Margarita Papandreou: Bearing Gifts to the Greeks?

This article reassesses the little known work of Margaret Papandreou, the American-born widow of Andreas Papandreou, in the context of the post-junta Greek women's movement. It highlights her Western background, her proactive global-minded feminism, and her public role as the socialist prime minister's wife (1981­1989). The article is based on published scholarship and other documentation that exists in the public domain but also draws from personal interviews with Margaret Papandreou and from an original study of her unpublished papers of 1972­1991. Given this variety of sources, it paints a fuller yet "historically" different picture enriched with biographical elements and statements of (self-)justification which respond to Greek journalistic slurs and attacks. In 1975 Margaret Papandreou founded the Women's Union of Greece and during the following decade she and other feminists rallied for the most urgent amendments to be made to Greek women's legal status in the family and in the labor force. She was a master at organizing, raising awareness, and directing the Union's exchange with the international women's movement.