IN almost every sense of the word, there is a vast distance between this impoverished West African country and prosperous, sophisticated Chile. But they share a legacy of bloodshed and oppression that color the politics of today. And in both countries last week, it became clear that voters had chosen female presidents not despite – but at least in part because of – their sex.

For Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, an economist and banker who was inaugurated Monday and is the first woman elected president in Africa, and for Michelle Bachelet, a general’s daughter who was elected as Chile’s first female president, a key to victory was the power of maternal symbolism – the hope that a woman could best close wounds left on their societies by war and dictatorship.

Unlike Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, the strong women of the previous generation, Ms. Bachelet and Ms. Johnson Sirleaf have embraced what they have both called feminine virtues and offered them as precisely what countries emerging from the heartbreak of tyranny and strife need.

“We have been fighting wars for 15, 20 years in this region,” said Rosaline M’Carthy, leader of the Women’s Forum in Sierra Leone, who traveled here last week for the inauguration. “To see the first female president elected from a war-torn country shows people are now beginning to see what men have wrought in this region. It is the minds of men that make war. Women are the architects of peace.”

On the campaign trail, Ms. Johnson Sirleaf was sometimes called the Iron Lady. But another, more popular name was her favorite: Ma Ellen. In her speeches, she often compared Liberia to a sick child in need of a loving mother’s tender care.

Western news reporters, schooled in taboos against referring to female politicians as matronly or grandmotherly, hesitated to use such language to describe her. But she and her supporters heartily embraced it. It conveyed, in this culture, that this candidate might finally bring some unity and peace to a fractured society.

While Ms. Bachelet was more the Western feminist in her style, her core argument conveyed something similar: that she was better prepared than her rivals to heal her society and reconcile the Chilean military with the victims of its rule. She recently joked to a biographer that perhaps she should give up a struggle to control her weight. Otherwise, she said, “Chileans would lose the mother they have been seeking.”
nytimes.com

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