robes and with her head and face covered. The dangerous journey unfortunately did not succeed. On May 14, 1948, British control of Palestine expired. The nation of Israel came into being with the signing of the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, with Golda Meir as one of the 25 signers. First to formally recognize Israel was the United States. The next day, armies of neighboring Arab nations attacked Israel in the first of many Arab-Israeli wars. The U.N. called for a truce after two weeks of fighting. Golda Meir's Rise to the Top Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, appointed Meir as ambassador to the Soviet Union (now Russia) in September 1948. She stayed in the position only six months because the Soviets, who had virtually banned Judaism, were angered by Meir's attempts to inform Russian Jews about current events in Israel.

Meir returned to Israel in March 1949, when Ben-Gurion named her Israel's first minister of labor. Meir accomplished a great deal as labor minister, improving conditions for immigrants and armed forces. In June 1956, Golda Meir was made foreign minister. At that time, Ben-Gurion requested that all foreign service workers take Hebrew names; thus Golda Meyerson became Golda Meir. (“Meir” means “to illuminate” in Hebrew.) Meir dealt with many difficult situations as foreign minister, beginning in July 1956, when Egypt seized the Suez Canal . Syria and Jordan joined forces with Egypt in their mission to weaken Israel. Despite a victory for the Israelis in the battle that followed, Israel was forced by the U.N.to return the territories they had gained in the conflict. In addition to her various positions in the Israeli government, Meir was also a member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament) from 1949 to 1974.

Golda Meir Becomes Prime Minister In 1965, Meir retired from public life at the age of 67, but had only been gone a few months when she was called back to help mend rifts in the Mapai Party. Meir became secretary general of the party, which later merged into a joint Labor Party. When Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died suddenly on February 26, 1969, Meir's party appointed her to succeed him as prime minister. Meir's five-year term came during some of the most turbulent years in Middle Eastern history. She dealt with the repercussions of the Six-Day War (1967), during which Israel re-took the lands gained during the Suez-Sinai war. The Israeli victory led to further conflict with Arab nations and resulted in strained relations with other world leaders. Meir was also in charge of Israel’s response to the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre , in which the Palestinian group called Black September took hostage and then killed eleven members of Israel’s Olympic team. The End of an Era Meir worked hard to bring peace to the region throughout her term, but to no avail.

Her final downfall came during the Yom Kippur War, when Syrian and Egyptian forces waged a surprise attack on Israel in October 1973. Israeli casualties were high, leading to a call for Meir's resignation by members of the opposition party, who blamed Meir's government for being unprepared for the attack. Meir was nonetheless re-elected, but chose to resign on April 10, 1974. She published her memoir, My Life, in 1975. Meir, who had been privately battling lymphatic cancer for 15 years, died on December 8, 1978 at the age of 80. Her dream of a peaceful Middle East has not yet been realized. A Brief History of the World’s First Three Female Prime Ministers | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com A Brief History of the World’s First Three Female Prime Ministers Email Email a copy of "A Brief History of the World’s First Three Female Prime Ministers" to a friend India Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (left) with Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran (center) and Farah Pahlavi (right), during a state visit to India in 1970.

Photo: wiki commons. March 17 will be the 43rd anniversary of Golda Meir’s election as the fourth Prime Minister of Israel. She was Israel’s first and the world’s third female prime minister. Meir was born on May 3, 1898, in Kiev, which was then part of the Russian Empire and is now located in modern day Ukraine . Her family immigrated to the United States where she later married Morris Meyerson before immigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1921 . Meir was one of 24 signatories of the Israeli Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948. She served as Israel’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Minister of Labour and Foreign Minister before becoming the prime minister in March 17, 1969. Following the Yom Kippur War, Meir’s government was heavily criticized for Israel’s lack of preparedness but her party won the subsequent elections. She resigned on April 11, 1974. Related coverage Golda Meir - First Female Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir Resources Golda Meir Golda Meir has an impressive story.

