In every series it is a marvel to me how some historical women have dozens of published biographies, and other women have almost nothing. If you wonder why my podcast skews toward the US and western Europe, it’s the sources, people, it’s the sources. If there’s no source accessible to me, I have little to say, but women from other places deserve more coverage than they get, so I’m going to give it my best go anyway.
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Many women have served as the head of government for their respected countries. But usually that’s because they were part of a royal family, and they inherited the office. Occasionally it’s because they seized control (such as Cleopatra, Wu Zetian, Elizabeth of Russia, Catherine the Great, and Ranavalona I of Madagascar). Neither path is easy for a person with two X chromosomes, but they are not the accomplishment I’m talking about today. I’m talking about countries where there are elections, and you’re not supposed to inherit any office, especially not the top office. Which is not to say that family connections don’t play a role. In fact, it’s quite common for the way to be paved by a male relative, even in democratic countries, like my own. Some analysts call this “mediation,” and we’ve already seen it in this series with Lady Nancy Astor (episode 16.16), first woman to serve in the UK House of Commons. It is unlikely in the extreme that anyone (including Nancy herself) would have thought of her for that role, except for the fact that her husband had done it first. It’s not going to be too different in today’s episode.
Sri Lanka
The earliest country to elect a woman to the top job was Sri Lanka, and I am sorry to say that Sri Lanka was pretty much left out of my formal education. I’m guessing that’s true for many of my listeners as well, so a little background is in order.
Sri Lanka is an island country off the southeast coast of India. Its position made it valuable across the millennia for anyone who was interested in a trade route around the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka had many monarchies, and I am skipping over a lot before we get to the early modern period, when they attracted the interest of the Portuguese and then the Dutch and then the British.
As a British colony, the island was known as Ceylon. By 1931, they had universal adult voting rights, including for women (Kelegama, 1477). By 1948, they had independence from the British. They were still called Ceylon.
In 1956, a man named Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike was elected as Ceylon’s fourth prime minister. His name is a mouthful, which is why he is often referred to as SWRD Bandaranaike. You may have guessed from the name that he was a pretty Westernized Sri Lankan. He came from a wealthy family, had a private English tutor, and attended Oxford University in England.
During his campaign, he promised to remove English as the official language within 24 hours. And he did. For many people, this was an assertion of independence and identity. It was proof that they were no longer a British colony, though in fact they had not been a colony for a little while now.
The problem was that SWRD replaced English with Sinhala as the sole official language. Sinhala is spoken by the majority of Sri Lankans, but there is a sizable minority of Tamil speakers, not to mention some other smaller ethnic groups as well. The Tamil were not at all impressed with the idea of Sinhala as the only official language, and the stage was set for further tensions. The Sinhala tended to be Buddhist and the Tamil tended to be Hindu, though after centuries of foreign influence, there were a fair number of Christians and Muslims mixed in with both ethnicities. The Christians included the Bandaranaike family, so that was complicated too.
SWRD also instituted a number of socialist reforms intended to swing away from the capitalist English systems that had been imposed during the colonial period.
There is no knowing how any of this would have turned out for Sri Lanka because on Friday, September 25, 1959, a Buddhist monk waited for his turn to present a petition to the prime minister, and when SWRD appeared, the monk pulled out a revolver from under his robes and shot the prime minister (Barrow, Finding the Nation, 784). That was not a twist I was expecting from what I know about Buddhist monks, but I suppose history does prove that humans are capable of ugliness, even when they also espouse something beautiful.
The exact causes of the monk’s discontent are a little obscure to me, and perhaps they were to everyone, but the point is that Sri Lanka was now leaderless.
Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Housewife Turned Prime Minister
It is not uncommon in world history for a widow to find herself stepping up for her dead husband. SWRD’s wife would have been of little interest to historians if he had lived. But he didn’t live.
Sirimavo Bandaranaike came from another wealthy Sri Lankan family. She had grown up on an estate, in a family that ran the local courts and the local politics. She said about her family home that:
“We cared about the villagers just as they did about us. They were interested in our welfare as much as we were in theirs. It was the feeling we had for each other that was important. We were all ‘people of the place’ to put it idiomatically and it made us kin.” (Quoted in Wickranasinghe, 56)
I have no doubt that Sirimavo was telling the truth as she saw it here, but there’s also the possibility that she misunderstood the relationship. People at the top of the hierarchy tend to do that.
Sirimavo herself was a Buddhist, but she was educated in Christian schools, and she spoke English as well as Sinhalese. In 1940, she married SWRD Bandaranaike, which was a bit of a scandal. His family had money, but they weren’t of the same social standing as Sirimavo’s family. She was considered to be marrying beneath herself.
