Do you think part of the vitril/hate aimed at Thatcher is because she is a woman?

[lesley33]

Okay Margaret Thatcher enacted a lot of policies that made a lot of people very angry and she certainly didn't set out to do anything to promote the rights of women.

But I am struck about the amount of vitriol that is still aimed at her all these years later. There have been male politicians - Norman Tebbitt springs to mind - who have been responsible for similar policies and have been hated at the time, but I never read about people still hating these politicians many years later.

I'm not sure if this is just because Thatcher was PM or is it because she is a woman and by behaving the way she did, she stepped well outside traditionally permitted female behaviour?

What do you think about this?

I wonder if it was more that she is memorable because she is a woman, the only female PM to date, isn't she?

I still hate the lot of them. They destroyed communities by forcing people out of work, abandoned the weakest members of society, and in my opinion a lot of what we see today in terms of third generation long term unemployment can be directly attributed to their hateful and shameful policies.

See also David Cameron and his 'big society.'

I don't give a flying feck if she's a women. I'd have hated her equally had she been a man.

No. I think it's because she ripped communities apart, did her best to dismantle valued national institutions and radically altered the shape of our society as few PMs have managed to do, in a way that many people were less than happy with.

Some of the language used to attack her may be anti-feminist sometimes, but the reasons people hate her have nothing to do with gender, IMO.

No.

I will you give you full-on vitriol about Tebbit, John Fucking Redwood and John Major if you like.

Thatcher was placed in a special place as a woman by some media commentators at the time, and there were some misplaced expectations by others (a whole other essay), and she herself played with the image (another essay), but I loathe her because of her politics and actions. The same way I loathe John Redwood.

I do believe she was vilified for her policies, but more so as a woman politician implementing them.

I also suspect the lack of women in her cabinet, her refusal to countenance that gender inequality was an issue and the emphasis on policies that ultimately had a huge impact on women was no accident though. I think there was an element of internalised oppression in there. Also, to show any specific empathy for the plight of women, let alone pass any measures that could be even loosely seen as 'pandering to women' would only serve to remind critics of her own femaleness, and that she really didn't belong in such a high office. Pull up the ladder behind you and hope no one notices how hard you had to climb.

I would have to agree with the previous two posts.

Missy Thatcher was a woman, who came through the patriarchy and maybe felt that that was the way to behave...she had no female forbears to follow on from ( and before anyone gets cross, not even royal women had been able to overcome this)

That does not in any way excuse how she and her policies ruined this countries manufactuaring business, or how they ruined social housing, and kept the myth of benefit bunnies / social need from being discussed in the way it sometimes is nowadays.

thats just my opinion!

Spitting Image always presented her as dressed like a man, with the implication being that she was really a woman trying to behave like a man. As if women can't be right wing, bullying, etc too. Always sat uneasily with me tbh.

Yes, a lot of the vitriol is aimed at Thatcher because she's a woman, and a middle-class woman at that. The men around her at the time were famously cowed in her presence whilst bad-mouthing her behind her back. Their biggest problem, apparently, was that she didn't conform to the unspoken rules of the old school tie. The policies of the time set up a polarised society of winners and losers and many on the losing side had personal reasons for disliking the outcome. But the vitriol is because she was middle-class and female... a 'bossy woman' bucking the trend of personality-free, elderly white males that preceded her and, arguably, were the real cause of the damage that followed.

Always remember that the electorate voted her back in three times.

I do think she is partly hated for her gender but I've never been able to argue this clearly because for those whose lives were ruined the whole lot of them were equally bad.

yes

I hated her because she was evil. The fact that she was a woman had nothing to do with it. I hate Shiny Dave too...

I don't understand the Tory hatred on MN. The last Labour govt left the country in a mess. Noone on MN seems to ever mention this. Not a huge Tory fan, but just a bit

Anyhoo.....Yes I think vitriol against Maggie Thatcher is partly to do with her gender. And i find it sad that women are more than complicit in this.

