Golda Meir became Israel's first female prime minister

When Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died suddenly in early 1969, Israel’s governing coalition fractured over who should replace him. The party’s central committee turned to a 70-year-old veteran who had already retired from front-line politics. On 17 March 1969, Golda Meir was sworn in as Israel’s fourth prime minister and its first woman to hold the office.

Meir was no newcomer. A signatory of Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, she had served as minister of labour and as foreign minister before stepping back. Her appointment also placed her among a tiny global vanguard: she was only the third woman in the twentieth century to lead a nation, after Sri Lanka’s Sirimavo Bandaranaike and India’s Indira Gandhi.

A self-described compromise candidate had become the face of a country at war.

Her five years in power were defined by diplomacy and crisis, culminating in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Worn by age, ill health and political fallout, Meir left office on 4 June 1974. She remains, to this day, the only woman ever to serve as Israel’s prime minister.