20th Century Female Dictator, Not a Monarch?

Was just pondering this yesterday so I thought I'd throw it out there.

Would a female dictator be possible at any point in the 20th Century? One that did not inherit her position but rose up like many of the "Strong Men" of the time? Can be anywhere in the world.
 
Was just pondering this yesterday so I thought I'd throw it out there.

Would a female dictator be possible at any point in the 20th Century? One that did not inherit her position but rose up like many of the "Strong Men" of the time? Can be anywhere in the world.

Under Socialism possibly? Rosa Luxembourg as a possible example?
 
Well-observed on Gandhi and Jiang Qing, but...

For an extra challenge, you can try to make it someone who wasn't related to a male leader who either had the more powerful job(eg. Mao) or preceded the woman(eg. Nehru).

(Not making a new rule here, but I will be extra-impressed if someone can meet my criterion.)
 
Jacqueline Creft was a cabinet minister in the dictatorial New Jewel government of Grenada. Contra my previous criterion, she WAS the romantic partner of Maurice Bishop, though it's not clear to what extent her rise coattailed on his.

Creft was one of the people killed when the even more dictatorial faction of New Jewel staged the coup which so ticked off Ronald Reagan.
 
Well-observed on Gandhi and Jiang Qing, but...

For an extra challenge, you can try to make it someone who wasn't related to a male leader who either had the more powerful job(eg. Mao) or preceded the woman(eg. Nehru).

(Not making a new rule here, but I will be extra-impressed if someone can meet my criterion.)
Ideally that would be the rule, as said in the OP - no inheritance. It almost definitely counts as inheritance if it's the spouse or daughter of the previous leader.
 
Alice Auma seems to have been more of a mystic than a politician, and probably too idiosyncratic a personality to really run anything, even if she did manage to come to power in Uganda. Still, she was a woman, and more-or-less leading a political movement.
 
My first thought was Elena Ceaucescu (have her husband die, and leave everything to her).

If relations-to-male dictators is cheating, I wonder how dystopian you could make Thatcher's Britain...
 
Indira Ghandi came close.

Right for a while around the mid '70s she effectively dismantled democracy in India, and rejected Western criticism. "Just a few years ago," she observed, "there was a euphoria in the West about China and China is an authoritarian country."
 
Right for a while around the mid '70s she effectively dismantled democracy in India, and rejected Western criticism. "Just a few years ago," she observed, "there was a euphoria in the West about China and China is an authoritarian country."

Thing is, a lot of the hoopla around China at that time was based on the idea that they WEREN'T authoritarian: naive ideologues in the West really believed that the Red Guards were a spontaneous uprising, and that the youth were running the country.

Which at a superficial glance, might have seemed plausible, if you compared the China of the Cultural Revolution to that of the Soviet-style bureaucrats of the fifties and early 60s, or better yet, to the Confucian patriarchs of earlier eras. However, with India, western observers would most likely be comparing the Emergency to the three previous decades as "the largest democracy in the world". By which standard(however idealized it may have been), Mrs. Gandhi's authoritarianism is gonna suffer by comparison.

Not that I would want to overstate the extent to which discussion of India was a major part of peoples' conversational repertoire in the mid-1970s. In comparison to the USSR or China, it really wasn't on the radar, pro or con.
 
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Yekaterina Furtseva was the only female member of the Soviet Politburo in the pre-Gorbachev era - it's a long shot for her to get the big job, but maybe if she doesn't fall out of favor in 1960, she could be a dark-horse compromise candidate after Khrushchev falls.
 
If you enforce the 'no relationship with a prior leader' rule I cannot think of any way to get a female dictator in the 20th Century unless a military junta decides to install a woman as a 'figurehead' dictator. The other possibility would be Golda Meir declaring an emergency in a dire crisis and dismissing parliament with the support of the military (borderline but not ASB). For Maggie to do that is ASB, IMHO.
 
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