Margaret Thatcher - Feminist Icon?

[OnlyANinja]

The Guardian asks a number of influential women (apparently) but I'd rather ask MNers.

[WetAugust]

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.

[tethersend]

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

Do I win £5?

[KatieScarlett2833]

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

She is hated to this day.

[thegirlwithnoname]

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

[perceptionreality]

a what?

[thegirlwithnoname]

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.

[KatieScarlett2833]

I'm not offended in the least

[LineRunner]

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?

[karetta]

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.

[LineRunner]

Sarcasm, right?

[WinkyWinkola]

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

She's a woman of great integrity.

[KateSpade]

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.

[bottleofbeer]

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.

[bemybebe]

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.

[bemybebe]

scratch "never" from the first sentence

[Walkinginwonderland]

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.

[Thermalsocks]

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.

[ProgressivePatriot]

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!

[sportsfanatic]

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/alevelstudies/1960-radicalisation.htm

10 million days lost to strikes in 1970 alone - closed shop rules, demarcation disputes, many wildcat strikes with flying pickets - even the TUC could not control the unions. The unions, not the democratically elected Labour government, were running the country in the mid and late 70s. Businesses - not directly involved at all with the industries involved were going bankrupt because of knock on effects of strikes.......without the IMF the country would have been bankrupted. The unions, sadly, were the architect of their own downfall and as responsible as the Government for the destruction of much industry (and I say that as a former union member).

They were disastrous times to live through - a different world and in no way comparable to the 80s and 90s.

It couldn't go on and this is why Thatcher acted as she did. (And there were many things she did that I found indefensible and hubris brought her down in the end). But in the early days she did what she had to do.

It could easily have been a male PM who took the action she did but I still say that the level of visceral hatred - not just on this board - but on many message boards - would not have been quite so high had she been a man.

[poloi]

She is definitely an icon she turned around the British economy which in the 1970s was almost universally called "the sick man of Europe", into one of the strongest in Europe. She didn't destroy industries she just stopped subsidising uncompetitive and unproductive ones. Endlessly susidising backward industries is lunacy of the highest order and the reforms she made should have been done 10 years before she came to office but Callaghan and Heath were too weak to make the necessary changes.

[dstevenson]

No chance, how can somebody who ruined the lives of many of her own people be an icon? She is famous but for not many good reasons... much like a Dictator is infamous!

[ecude]

Whether you like her or not and I don't she was the most important PM she has revolutionised politics in Britain and showed remarkable strength and courage to overcome the odds and become PM. This does make her a feminist icon in my opinion as she broke down the door to an otherwise male only position.

[biryani]

An icon to some, not so to most. Feminist icon? I think not. She reached the top, sure - bankrolled by a rich man.

[WinkyWinkola]

She herself said she owed nothing to women's lib.

[LineRunner]

Thatcher got where she did because she could.

Part cobra personality, sure: but being wealthy was also necessary.

She took an economy with a strong manufacturing base and industrial relations problems, and destroyed the economic base to get rid of the industrial relations problems. That was fucking stupid. The finance-based smoke-and-mirrors economy she replaced it with is the real sickness.