Why Margaret Thatcher was one of the UK's most important feminists
Margaret Thatcher destroyed centuries of male supremacy when she become Prime Minister in 1979. Never again could a young girl be told her rightful place was in the kitchen
My son often jokes about the day, as a ten-year-old, when he ‘met’ Margaret Thatcher. It was 1986, in the streets near Edinburgh’s Meadowbank stadium, and we were part of a noisy anti-apartheid demonstration, protesting the then Prime Minister’s visit to the capital. As her limousine glided past us, her iconic helmet of blonde hair gleamed through the bullet-proof glass. The monster was real.
“Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Out. Out. Out,” we screamed. A few choice swear words were also hurled through the air towards her, but the Iron Lady remained unmoved. She had clawed her way from a flat over a grocer’s shop to become the most powerful woman in the world.
Only two years before, she had survived an assassination attempt by the Provisional IRA when they bombed her hotel in Brighton, killing five people. Thatcher had emerged from the rubble of the Grand Hotel unscathed, and gave her conference speech only six-and-a-half hours later. Chants of Free Nelson Mandela from a few hundred Scottish socialists were not going to faze the woman who, love or her hate her, had changed Britain forever.
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‘The truth about Thatcher’
Monday, October 13 is the 100th anniversary of her birth. Her home town, Grantham, will hold a Thatcher Fest, featuring Edwina Currie, drag queens and punk poetry. Her foundation, the Margaret Thatcher Centre will host a gala dinner with a guest list of 1980s icons including Dame Joan Collins, comedian Jim Davidson and the irrepressible Jeffrey Archer.
Her son Mark, who famously got lost in the Sahara desert, will pay tribute to his mother in his first ever public speech about her legacy. And last month saw the publication of a new edition of Thatcher’s authorised biography by Charles Moore – three authoritative volumes compressed into one 1,000-page hardback.
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A much more slight, but no less fascinating biography of Thatcher, by former magazine editor Tina Gaudoin, has also hit the bookshops. The Incidental Feminist: Friend, foe, femme fatale? The truth about Thatcher examines MT, as she is described within its pages, as a woman first, politician second.
Gaudoin’s thesis that Thatcher was a feminist by default is hardly original, even if does provide a provocative title, but her approach to her subject is novel, as journalist and author Libby Purves writes, “This is something genuinely new. Gaudoin approaches the strangeness and the strength of a remarkable Englishwomen with wide and honest research.”
I loathed everything she stood for
I read it with a detachment that I could not bring to its subject, even ten years ago. I loathed Thatcher for much of my adult life. She was the antithesis of everything I stood for, from her belief in an unfettered free market to her contempt for the trade union movement.
Her voice grated. Her clothes shrieked middle-class, middle England. And her bellicose manner seemed a direct attack on me, my class and my values. I agreed wholeheartedly with her when she said: “I owe nothing to women’s lib.” Thatcher was no feminist. She was the patriarchy in a navy blue dress.
But when she died in 2013, aged 87, I did not celebrate as I did the day she resigned as Prime Minister. Nor was I tempted to “tramp the dirt down” on her grave, despite previously, and often, singing along with gusto to Elvis Costello’s angry and bitter song.
Instead I found myself feeling quite sad. The grocer’s daughter had been such a big part of my life – all our lives – that her death, while not a shock, was a big moment.
Rejecting the F-word
In recent years, as I began to think about her more as a woman rather than political caricature, I came to the reluctant conclusion that while she did not subscribe to the women’s liberation movement, she was an accidental feminist. A woman who disrupted the male hegemony, not by burning her bra or writing books, but simply by being herself.
Reading Gaudoin’s book reminded me that Thatcher had become a member of parliament in 1959, four years before Betty Freidan published the Feminist Mystique, the book that sparked second-wave feminism.
There was no sisterhood to support a young Thatcher in her political ambitions, just as there were no women’s quotas to promote Labour’s Barbara Castle when she became an MP in 1945. Castle, like Thatcher, rejected the F-word. “I always thought of myself as an MP, not as a woman MP,” she said in 1980.
Determination and talent
Thatcher and Castle were women of their time. They were born into a society where a rigid class system was still in place, and where a woman – whatever her background – was expected to be subservient to the men in her life. But through sheer determination and unique talent, both flourished in a profession where women were still rare creatures.
Castle was the Prime Minister the Labour party should have had, while Thatcher became the country’s first women PM and one of the world’s most significant post-war figures.
Was she a feminist? Not in the strict sense of the term. She did not subscribe to systemic change, rather she advocated individual achievement as a means of liberation. But, as much by accident as by design, she destroyed centuries of male supremacy when she walked into Number 10 on May 4, 1979.
Never again could a young girl be told with any authority that her rightful place was at the kitchen sink rather than in the boardroom or in parliament. Maggie had shown the way. Her political philosophy may still to this day be anathema to many feminists, including me, but a century after her birth, Margaret Thatcher deserves her place in the sisterhood. Albeit on the right wing.
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