She had three children, hosted parties for her husband, and worked in social welfare projects. She was president of the All Ceylon Women’s Association, and she advocated for women’s education and family planning (Telegraph). All of this was exactly what was expected for a political wife of this time period. No one thought of her as more than that, nor did she think of herself as more than that, but that does not mean she did not have political opinions. An observer at the time said later that “she played no visible role in his political activities but it was rumoured she had strong views on several current issues which she expressed around the family breakfast table with conviction” (Sirimavo, 139).
By March of 1960, a new election had brought a new party and a new prime minister to the forefront, but the man lost his vote of confidence within months, and on July 21, 1960, Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the world’s first woman elected prime minister in a decisive victory for the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. She was forty-four years old. She had no university degree. She had no parliamentary experience. She had never led any organization that included men (Sirimavo, 139). No woman had ever done this role, anywhere. Her opponents thought for sure she would fail.
The election of a woman made global headlines and caused unexpected consternation. The British newspapers weren’t even sure what to call her. The normal term was statesman, but they didn’t like that for her, so they invented a new word: stateswoman (Sirimavo, 140).
Sirimavo’s one and only biographer wrote of her that “If Mr Bandaranaike’s stature as a politician and leader was built up over decades of campaigning, Sirimavo donned hers like a cloak that had been lying in her wardrobe for years, unworn, but which had been pressed and kept ready for wearing at any given moment” (quoted in Perera, 34).
She herself was eager to explain her presence in this role, not by rejecting her femininity, but by embracing it. She said early on that “I feel most strongly the home is a woman’s foremost place of work and influence, and, looking after her children and husband, duties of the highest importance. But women also have their vital role in civic life, they owe a duty to their country, a duty which cannot, must not be shirked” (quoted in Sirimavo, 140).
When British reporters asked her if she would like to see more women in politics, she said yes with no hesitation (see the end of the BBC video below).
The truth was that though her path to power was not the norm, it was not a bad education for it either. She had spent years watching government work. Now it was her turn to make it work.
Her Political Career
It is not surprising that she continued her husband’s policies. They were the policies of the party that elected her. She nationalized many industries, including newspapers, banking, petroleum, and the formerly parochial schools. She was a leader among the non-aligned nations, which meant those that were trying hard not to be drawn into either side of the Cold War. She continued the protection of Buddhism and Sinhala as the official language, and when the Tamil were restless, she called out the troops.
In 1962, she survived a military coup attempt.
In the 1965 elections, her party lost power and Sirimavo became the leader of the opposition. She was the first woman in that role too.
In 1970, the elections went just the other way, and she was prime minister again.
In 1971, there was another insurrection, which she also survived.
If you’re finding me hazy on the details here, yes, I agree. My sources don’t have much in the way of details.
In 1972, she oversaw the formal change from Ceylon to the Republic of Sri Lanka under a new constitution, losing forever the dominion status and cutting the final cord with the British empire. She was also instituting land reform, setting a ceiling on the amount of land that any one person could hold and removing several plantations from British control (Perera, 34).
On the other hand, the constitution inflamed tensions with the Tamil. Sinhala was still the official language, Buddhism was given primary status, minority communities lost some of their previous protections, and power was consolidated into government agencies in which Tamils were not represented. Perhaps most damaging of all were the changes to university admissions criteria, which were blatantly discriminatory. For example, the exam to join the Medical Faculty at the university was scored out of a total of 400 points. If you were Tamil, you had to earn at least 250 points to qualify. But if you were Sinhalese, you only had score 229 (Wickramasinghe, 292). The Tamil youth were not at all pleased with their prospects.
How much of this was directly Sirimavo’s policy, I have been unable to determine, but it happened under her watch. She was also not helped by the reality of economic decline. In 1977, her party lost the elections again, and she was no longer prime minister. This time she was even investigated for abuses and expelled from Parliament, though her rights were later restored. While she was out of office, the Sinhala-Tamil conflict exploded into civil war.
She was later reinstated and served as leader of the opposition.
In 1994, her daughter Chandrika ran for election and became the president with the goal of promoting peace. The whole system had changed in the meanwhile. Prime minister used to the head of government, but it was now more of a ceremonial role, while the president did much of the day-to-day work. Chandrika gave the prime minister role to her mother, so in her 80s, Sirimavo was prime minister for the third time. Even so, there were rumors of dispute between mother and daughter. Certainly Chandrika was moving Sri Lanka away from the socialist policies her mother had championed.