Between 1898 and 1914, two and a quarter million Jews left Russia for the United States. It was during this time that the roots of modern Zionism was born. Zionists believe that because Jews have been oppressed in Europe and other parts of the world, the only way than overcome this oppression and gain self-sufficiency and acceptance is to migrate to Israel and build a nation there. Golda Meir Jews first arrived to Israel in the early 20th century, when Britain allowed Palestine to be an establishment for Jews. And it is within this environment that Zionism flourished. Zionism was founded primarily by secular Jews and there are different branches of this movement. In Labor Zionism, socialist-leaning Zionists believed that Jews could overcome their second-class status and succeed by migrating to Israel and build a utopian proletariat society that's operated by the workers, and they promoted the idea of kibbutz, which is a commune that reflects a cooperative agriculture system. In Revisionist Zionism, some leaders focus on the cultural heritage of Israel as the basis for establishment of the nation. This group of Zionists is also opposed to Labor Zionism and socialistic approaches to the operation of Israel.

And in Religious Zionism, some leaders believed that traditional Judaism played an important role in Zionism's values. It was out of the rise of Zionism that Israel gained its' first and only female Prime Minister, Golda Meir, who ruled from 1969 to 1974. Golda Meir was born in the Ukraine in 1898. Her father was a skilled carpenter who saved money to move with his family to the United States due to severe persecution of the Jews in he Ukraine. Golda's paternal grandfather was kidnapped at age thirteen to join the Czar's army and he refused to convert to Christianity and eat non-kosher foods. At age 8, Golda moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and when she turned 14, she wanted to attend high school but her parents refused to let her do so because they believed women would do better as wives and mothers. Her father even told her once, "It doesn't pay to be too clever. Men don't like smart girls." Upset by this, Golda ran way and went to live with her older sister in Denver.

While there, she developed a strong interest in Labor Zionism due to her sister's friends who often visited and had conversations about this topic. It was also during this time that she met her future husband Morris Myerson, a quiet man who worked as a sign painter but who didn't share her Zionist views. Sometime later her parents let her return to Milwaukee and after graduating from high school, she attended a teachers' college and taught at a Yiddish school. Golda's purpose for life changed when in 1917, Britain declared Palestine an establishment for the Jews. After marrying Morris a year later, they moved to Palestine, where they both worked on a kibbutz and made a good impression on fellow workers there. In the 1920s, Golda and Morris moved to Jerusalem and she gave birth to two children. The tension in her marriage also increased during this time because while Morris wanted her to live a more conventional life as a wife and mother, Golda had bigger aspirations, which included a political career and Zionist activism. She then worked with the General Federation of Labor's Women Worker's Council and she held key positions with the World Zionist Organization.

After Israel's official establishment in 1948, Golda traveled to the United Stated to raise $50 million for funds to support Israel's military since the nation had been receiving attacks from neighboring Arab nations. In 1949 she was elected to the Israeli Parliament then became Israel's first female Foreign Minister. Then in 1969, she became the first and only female prime minister. However, her most disappointing moment occurred during this time because Israel received a surprise attack from Syria and Egypt during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Israel wasn't prepared for this attack, and Golda didn't plan to take military action when she first heard of threats from these nations. As a result, people in Israel lost confidence in her abilities and she resigned in 1974. Golda Meir died at age 80 in 1978. There is a secret you don't know Besides the factual Golda Meir biography presented above there is a super-sized secret that no one must ever know about except you and me. And that secret is that when Golda Meir wasn't leading her country she was designing video games about alien zombie kittens.

