Golda Meir

Golda Meir was a Russian-Israeli politician and stateswoman whose 60-year political career produced her 1969–1974 service as the fourth Prime Minister of Israel — making her the first woman ever to serve as Israeli Prime Minister and one of the defining 20th-century women heads of government. She was born Golda Mabovitch on May 3, 1898, in Kiev, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine), into an Russian-Jewish working-class family. Her father Moshe Mabovitch was a Russian-Jewish carpenter and her mother Bluma Naiditch was a homemaker. The 1903 Kishinev pogrom and the 1905 Russian-Empire anti-Jewish pogroms produced her family's 1906 emigration to the United States.

Her 1906 family arrival in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and her education at the Milwaukee Normal School (now University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, 1916) launched her early-career path. Her early-career Milwaukee-area political activism across the 1910s — including her 1915 founding membership in the Milwaukee Young Poale Zion Labor-Zionist youth movement — launched her subsequent Labor-Zionist political career. Her 1921 emigration to British Mandatory Palestine (with her husband Morris Meyerson) and her subsequent 1921–1924 work at the Merhavia kibbutz launched her Palestinian Yishuv political career.

Her 1928–1948 service as the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labour) Women's Labor Council secretary produced her late-1920s, 1930s, and 1940s Palestinian Yishuv political leadership. Her May 14, 1948 signing of the Israeli Declaration of Independence as one of the 24 declaration signatories — and her subsequent 1948 service as the first Israeli ambassador to the Soviet Union — launched her Israeli national-government career.

Her 1956–1966 service as the Israeli Foreign Minister under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion produced her 1956 Hebraicized name change from Golda Meyerson to Golda Meir. Her March 17, 1969 election as the fourth Prime Minister of Israel — at age 70, the third Israeli Prime Minister to die in office — produced her 1969–1974 Israeli Prime Minister service across the September 5, 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the October 6, 1973 Yom Kippur War. The April 11, 1974 resignation following the post-Yom-Kippur-War Agranat Commission report produced her later biographical legacy. She died on December 8, 1978, at age 80, in Jerusalem, of lymphatic cancer.

Her name Golda derives from the Yiddish meaning "gold." Golda has been a rare but enduring American girls' name across the 20th century, primarily within Jewish-tradition families.