I haven't read the whole thread, and there is very little that Thatcher ever did that I don't absolutely abhor, BUT - I think that today it's easy for people to forget how different women's experiences/lives/prospects were in 1979 to how they are today and therefore underestimate her astonishing achievement at becoming prime minister despite her gender. It was amazing/unheard of/unbelievable.
Some of the very ordinary things I remember at the time she was elected include a comedian on TV making a joke about how she was "going to run the country, just as soon as she'd finished washing up and doing the ironing," I remember the audience laughing hysterically and, as a young child, thinking "Oh, yes, he has a point!" Not because I was anti-women or anything, but because that was how society was already training me to think. I also remember my Dad, a perfectly ordinary decent man, saying things like he was now ashamed to be called an Englishman (we were living abroad at the time.) People forget that such attitudes were not extreme or odd or laughable in 1979, they were the norm, and simply by overcoming all of that to get to the top, she allowed young girls like myself to look at the whole situation, at women's position in society at the time, and start seeing it for what it really was - pretty awful.