Golda Meir | Jewish Women's Archive by Letty Cottin Pogrebin In the pantheon of illustrious national leaders there exists an even more elite subgroup, female heads of state, among whom stands one Jewish woman: Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1973. Pioneer, visionary, risk-taker, indefatigable fund-raiser, eloquent advocate, she was an activist of the first order, one of the founders of the Jewish state, a woman whose life story is as central to the mythos of modern Zionism as that of Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and David Ben-Gurion. Presidents and kings found her willfulness charming, while her grandmotherly appearance and plain-spoken personal style endeared her to ordinary people around the world. In her time, Golda was as admired as Queen Elizabeth and as well known by her first name as Madonna is today. Yet, for all her accomplishments and fame, Golda Meir—like Indira Gandhi of India and Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain—was no particular friend of women.

She was, in current parlance, a “queen bee,” a woman who climbs to the top, then pulls the ladder up behind her. She did not wield the prerogatives of power to address women’s special needs, to promote other women, or to advance women’s status in the public sphere. The fact is that at the end of her tenure her Israeli sisters were no better off than they had been before she took office. That a notable female can be simultaneously an inspiration and a disappointment, a source of great pride and of deep frustration, is the unique contribution of the queen bee to women’s history in general, and of Golda Meir to Jewish women’s history in particular. She was born on May 3, 1898, in Kiev, Ukraine. Her father, Moshe Mabovitch, a skilled carpenter, and her mother, Blume Naidtich, named her for her maternal great-grandmother, a domineering matriarch who lived to be ninety-four and who always took salt instead of sugar in her tea to remember the bitterness of the Jewish Diaspora . Golda Meir was pleased with this legacy.

She identified most, she said, with her “tenacious,” “intransigent” relatives, especially her paternal grandfather, who was kidnapped at age thirteen into the Czar’s army but resisted conversion to Christianity and refused to eat traif (nonkosher food). The Maboviches kept kosher , observed Jewish holidays, and shared traditional Sabbath meals with their extended family—all later lost in the Holocaust. Meir remembered everyone sitting around the table singing Hebrew songs, yet she described growing up in “a not particularly religious household.” She vividly recalled her early childhood as a time of abject poverty and terrifying pogroms, and she attributed her lifelong commitment to Jewish security to her memories of antisemitic violence and the experience of hiding from the Cossacks. She also remembered her sister Sheyna, nine years her senior, risking her life to attend Labor Zionist meetings, and her sister Zipke, the baby, getting the lion’s share of their meager gruel. In 1903, Moshe left for America; three years later, he sent for his family and settled them in a two-room flat in the poor Jewish section of Milwaukee. Golda was eight years old.

On the surface, her life story seems to follow the classic immigrant trajectory toward her rendezvous with destiny. But behind the facts lie years of searing family tensions, conflicts between her goals and others’ expectations of her, and painful inner struggles that might have fueled a feminist consciousness had she not interpreted them as problems unique to her. During the 1970s, Golda Meir (1898 – 1978) was voted the Most Admired Woman in America at the same time as she was American feminism's poster girl, the face above the caption "But Can She Type?" In reality, however, she never used her position to advance the cause of women's rights and equality in Israeli society. Institution: U.S. Library of Congress. At fourteen, she graduated from the Fourth Street Elementary School as class valedictorian but had to fight her parents for the right to go to high school. She wanted to be a teacher; they wanted her to find a husband. “It doesn’t pay to be too clever,” warned her father. “Men don’t like smart girls.” Defying him, she enrolled in Milwaukee’s North Division High School and took after-school jobs to pay her expenses.

Still, the arguments raged. Fed up, Golda ran away to live with her sister and brother-in-law in Denver, where she attended school and spent her evenings listening to Shayna’s radical friends—anarchists, Socialist Zionists, and Labor Zionists whose debates helped refine Golda’s political philosophy. She also fell in love with Morris Myerson, a quiet, bespectacled sign-painter who loved poetry and music and exposed her to lectures on literature and history but who never fully shared her Zionist passion. A letter of apology from her parents allowed her to return home after a year, and in 1916 she graduated from high school and registered for a three-year program at the Milwaukee Normal School, a teachers’ training college. Three times a week, she taught children reading, writing, and history at a folkshule, a Yiddish school at the Jewish Center of Milwaukee, but her real teaching took place on street corners—much to her father’s distress—where she lectured on Labor Zionism.

