Bitten by the political bug, Golda became Minister of Labor; when asked if she felt handicapped at being a woman minister, she replied, “I don’t know. I’ve never tried to be a man.” She continued in this position until 1956, when she became Foreign Minister and served under Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. A man of strong ideas―he was the one who had prevailed on Golda Myerson to change her name to the Hebrew equivalent Meir—called her the only man in his Cabinet. In this capacity, she put in eighteen-hour days; she was what the Israelis call a bitzuist—a doer. In 1969, the Labor Party selected her as its candidate for Prime Minister. That was not exactly the retirement she had in mind. She said, “Being seventy is not a sin. It’s not a joy either.” The Party’s decision sent seismic shock waves throughout the country. She looked like a chain-smoking grandmother with a gray bun, stout frame, and Midwestern accent. Golda accepted the nomination, thereby traversing the improbable road from pogrom to Prime Minister. Golda had need of perseverance, as her tenure coincided with the Palestinian movement embracing terrorism, hijacking planes, and murdering Olympic athletes.
In 1973, Meir was upset when she did not hear from the Vatican about her plea to help broker peace; this silence was not surprising, as His Holiness had never recognized the legitimacy of Israel. Undaunted, Golda flew to meet Pope Paul VI. “Before we went to the audience,” she recalled, “I said to our people: ‘Listen, what’s going on here?’ Me, the daughter of Moshe Mabovitch, the carpenter, going to meet the Pope of the Catholics?’ So, one of our people said to me, ‘Just a moment, Golda, carpentry is a very respectable profession around here.’” After the head of the Church told her the Jews should be more merciful to the Palestinians, Golda responded, “Your Holiness, do you know what my earliest memory is? A pogrom in Kiev. When we were merciful and when we had no homeland and when we were weak, we were led to the gas chambers.” Of the historic meeting, Golda recalled that there were moments of tension. No doubt. She stated of her interior turmoil, “I felt that I was saying what I was saying to the man of the cross, who heads the church whose symbol is the cross, under which Jews were killed for generations…’’ Meir’s position knew no gray area; the situation boiled down to them or us. Her hardline stance was that, after the Diaspora, the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust, the world owed the Jews their ancestral homeland.
In 1974, at age seventy-six, Mrs. Meir relinquished the reins of government to Yitzhak Rubin, telling her party she no longer had the stamina to carry the heavy mantle of leadership. Surprisingly, towards the end of her life, the powerhouse revealed she was still nursing guilt about the years during which she had neglected her children in her drive to be a mother to her nation. Her mea culpa: “There is a type of woman who does not let her husband narrow her horizons. Despite the place her children and family fill in her life, her nature demands something more; she cannot divorce herself from the larger social life. For such a woman there is no rest.”
Rest finally came for Golda in 1978 when she passed away in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital at age eighty. In announcing her death, hospital officials disclosed one of Israel’s best-kept secrets; she had been suffering from cancer since the late 1960s, as she was leading Israel through its 1973 war. Ms. Meir did not permit disclosure of her illness, even at the end. Ironically, death came for Golda with Israel on the brink of peace with Egypt, a goal she had sought for almost six decades of Sisyphean struggle. In 1974, she said, “Someday, peace will come, but I doubt that I will still be here to see it.” However, Golda came closer to realizing her dream than she had expected. In honor of her selfless devotion, the government laid their own iron lady to rest near the visionary of Zionism, Theodor Herzl.
Golda had always downplayed her femininity, perhaps a necessary tactic to scale the ranks in a patriarchy. And yet she was at her core a mother lion who proved the truth of Kipling’s words, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
For Oscar Wilde, the one unforgivable sin was to be boring. “Dull” was never an adjective that society could pin on a centenarian ceramist. She lived and loved in her own way, and served as inspiration for one of film’s most iconic characters.
Beatrice Wood was born in San Francisco; when she was five, her family relocated to New York, to an exclusive zip code on the Upper East Side. Her mother’s main parental concern was preparation for her daughter’s debut to Manhattan society, which entailed a year in a convent school in Paris, enrollment in a finishing school, and summer trips to Europe to visit art galleries, museums, and theaters. Ironically, this exposure to the arts sabotaged Mrs. Wood’s vision of Beatrice following in her well-heeled footsteps. In 1912, the teen spurned the idea of becoming a trophy wife and dreamed of a future as a painter. Realizing the futility of argument, her mother sent her—nanny in tow—to France to study at the Académie Julian. Finding the curriculum tedious, Beatrice ran away from her chaperone and moved into an attic room. Never short on nerve, she peered through a hedge to watch Claude Monet painting amidst his flowerbeds. She moved to Paris, where she turned her attention to the theater, enrolled in the Comédie-Française, and shared the stage with Sarah Bernhardt.
With the storm clouds of World War I hovering, the Woods insisted that Beatrice return home, and to their chagrin, they were unable to dissuade her from a career as an actress. Bilingual and beautiful, she obtained a position in the French National Repertory Theatre under the stage name Mademoiselle Patricia, a necessary move as acting was not a reputable profession for a girl from the right side of the tracks. During her tenure, she rubbed shoulders with fellow thespians; she shared a dressing room with the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and knitted a scarf for Isadora Duncan. Beatrice was grateful for her work, as she wanted money to escape her home where ‘’I was a good little girl. Nothing is more revolting.”
After performances, she hung out with the most adventurous artistic characters in town, such as Man Ray and film star Myrna Loy. When informed that Edgard Varèse, a French vanguard composer, was in a hospital with a broken leg, she paid him a visit. Through him she met Henri-Pierre Roché, a diplomat and writer, who became her first lover, and who broke her heart. The problem was that she “was a monogamist woman in a polygamous world.” After their breakup, she fell for Marcel Duchamp, best known for Nude Descending a Staircase. He was an integral part of the Dada movement, an avant-garde trend that traditionalists considered blasphemy. Its adherents found patrons in the stratospherically wealthy Walter and Louise Arensberg—the first American collectors of modern art—who held evening soirées at their luxurious duplex apartment. Duchamp served as their star attraction; other guests were Beatrice Woods, Isadora Duncan, and William Carlos Williams.
A 1917 photograph shows Duchamp and Wood at Coney Island; Beatrice is seated on a fake ox, while behind her, in an oxcart, against a painted background, her lover is perched. Beatrice reminisced, “With Marcel’s arm around me, I would have gone on any ride into hell with the same heroic abandon as a Japanese lover standing on the rim of a volcano, ready to take a suicide leap.” Duchamp gave Wood her initial push into the world of modern art. After her remark that “anyone can do such scrawls,” he dared her to try. Impressed with Marriage of a Friend, he submitted it to Rogue magazine. Their romance ended when his relationship mantra echoed Henri-Pierre’s; lust can be divorced from love.
Roché, Duchamp, and Wood organized the Society of Independent Artists and published the avant garde journal The Blind Man, leading to Beatrice’s moniker, the Mama of Dada. Her life attracted attention when Roché’s novel about an amour a trois, Jules and Jim, inspired Francois Truffaut’s 1961 movie of the same name, where actress Jeanne Moreau played the role of Ms. Wood. Beatrice denied its verisimilitude, claiming she was a serial monogamist. Despite numerous