What is the secondary symbolic role of first ladies in western and Essay

What is the secondary symbolic role of first ladies in western and eastern cultures - Essay Example This is as a result of some countries opening up to new possibilities overtime and loosening up some requirements of a first lady. There are also women who are bold and determined to change the old ways of doing things. They did not accept to be controlled and aspired to be greater than second place. Despite the differences in nationality and cultural values, the roles of the first ladies are similar in numerous ways. Several women have gone out of their way to become leaders as first ladies and not as wives to their prominent husbands. In the western countries among the Europeans, one of the first ladies to break the norm was Angela Merkel who was the first woman to become the head of Germany making her husband Joachim Sauer the gentleman of Germany. Merkel was born on July the 17th in 1954. She started out as a trained physicist and joined politics in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin wall. She joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) political party in 1990. Soon afterwards, Merkel was allotted to Helmut Khol’s cabinet (Ferree, 2006, p. 94). Here, she was made the Minister for Women and Youth. After Khol was defeated in the general elections of 1998, Merkel was appointed Secretary-General of the political party CDU. In the year 2000, she was selected as the leader of the party but lost the candidacy of CDU for chancellor to Edmund Stoiber in the year of 2001. However, this did not shake off her determination to prosper in the male dominated politics. In the year 2005, Merkel run for the seat once more and defeated Chancellor Gerhard Schroder by a whisker. She had won by only three seats. Once the CDU conceded to a coalition pact with the Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel was acknowledged as the first female chancellor of Germany (Crawford, 2013, p. 38). Merkel’s political career gained more media visibility to her husband