In November 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration supporting “the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people.” A month later, on Christmas Eve, Golda Mabovitch married Morris Myerson on the condition that they would immigrate to Palestine and live on a kibbutz . (A decade before her, the first kibbutz was created by a woman, Mania Shochat.) They chose Merhavyah in the Emek, an area of festering malarial swamps, with, as she put it, “no orchards, no meadows, no flowers, nothing.” But when they arrived in 1921, the admission committee rejected them, saying the kibbutz was not ready for married couples. Stunned, they applied again and were granted a probationary residency during which Golda picked almonds and planted saplings, Morris worked the fields, and the kibbutz members became enamored of Morris’s phonograph and classical records. This time, they were accepted.

Before long, she became a model kibbutznik and such an expert on breeding and feeding chickens that the kibbutz sent her to Haifa for a management course and later chose her as its representative to the Histadrut [General Federation of Labor]. While Golda was flourishing, Morris, who had contracted malaria, felt useless and disconsolate. He flatly refused to have children unless she agreed to rear them in a conventional family setting. After two and a half years (“the happiest of my life”), they left Merhavyah for Jerusalem, where Golda—giving birth to a son, Menachem, in 1924, and a daughter, Sarah, in 1926—valiantly tried to be a traditional wife and mother amid a life of grinding poverty. Morris worked as a bookkeeper for the Histadrut Building Office, which didn’t always pay its salaries, and Golda scrimped and bartered to make ends meet. In exchange for Menachem’s nursery school fees, she did the school’s laundry by hand, not minding the work but longing for labor with a Zionist purpose and desperate for meaningful community. Now it was her turn to feel useless and disconsolate.

One day in 1928, she ran into an old friend, David Remez, who offered her the job of secretary of Histadrut ’s Mo’ezet ha-Po’alot, Women Workers Council. Knowing Morris would never approve, she nonetheless took the job and moved to Tel Aviv with her children and her sister. Morris visited on weekends but, in essence, their marriage was over. The separation became final ten years later—though they were never legally divorced—yet, until Morris’s death in 1951, Golda would continue to feel guilty “because I couldn’t be the wife he wanted and should have had.” She would also worry that she had not done enough for her children. “I was always rushing from one place to another—to work, home, to a meeting, to take Menachem to a music lesson, to keep a doctor’s appointment with Sarah, to shop, to cook, to work and back home again.

And still to this day,” she wrote at age seventy-seven, “I am not sure that I didn’t harm the children or neglect them.” At the same time, she acknowledged, “There is a type of woman who cannot let her husband and children narrow her horizons.” Moving quickly up the ranks, she became a member of the Executive Committee of the Histadrut in 1934 and head of its political department two years later. During World War II, she held several key posts in the World Zionist Organization and in the Jewish Agency, the highest Jewish authority in British-administered Palestine, which functioned as the government of the Yishuv (Jewish settlement). When the male leadership was arrested for smuggling in refugees, she served as acting head of the agency, and until the end of the mandate she was its spokesperson in dealings with the British. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, it became clear that armed confrontation with the Arabs was inevitable. A vast amount of money was needed to equip the armed forces. Because she spoke perfect English, Golda volunteered to go to the United States to solicit twenty-five million dollars from the American Jewish community.

