Women on Top in the World’s Democracies

But it also highlighted the rising profiles of women in politics — a trend that will continue, no matter how much it terrifies insecure men like Trump.

….and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019

A century ago in Europe, leading suffragists — such as Inessa Armand, Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin — had little choice but to seek powerful men to validate their aspirations.

One such man was Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, who advocated the elimination of "old laws which placed woman in inequality in relation to man."

Armand was (allegedly) romantically involved with Lenin, and Zetkin interviewed him on "the women's question" in 1920, following his 1919 speech on the "tasks of the working women's movement in the Soviet republic".

This approach was understandable, but it proved ineffective. Lenin insisted that only socialism — with its promise of equality for all — could liberate women. "Wherever the power of capital is preserved," he declared in that speech, "the men retain their privileges."

But, while over 80 per cent of women in the Soviet Union aged 15-54 had jobs (as of 1983), few had careers. During the Stalinist era, women were explicitly told to return to the "family front".

My own grandmother was forced to give up her position as an educator after my grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, was appointed the head of Ukraine's Communist Party in 1937. She was supposed to serve as an example for other working wives of...