Margaret Thatcher - Feminist Icon?

i really don't think littlgnu was doing anything other than stating a fact.

Thatcher was, and probably still is utterly heartless, i really wouldn't waste your compassion on someone opposed in principle to that quality!

She would have been horrified to be considered a feminist, let alone an icon.
She got where she did without any special measures, tokenism, just determination in a man's world.

I was an adult in the 70s. I was from humble origins with Labour voting parents and voted Labour myself but I was horrified at what was happening to this country. The old heavy manufacturing/mining industries were doing a pretty good job at destroying themselves well before Thatcher. They were inefficient, unproductive and dominated by Communist led Unions who were holding the country to ransom --"Everybody out" was the catchphrase of the decade. They were only kept going by huge public subsidies which we no longer had.

We were indeed the Greece of the 70s going cap in hand to the IMF while Callaghan froliced in the Seychelles -- "Crisis, what crisis"/Winter of Discontent etc. I was working in Germany for a while and we were truly "the sick man of Europe" and a laughing stock. Our German friends had a catchphrase "British Leyland" which they attributed to everything that was shoddy.

So it was a breath of fresh air to have someone in power who stuck to her principles and not sway with every opinion poll. She was determined that these Communist led unions should no longer bring the country to a halt, causing three day weeks and the lights to go out (we were even running out of candles!). Heartbreaking though it is to see these old industries and their communities die, they were well on the way to dying well before Thatcher.

No leader trying to revive an economy is going to deliberately destroy any industry that is actually productive.

A lot can be learned by how how other countries perceive us and I personally saw the change and the growth in admiration and respect that was felt for this country and Thatcher in particular. As such she was an inspiration for women all over the world.

About as feminist as Bernard Manning when it came to other women. No, actually, less so.
I bet she's not languishing in a pool of her own pee and poo unlike lots of other pensioners or waiting for some grumpy careworker who is being paid peanuts to spoon gruel into her mouth. But one can hope.

scratch "never" from the first sentence

I think Thatcher can be considered an icon, only this will never be acknowledged in this country.

Rightly or wrongly she was an influential figure and allowed a lot of people to view women in politics not as some token representatives of their gender but a formidable force.

Gorbatchev is at best irrelevant and at worst a hate-figure in Russia, yet his positive influence on the world is indisputable. Thatcher is similarly an iconic figure in the world of international politics and changing attitudes towards women, even if her domestic image is so controversial.

Besides whatever destruction she is blamed for, I do think that she would not attract the same level of condemnation was she a man. It just wouldn't happen.

If she'd achieved a lot of what she did without tearing communities apart and decimating the North then yeah, she'd have been great.

I was born in 78 so although too young to understand at the time she was PM, her reign spanned my childhood. We never had a bean and my parents attribute much of that poverty to her and her government. I'm going to assume they know what they're talking about as they are intelligent people who just never had a hope living under her rule with a young family in the 80's.

IMO to me Thatcher is an Icon, for the fact, she was our only (so far) female Prime Minister, and she was also a wife and mother.

For me that shows an enormous amount of things

I'm too young to remember her, but have an avid interest in politics, in no way do i agree with the thing she did.

Not to mention her great friendship with that other humanitarian champion, General Pinochet.

She's a woman of great integrity.

Sarcasm, right?

Thatcher is the best Prime Minister the country has had since Churchill, she modernised the economy and sorted the union bully boys out. The change the Labour party have undertaken since her time in office is the greatest sign of her success.

WetAugust, I remember Thatcher all too well, and I remember her gleefully fucking over the manufacturing base of the UK; gleefully facilitating the sinking of the Belgrano, full of teenage conscripts, when it was outside of the exclusion zone and sailing away from it; and encouraging the 'business interests' of her son, Mark Thatcher (who went on be a person of interest to various law enforcement agencies).

And I wonder what first attracted Maggie to the millionaire Dennis Thatcher?

I'm not offended in the least

Well I put cunt but in asterisk's.
Then the asterisk's disapeared.
I hate the woman.
I will not put anymore, I have no wish to offend fellow mners.

a what?

Maggie Thatcher is and always will be a in my opinion.

Mention her name around here if you really want to hear foul and abusive language.

She is hated to this day.

I just checked with my mum who says Thatcher was evil, and she's 65.

Do I win £5?

Of course you can disagree with what you consider she stood for.

I'm just giving you the context from the perspective of someone who was an adult in the 70s.

Personally I have more hatred of Blair than any other PM I've lived under. Heath would come a close 2nd.

Oh come on, how many people on here are young enough to not have been around when Thatcher was PM?

Besides, I have no personal experience of Hitler, but I'm not a fan of him either.

Sorry but just because some of us were not around in the 70s does not mean we are not allowed to disagree with what she stood for.

Edam - that's why I said she went too far and became delusional.

When i was a teenager in the 1970s it was just one big round of strikes. The electricity workers would strike resulting in power cuts, Then the miners would strike, resulting in a lack of coal and more power cuts. that strike would be settled and then the car workers / train drivers dockers etc would strike. Settle those and it would be the power generators turn again.

The WofD had hospital workers out - operations cancelled, refuse collectors out - rubbish piling high in the streets, transport workers out - food supply shortages, steel workers out - manufacturing industry ground to a halt, etc.

The dead even went unburied.

It was just one round after another of strikes holding the country to ransom as each scetor of the workforce attempted to keep up with the settlements of strikers.

What Thatcher did was break that pernicious behaviour. Heath and Callaghan had both tried and failed.

The miners strike was a dreadful period. She knew was she was doing when she stockpiled coal before taking them on. The Police in those days were violent - that existed long before Thatcher's time and there were many miscarriages of justice. Thatcher brought in PACE.

I'm no fan of hers. I couldn't wait for her to leave office. That Thursday morning she announced she was stepping down was fantastic!

I just get a bit riled when people who have no personal experience just trot out hatred about her. You're not one of them.

Btw, I saw the Maggie film a couple of months ago - entirely fails to mention her support for apartheid S Africa (and Denis's dodgy business dealings with that vicious regime). Of course they had to leave it out, because if they'd been honest, audiences would have lost a lot of sympathy. These days it's hard to believe the Young Conservatives used to sing 'Hang Nelson Mandela' at Tory Party Conferences for a laugh.

Wetaugust - I remember Maggie only too well. Growing up in South Yorkshire during the miners' strike, it was kind of hard to miss her. We were effectively living under martial law, with the Met up on overtime having licence to give anyone they didn't like a good kicking, or worse. My family aren't miners, btw, so I had no personal grudge - just saw what she did to people, at the time and for generations afterwards. She suspended the rule of law and the London media didn't even notice.

Maggie was strong all right - strong in the belief that she could do what the fuck she liked. We have been paying for it ever since - the current crisis is the direct result of her policies, tearing up any regulation of the City, destroying primary and secondary industries in favour of a 'service economy'. (And no thanks to the governments that came after her for continuing the love affair with the spivs in the City).

I was not born when she came to power but even by today's standards she's no feminist

I was 22 when she came to power.

I well remember the dying years of the Callaghan governemnt - Winter of Discontent etc. Many of you criticising Thatcher are too young to have had any personal knowledge of what it was like to live in those times.

The country needed a strong Prime Minister in 1979 to sort out the mess that Labour had left. It got it with Mrs Thatcher.

Where she went wrong was to believe utterly that she was always right and to fail to take advice from her Cabinet / political advisors.

She became out of touch and we ended up with poorly thought out policies e.g. Poll Tax.

She was no feminist.

But you are juding her by the standards of today and not those of 30 odd years ago when she was PM.

Those were very different times in terms of equality and diversity.