Where others had tried and failed, she succeeded in communicating both a compelling urgency and a sense of shared mission. She raised not twenty-five but fifty million dollars. Her courage took many forms. In May 1948, with five Arab armies massed on Israel’s borders, Golda disguised herself as a Moslem woman and crossed into Trans-Jordan for a secret meeting with King Abdullah, to try to persuade him to stay out of the war. Abdullah, King Hussein’s congenial grandfather, with whom she’d already had two clandestine encounters, received her with respect but remained unresponsive to her pleas. When Israel was just four days old and in the thick of battle, Golda returned to the United States to do more fundraising for the war effort. A month later, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett appointed her ambassador to the U.S.S.R.—sweet revenge for the little girl once menaced by the Cossacks and a profound thrill for Soviet Jews who, at great peril to themselves, thronged the Moscow synagogue on Rosh Hashanah to greet her.

In 1949, she was elected to the Knesset (Israeli parliament) and appointed by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to be the Minister of Labor, in charge of finding jobs and housing for the nearly seven hundred thousand immigrants who streamed into the country between May 1948 and the end of 1951. Golda held the Labor portfolio for seven years. She said she would have liked to keep it forever, but in 1956, Ben-Gurion made her Foreign Minister, the second-highest position in the government. He also insisted she adopt a Hebrew-sounding surname to better represent her Hebrew-speaking nation; thus did Myerson became Meir. The only female foreign minister in the world, Golda Meir was also the only foreign minister who had no use for formalities, who flew tourist class, who shocked hotel staffs by handwashing her own underwear and shining her own shoes, and who entertained foreign dignitaries in her kitchen, in an apron, serving them her homemade pastry along with a stern lecture on Israel’s security.

She also was a foreign minister who refused to obey the color line in Rhodesia, inspiring a full complement of dignitaries to follow suit, and whose proudest accomplishment was the export of Israeli technical and agricultural expertise to the African nations. In 1966, she decided to retire from government; Abba Eban would take over her post. She was sixty-eight years old, ready to become a full-time grandmother, eager to do more reading, listen to music, bake, visit friends, slow down. A year earlier, she’d been diagnosed with lymphoma, a condition she insisted upon keeping secret and for which she was treated at Hadassah Hospital in the dead of night. Although Meir considered her public career at an end, she was persuaded to become secretary general of Mapai, her political party, and, in 1967, secretary of the unified Labor Party. Then suddenly, in February 1969, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died of a heart attack and, to avoid a power struggle between Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon, the party prevailed upon her to become Israel’s leader. Retirement would have to wait.

She might have enjoyed more than four years in power had not Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on October 6, 1973, to start the Yom Kippur War. Though Israeli forces were able to regain the offensive, they suffered more than twenty-seven hundred casualties, a profound blow to a small country, and especially to Jews, who measure their collective survival one life at a time. Until the day she died, Meir regretted that she had not followed her instincts to call up the reserves days earlier rather than heeding the advice of military intelligence experts who saw no reason to mobilize. Gripped by a kind of national trauma, the public turned against her; parents of the dead shouted at her in the streets and blamed her and Defense Minister Dayan for the devastating losses. The Labor Party suffered a fatal setback and, on June 4, 1974, unable to form a government, Golda Meir resigned.

For all her grief and remorse over the Yom Kippur War, for all the humiliation and pain of her people’s rejection of her, she was nonetheless able in her final years to evolve into an elder statesman and beloved public citizen, a woman whom bus drivers insisted on taking to her front door and whom organizations clamored to honor. In time, her image regained its luster, and her reputation as a philosopher-comedian entered the realm of legend. As a politician and Jewish nationalist, Meir was consistent, strong in her resolve, and undisturbed by nuance or self-doubts. The Zionist cause to her was a moral, historical, and political imperative. Though she was eager to make peace with “the Arabs,” and often begged for Arab recognition and Arab partners, her refusal to acknowledge the existence of “Palestinians” or, consequently, Palestinian suffering, was for many years a stumbling block to progress. As a woman, on the other hand, Meir was a study in contradictions. Though her public persona was almost neuter, she was reputed to have had many lovers for many years.

