Margaret Thatcher.........unsung heroine for British feminism?

[thefinerthingsinlife]

Now I know she didn't "help" womens causes as such, ie equal rights however she was a female in charge of the country.

She proved to both men and other women, that women can be strong and powerful, and women are more than capable of being successful leaders, a mother and a wife.

What do you think?

I was thinking this. If you asked her if she was a feminist she would be horrified. She was very self self self. But she got to the top of what she wanted to do, and men were genuinely scared of her, which is an achievement. Would love to know how she did it.

She let us down so, so badly.

She brought nothing womanly to politics in my opinion. She's a cold-hearted abomination who betrayed her sex and irreparably damaged the national psyche.

How is it 'an achievement' to make men 'scared of you'?

Isn't that more of a male view of power. I prefer to think that women would strive to engender respect not fear. They should also encourage collaborative thinking rather than Thatcher's despotic ways.

But why? Why should women necessarily be different from men? And I think it is an achievement that she managed to get genuine respect from men.

She was a man in a dress.

I think quaere is right that it was an achievement for Thatcher to be feared by men. Thatcher was operating in a male world of power and it is power that is respected in that world. As Machiavelli said "it is better to be feared than to be loved". Also agree with quaere that Thatcher did it for herself, she didn't have a lot of time for other women in politics, she preferred to be surrounded by men. Collaborative thinking was not Thatcher's style, she wasn't a consensus politician.

In the sense that a whole generation of children - my generation - grew up with a woman PM as background. Like Obama today as President to a whole generation who know nothing but a black president. So the highest position in the land is no longer out-of-bounds. (Notwithstanding the queen, but that's hereditary rather than fighting your way through.)
In that sense she helped feminism.
In another sense she didn't- my generation grew up thinking well, a woman has been PM, what is left for feminism to achieve? So perhaps a false pinnacle.

She was a woman but not a sister.

I loathe that woman but I do accept that she achieved a great deal at a time when it was even harder than it is now for a woman to succeed in politics. I don't think she is an unsung feminist. What I think about her is pretty much unrepeatable...

what wukter said.

i do still feel a sense of pride that Britain had a female prime minister who was not in politics because she was the widow or a daughter of a politician.

i also feel that she expressed a lot of views that a lot of women hold but don't hear from many women in public life, and that is also a good thing.

I am also pleased that she was a woman who rose to the highest level and also had children; and I sort of admire her for not going into what that required of her much. probably there was nothing she felt she could gain by talking about it, as Yvette Cooper has already found.

i'd say she was neither a sister nor a brother, and that was the disastrous aspect of her.

wukter wrote - "Like Obama today as President to a whole generation who know nothing but a black president."

He's only been in power 18 months, not 18 years.

If it was 18 years US democracy would be in trouble.

I have a lot of respect for the way in which she made it to a career at the top of politics as a woman from a non-privileged background. She got herself a good education and a good job and fought her way into a political candidacy on her own merits at a time when there was grotesque prejudice against women. She did have the advantage of being able to rely on Denis's money to support her continued attempts to become an MP, but at the same time having young children was a mark against her when attempting to get selected to fight seats. I think it's easy to underestimate just how difficult this was to do.

And I think having a woman as PM did, as smallwhitecat says, have a quite significant effect on public attitudes towards women that it's perhaps only possible to appreciate now that we don't have one. The obsession with the WAG/celebrity culture and with appearance has (I think) arisen since her time (and female politicians are now criticised so much for their appearance that it's actually hard to envisage another making it to lead a party in the short term). That wasn't possible to the same degree when there was a woman in the Top Job.

But I disagree with most of her policies, and I think she did other women very few favours -- she appeared to think that as she had made it to the top under her own steam there was no need to address the inequities that made it hard for other women to do the same, and to an extent appeared to be actively anti other women in politics. The drive towards a model where most families needed two incomes may have pushed more women into work but (as we've found) largely into lower-paid areas and did absolutely nothing to get more men into the domestic and childrearing sphere (I personally think that until men are more equally represented as SAHPs and taking part in childcare there will not be anything approaching an equal balance in the area of paid employment).

Much as I despised everything about her politics I did admire her ability to succeed in a male environment.

When she fell (oh moment of great jubilation) I was disgusted as male journalists' coining of the perjorative term 'handbagging' to describe her successful manouevrings against male colleagues. It was a term that was never brought out until the end and it reminded me of the way that women steelworkers, etc were crushed back into their former roles at the end of the second world war: a worried male effort to reassert supremacy.

Sadly I think her atypical success just made it possible for people to talk down the real persisting difficulties for female politicians. In a way her success was like the business success of the lucky few during the 1980s who were able to play the economy successfully while others went to the wall. It is a kind of gender version of Tebbit's 'get on your bike' -- an 'I did it so what is stopping you?' mentality that ignores all the structural features that make it inevitable that most will fail.

smallwhitecat I had to chuckle when I read your post, because I grew up thinking the exact same thing!

I had never questioned that men and women are equal, I was brought up that they were, there wasn't ever any argument about that. That a woman was running the country was perfectly normal nothing special about it at all.

I think: get a fucking grip.

I suppose she might be some sort of feminist role model in that she emasculated a generation of skilled and semi-skilled working men, thereby forcing women into a more financially important role in the family. But only a certain type of feminist would take heart from that.

Also, she's hardly unsung, is she? People have been banging on about her being a feminist triumph from her early days.

I grew up being told that women could do what they wanted, then Thatcher happened and it was pretty commonplace in my small world to be perfectly honest.

Since I have grown up and become middle-aged, I realise that women are tolerated and very occasionally lauded in most areas of politics/business/work. Who knows whether she was tolerated and propelled to power, or gained power purely by her own talents? But to say she changed things is rather trite, I think. When you consider eg (just one eg) the pay gap that persists today.

And calling her a man in a dress is fucking offensive and totally defeating the point of feminism - women do not have to act like stereotypical women as society would like us to, to be women thankyouverymuch.

"She was a woman but not a sister" ROFL, there is no sisterhood. Men don't do things for their 'brothers' why should she? Sure, it would have been good but fuck it, she did other things.

I don't know enough about it, but I think she was propelled to power by people like Keith Joseph. She was given lots of training in how to lower her voice etc., similar to the way in which Gordon Brown was unsuccessfully taught how to smile. But I think a lot of her enemies underestimated her and thought it would be easy to manpulate her. The fact that she survived for so long in such an environment is a testament to her character and skill as a politician. She was no pushover, she surprised a lot of people, and despite her faults, will go down in history as one of our greatest Prime Ministers who instigated fundamental change. In comparison to her, Blaor is a minnow. She fundamentally changed the Labour Party, which produced Blair, and Labour ditched many of its core beliefs. She left her mark on the country and everybody knows her name. She was fond of using the royal "we", and I think she deserved it.

She was the equal of all the other world leaders at the time and was known as the 'Iron Lady'. The recent crop of leaders that we have had don't command the same respect at world level, except in their dreams (e.g. Gordon Bennett fantasising that he had saved the world and the planet). She was remarkable, I think it will be a long time until we see her like once again.