In 2000, Sirimavo stepped down for health reasons, and she died later the same year, just hours after casting her vote in a parliamentary election (Perera, 35). It was a fitting end.
Sirimavo’s Legacy
Sirimavo’s career may have begun as “mediated,” which in political science means she got it on the basis of her husband’s position and continued his policies, but at the end of the day, she was a far more significant political figure than he was. He served for three and half years. Her political career lasted four decades, and she was well beyond his policies by the end.
Sirimavo was the first woman in the history of the world to be elected to the top job, but she was certainly not the last. Within a few years of Sirimavo’s original election, India elected Indira Gandhi, and then Israel elected Golda Meir. As of March 2026, the Pew Research Center reports that there are 193 member states in the United Nations, and 63 (or about a third) of them have had a female leader at some point. Most of those 63 have had such a woman very recently. Or to state it differently, most of the women currently serving as their country’s leader are the first woman to do so in that country. This is true of Mexico, Japan, Namibia, and Italy, among others. A handful of countries have elected more than one woman in their history. These include the Philippines, Argentina, Iceland, and the UK.
And speaking of the UK, I have one more thing to say. I do a daily On This Day in Women’s History post on Threads and Substack, and every time I have dared to mention a historical date regarding Margaret Thatcher, first female prime minister of the UK, I get flooded with people angrily responding that she was a terrible person, that her policies were disastrous, and that it’s horrible that I’m celebrating her.
I am always confused by these responses because a date and a fact are not a celebration. They are certainly not an endorsement of all Thatcher’s policies. In the research for today, I definitely got the impression that there were Sri Lankans who were unhappy with Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and if I had more Tamil sources (which I don’t), I’m quite certain they would have a lot to say for themselves.
My question is why would anyone expect anything else? Political figures are polarizing by the very nature of the job. A country will not necessarily be better run if women do the running because both men and women are capable of mistakes, incompetence, dishonesty, greed, and circumstances beyond their control. As more and more women move into this field, it is inevitable that some of them will do an objectively bad job, and all of them will do a subjectively bad job according to their political opponents. None of that is new. Just take a look at all the male politicians, and you’ll see what I mean.
So what I think is worth celebrating is not any particular powerful woman or her policies, but merely the fact that to an increasing degree, the world is no longer dismissing about half of humanity’s talent, skill, and hard work on the ridiculous basis of chromosomes and genitalia. If you double the number of people who can be elected, then surely that should improve our odds of finding someone who will do the job well. Odds are not a guarantee. But it is moving in the right direction.
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Selected Sources
Barrow, I. “Finding the Nation in Assassination: The Death of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and the Assertion of a Sinhalese Sri Lankan Identity.” The Historian, vol. 76, no. 4, 2014, pp. 784–802, https://doi.org/10.1111/hisn.12050, 10.1111/hisn.12050. Accessed 9 July 2026.
Chavda, Janakee. “About a Third of UN Member Countries Have Ever Had a Woman Leader.” Pew Research Center, 2 Mar. 2026, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/02/about-a-third-of-un-member-countries-have-ever-had-a-woman-leader/. Accessed 12 July 2026.
Dugger, Celia W. “From 2000: Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka Dies at 84; First Woman Premier.” The New York Times, 6 Mar. 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/world/asia/sirimavo-bandaranaike-dead.html. Accessed 10 July 2026.
Harris, Ian. Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth Century Asia. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010.
Kearney, Robert N. “Women in Politics in Sri Lanka.” Asian Survey, vol. 21, no. 7, 1981, pp. 729–46, 10.2307/2643618.
Kelegama, Saman. “Development in Independent Sri Lanka: What Went Wrong?” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 35, no. 17, 2000, pp. 1477–90, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4409207. Accessed 9 July 2026.
Perera, Sarath, et al. Sirimavo: Steering the Destiny of a Nation. Bandanaraike Museum Committee, 2022, https://sirimavobandaranaike.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/SB-WEB-BOOK-Introduction.pdf. Accessed 9 July 2026.
Sirimavo: Honouring the World’s First Woman Prime Minister. Edited by Tissa Jayatilaka, The Bandaranaike Museum Committee, 2010, https://sirimavobandaranaike.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/SIRIMAvo-Book.pdf. Accessed 12 July 2026.
Wickramasinghe, Nira. Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History. Oxford University Press, 2014.
https://noolaham.net/project/977/97612/97612.pdf
“Sirimavo Bandaranaike.” Telegraph.Co.Uk, 11 Oct. 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20180618131736/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1369772/Sirimavo-Bandaranaike.html. Accessed 9 July 2026.