First female prime minister

On July 21, 1960, Sirimavo Bandaranaike is sworn in as prime minister of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), becoming the first woman in the world to be elected head of government. She leads the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to victory in the July 1960 election, and holds office three times, in 1960 to 1965, 1970 to 1977 and 1994 to 2000.¹²³

She entered politics after her husband, Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, was assassinated in September 1959 by a Buddhist monk. Ceylon had been independent from Britain since 1948 and was a parliamentary democracy in which women had voted since 1931. Her husband's legacy, a Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism that had won him the 1956 election, and sympathy after his death carried the party, which asked her to lead it. She was first named a senator because she was not a member of Parliament.¹²

In office she followed a socialist and nationalist program. Her government nationalized banks, insurance and the oil distribution trade, took over denominational schools, and enforced Sinhala as the sole official language from 1961, a policy that deepened the divide with Tamils. She also took a non-aligned line in the Cold War, and she survived an attempted coup in 1962. Her second government wrote a new republican constitution in 1972, which changed the country's name to Sri Lanka, and put down a Marxist uprising in 1971. Her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga became president in 1994 and named her mother prime minister. Her example was followed by Indira Gandhi in India in 1966 and Golda Meir in Israel in 1969.¹²