Foremost among them were David Remez, Israel’s Minister of Transport and then of Education, and by some accounts the true passion of her life; and Zalman Shazar, one of the preeminent architects of the Jewish state and eventually its president. Though she exhibited stereotypically feminine attributes—the cooking, the warmth and emotionality, the matronly appearance—those who knew her never fail to mention her toughness. “To survive Israeli politics she had to become tough, she had no choice; she must have gone through hell to get where she did,” says M.K. Colette Avital, who began her career in Israel’s foreign ministry under Meir’s tenure and became one of her nation’s top-ranking foreign service officers. Avital remembers her old boss as someone who could be rigid and hot-tempered, someone who “disliked women, never really helped women.” Jew, Zionist, Israeli—these were the identities that defined Golda Meir’s life and galvanized her loyalties while the female aspect of her being remained devoid of consciousness or commitment.

(“Whether women are better than men I cannot say,” she once wrote, “but I can say they are certainly no worse.”) While she was voted the Most Admired Woman in America during the 1970s, simultaneously serving as feminism’s poster girl—the face above the caption “But Can She Type?”—the reality was far more complex. She acknowledged the important role women played in the founding of the State of Israel but was unwilling to bond in solidarity with her sex. Rather than recognize in her life experience the untenable pressures that plague virtually all achieving women, she attributed her strains and sacrifices to her private feminine or maternal failures, faulting her own aspirations, her love of political work, and her burning ambitions for the Jewish state. As Prime Minister, she did not focus on child care policy or concern herself with the problems of working women or use her influence to argue for equal gender arrangements in the home or encourage more women to run for public office. The conflicts that tore her apart helped her to sympathize passively with the “heavy double burden” of working mothers but did not inspire her to politicize that sympathy and identify with feminist goals.

In fact, she seemed to go out of her way to criticize feminism and distort the tenets of the women’s movement. She did, however, have her epiphanic moments. When Israel was experiencing an epidemic of violent rapes and someone at a cabinet meeting suggested women be put under curfew until the rapists were caught, Meir shot back, “Men are committing the rapes. Let them be put under curfew.” When Ben-Gurion first made her a minister in his cabinet, the religious bloc objected to the idea of a woman ruling over men, though they finally acquiesced on the grounds that Deborah, the biblical judge, had been acceptable to God. However, when Meir was a candidate for mayor of Tel Aviv, the religious objections defeated her, to her everlasting fury. When Ben-Gurion described her as “the only man” in his cabinet, Golda was amused that he thought “this was the greatest possible compliment that could be paid to a woman. I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government!” She noticed the disparity but seemed to miss the larger point.

She once said in a speech to the UN that the world might be better off if political leaders allowed themselves to “feel more and think less.” Yet she did not deduce that having more women in power might add the missing component to public life. Just as some Jews choose not to be Jewish-identified because they think they have the option to behave as if peoplehood doesn’t matter, Golda Meir chose not to be woman-identified and behaved as if gender doesn’t matter. But, of course, when one is Jewish and female, both facts matter. She died on December 8, 1978, at age eighty, a titan of modern Zionism, a history-making national leader, one of the most accomplished women of the twentieth century—still feeling guilty about falling short as a wife and mother. SELECTED WORKS BY GOLDA MEIR A Land of Our Own: An Oral Autobiography, edited by Marie Syrkin (1973); My Life (1975); This Is Our Strength, edited by Henry M. Christman (1962). Bibliography Agress, Eliyahu.

Golda Meir: Portrait of a Prime Minister (1969); Ander, Richard. Golda Meir: A Leader in Peace and War (1990); Ben-Gurion, David. Memoirs (1970); Davidson, Margaret. The Golda Meir Story (1981); Mann, Peggy. Golda: The Life of Israel’s Prime Minister (1972); Martin, Ralph G. Golda: Golda Meir—The Romantic Years (1988); A Woman Called Golda. Feature film. Paramount Pictures (1982). Golda Meir becomes Israeli Prime Minister | History Today Golda Meir becomes Israeli Prime Minister Richard Cavendish remembers Israel's own Iron Lady, who became Prime Minister on March 17th 1969 Golda Meir Israel’s own imperious ‘iron lady’ and first woman prime minister once said: ‘It was not as though there was a Palestinian people considering itself Palestinian and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them.

