THE WOMAN WHO OPENED THE DOOR TO WOMEN LEADING NATIONS
SIRIMAVO BANDARANAIKE
When her husband, Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, was assassinated in 1959, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party turned to his widow, a woman with no political career of her own, to hold the party together. In 1960 she became the first female head of government in the world, prime minister of Ceylon, at a time when the very idea of a woman running a country was treated in most capitals as a novelty rather than a possibility. That single fact alone reshaped the outer limits of what people around the globe imagined a woman could hold.
Bandaranaike pursued an assertively non-aligned foreign policy during the most polarized years of the Cold War, positioning Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka under her 1972 constitution) as a genuine broker between blocs rather than a client of either. She hosted and helped mediate the 1962 border dispute between China and India, and she was a founding force in building the Non-Aligned Movement into a body with real diplomatic weight, later chairing it in the 1970s.
Her three terms as prime minister, spread across 1960 to 1965, 1970 to 1977, and a final stint in 1994 to 2000 under her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga's presidency, made her one of the longest-serving female heads of government anywhere in the world, and she became a template other nations pointed to, sometimes admiringly, sometimes warily, when their own women sought executive office. Indira Gandhi in India and later Golda Meir in Israel followed within a few years, and the "first woman prime minister" precedent Bandaranaike set became a genuine reference point in debates about women's political capacity worldwide.
Bandaranaike proved that a woman could hold the highest office in a state, survive political defeat, and return to power, and she did so while making hard, often contested choices about language, economy, and alignment that shaped Sri Lanka's trajectory for decades. Her life is best understood not as an inspirational footnote but as a case study in how breaking a barrier and governing wisely are two entirely different achievements, and how history tends to remember the first far more warmly than it remembers the second.
365 men who changed the world.
Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.
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