They did not exist.’ Asked when she thought the Arab problem would be resolved, she said: ‘When the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.’ David Ben-Gurion used to call her the best man in his government. She started life as Goldie Mabovitch, born to a Jewish family in the Ukrainian city of Kiev in 1898. Her Russian childhood left her, she said, with ‘no happy or even pleasant memories’, but the family emigrated to the United States and from 1906 lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where her father had a job as a railroad carpenter, her mother ran a grocery, and she went to school. A convinced Zionist from an early age, she married a sign-painter named Morris Myerson and in 1921 she and her husband left for Palestine where they lived in a kibbutz which Myerson hated. They had two children but the marriage broke up and Myerson died in 1951. By that time his tough-minded former wife had risen high in Israeli politics.

As head from 1946 of the political department of the Jewish Agency, which represented the Jews to the British authorities, she worked for the many Jewish refugees who had fled Europe for Palestine in violation of British immigration rules and for the release of leading Zionists who had been arrested. She was 50 when she became one of the signatories of Israel’s Proclamation of Independence in Tel Aviv’s art museum in 1948 when she found herself close to tears and remembering her schooldays when she had scanned the names of the men who signed the American Declaration of Independence. Elected to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in 1949 she was briefly her country’s first ambassador to Moscow, holding Israel’s first-ever passport. She was minister of labour from 1949-56 and foreign minister from 1956 until 1966. By then she had Hebraicised her married name to Golda Meir. She supported the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, in party conflicts and when he died in 1969 the party pressed her to succeed him on a temporary basis even though she was 70 and officially retired.

She moved into the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem and began to get used to ‘the permanent presence of police and bodyguards, to a work day of at least 16 hours and to the minimum of privacy’. She lasted until 1974, when she resigned after being heavily criticised over the Yom Kippur War. When she died in Jerusalem in 1978, she was 80 and it was revealed that for the last 12 years she had been suffering from leukaemia. Golda Meir | Jewish Virtual Library Tweet Golda Meir was born in Kiev in 1898. Economic hardship forced her family to emigrate to the United States in 1906, where they settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In high school she joined the Zionist group, "Poalei Zion" (Workers of Zion). She immigrated to British Mandate Palestine in 1921 with her husband, Morris Myerson, and settled in Kibbutz Merhavya. Moving to Jerusalem in 1924, she became an official of the Histadrut Trade Union and served in a managerial post with the union's construction corporation, Solel Boneh.

Between 1932 and 1934 she worked as an emissary in the United States, serving as secretary of the Hechalutz women's organization; she also became secretary of the Histadrut's Action Committee, and later of its policy section. When the pre­state British Mandatory Authorities imprisoned most of the Jewish community's senior leadership in 1946, she replaced Moshe Sharett as head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, the chief Jewish liaison with the British. Elected to the Executive of the Jewish Agency, she was active in fundraising in the United States to help cover the costs of the Israeli War of Independence , and became one of the State's most effective spokesmen. In 1948, David Ben-Gurion appointed Golda Meir to be a member of the Provisional Government. A few days before the Declaration of Independence , Ben­Gurion sent her disguised as an Arab on a hazardous mission to persuade King Abdullah of Jordan not to attack Israel . But the King had already decided his army would invade the Jewish state following the British departure. In June 1948, Meir was appointed Israel's Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Elected to the Knesset as a Mapai member in 1949, she served as Minister of Labor and National Insurance until 1956. In June 1956, she became Foreign Minister , a post she held until January 1966. As Foreign Minister, Meir was the architect of Israel's attempt to create bridges to the emerging independent countries of Africa via an assistance program based on practical Israeli experience in nation building. She also endeavored to cement relations with the United States and was successful in creating extensive bilateral relations with Latin American countries. Between 1966 and 1968, she served as Secretary­General of Mapai , and then as the first Secretary­General of the newly formed Labor Party . When Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died suddenly in early 1969, the 71­year­old Meir assumed the post of Premier, becoming the world's third female Prime Minister (after Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka and Indira Gandhi of India). As Prime Minister she inherited Eshkol's second National Unity Government administration, but this broke up over the question of continuing the cease-fire with Egypt in the absence of a peace treaty.

She then continued in office with the Alignment (Labor & Mapam), the National Religious Party and the Independent Liberals. The major event of her administration was the Yom Kippur War , which broke out with massive coordinated Egyptian and Syrian assaults against Israel on October 6, 1973. As the postwar Agranant Inquiry Commission established, the IDF and the government had erred seriously in their assessment of Arab intentions. Although she and the Labor Party won the elections (postponed due to the war until December 31, 1973), she resigned in 1974 in favor of Yitzhak Rabin . She passed away in December 1978 and was buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem . In 2009 documents revealed that a plot by the Black September terror organization to assassinate Meir during her trip to New York City on March 4, 1973, was foiled by the United States. A U.S. intelligence organization intercepted a communication between the Iraqi United Nations office and the Iraqi embassy in Washington D.C., containing specific information about placement of three car bombs around New York City meant to detonate when Meir was nearby.

The message was sent to the FBI, who worked with the New York Police Department to find and dispose of the explosive devices. Biography – Golda Meir » The Prime Ministers Biography – Golda Meir Golda Meir (earlier Golda Meyerson, born Golda Mabovitch, Голда Мабович; May 3, 1898 – December 8, 1978) was an Israeli teacher, kibbutznik and politician who became the fourth Prime Minister of Israel. Meir was elected Prime Minister of Israel on March 17, 1969, after serving as Minister of Labour and Foreign Minister.[3] Israel’s first and the world’s third woman to hold such an office, she was described as the “Iron Lady” of Israeli politics years before the epithet became associated with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion used to call Meir “the best man in the government”; she was often portrayed as the “strong-willed, straight-talking, grey-bunned grandmother of the Jewish people”.

After Levi Eshkol’s sudden death on February 26, 1969, the party elected Meir as his successor. Meir came out of retirement to take office on March 17, 1969, serving as prime minister until 1974. Meir maintained the national unity government formed in 1967, after the Six-Day War, in which Mapai merged with two other parties (Rafi and Ahdut HaAvoda) to form the Israel Labour party. Six months after taking office, Meir led the reconfigured Alignment, comprising Labor and Mapam, into the 1969 general election. The Alignment managed what is still the best showing for a single party or faction in Israeli history, winning 56 seats—the only time a party or faction has even approached winning an outright majority in an election. The national unity government was retained. In 1969 and the early 1970s, Meir met with many world leaders to promote her vision of peace in the Middle East, including Richard Nixon (1969), Nicolae Ceaușescu (1972) and Pope Paul VI (1973).

In 1973, she hosted the chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt, in Israel. In August 1970, Meir accepted a U.S. peace initiative that called for an end to the War of Attrition and an Israeli pledge to withdraw to “secure and recognized boundaries” in the framework of a comprehensive peace settlement. The Gahal party quit the national unity government in protest, but Meir continued to lead the remaining coalition. In 1974, after the end of the Yom Kippur War, Meir resigned as prime minister. She died in 1978 of lymphoma. In 1975, Meir was awarded the Israel Prize for her special contribution to society and the State of Israel. In 1974, Meir was awarded the honor of World Mother by American Mothers.[41] In 1974 Meir was awarded the James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service by Princeton University’s American Whig–Cliosophic Society. [Source: Wikipedia ]

Question: Who, in 1969, was the first female prime minister of Israel?
Answer: Golda Meir