"Noone on MN seems to ever mention this"

I do. I don my flame-retardant suit and thick skin cream & mention it occasionally.

She was a woman?????????

Cogito, you're braver than I am usually then

Well it makes for lively discussions. I'm old enough to remember life pre-Thatcher. Like Soviet Russia but without the fur hats and joie de vivre.

I imagine people hate her fo different reasons.

It's not because she was a women for me- heck I remember telling Mum that I wanted ehr to win in 1979 becuase it was about time a woman made it!

It's because it was a horrible time to live where I do now (South Wales) or where I did then, or be a single Mum, or vulnerable. Regardless of whether the mines etc needed to be closed, the area was left to destruct without input or care.

She broke the back of communities, hard working ones that could not survive under the changes she made. Not just mining towns- mine wasn't, mine was industrial and collapsed gradually under her weight.

Other people voted her back in; I did not. We are not all 22 on Mumsnet and some of us got to vote before she shoved off! And there are choices beyond Tory (yuck) and Blue Labour (yuck). Especially where I live now.

MamaMary, I think that's because no Mumsnetter remembers being diagnosed as malnourished under Labour. A few did under the Tories though.

I remember the riot van on the local estate (and we are not tlaking inner city either) as it became increasingly ghettoised and nobody could find work.

I remember working for the NHS under the last Tory Government.

And the Civil Service (albeit Major's lot).

I remember it being fairly common for people to be sleeping on the streets; that seems to be happening again.

I don't think it is because she is a woman. I think it is because she deserved it because of what her government did. And she was very much the leader of her government, much more so than Cameron is of his, for example. So naturally the vitriol focuses more on her than Tebbit et al.

Having said that, there is of course an element of woman-hating that supervenes on the rest of the vitriol directed at her -- one that comes from right and left equally. I remember very strongly that the nasty sexist term "handbagging" (referring to her very effective strong-arming and reprimanding of people on her own side whom she saw at out of line) emerged very suddenly as a media cliche at around the time that she was forced out of office. It did seem like, once she was ousted, men who had supported her were quite keen to re-characterize her undoubted political strength and dominance in a more gendered way, in terms of the old tropes of ball-breaker etc. It is reminiscent of society's panicky reassertion of femininity after women spent the second world war effectively performing "men's" roles in industry.

I don't mean to imply that those sexist currents weren't present during her prime ministership as well as after her fall, but it did really seem that they exploded at the time of her political death, and therefore that they represented a kind of cleansing/disavowal undertaken by a society that was still determined to treat a politically powerful woman as an aberration. Which sadly it certainly was.

Probably a tiny bit. But more of the hatred was because of her awful policies. I think she actually managed to rise above gender to a certain extent, but maybe that was because she was acting on behalf of men, so her sex didn't matter so much.

Of course a lot of it was because she was a woman. Women are supposed to passive, fragile, submissive, indecisive and smile sweetly while deferring to men don'tcha know?

Yes. I was only a child when she was in power, but I remember her gender featuring heavily in insults that were thrown at her from the adults around me. For example, no one is calling David Cameron a 'frigid bitch' I expect, or a 'ball breaker' . But she was a right caaaaaaaaah

I went to see the Iron Lady with Meryl Streep and it reminded me of exactly how dreadful she and her party were.

The whole thing was interpersed with clips of the violence that the Thatcher government caused.

It's not because she was a woman, it's because she and her party conducted a wholesale attack on the British working class.

Cogito I also remember the pre Thatcher decade. Working through it, raising children through it... beset by millions of days lost through (often) politically motivated strikes, flying pickets, Britain - the modern day Greece of Europe - relying on the IMF to save us from bankruptcy, the winter of discontent, the rubbish piling up in the streets, the dead left unburied... horrible horrible time.

The incompetency of the Government and its inability to face up to strike blackmail ushered in Thatcher because the country had had enough - and the rest is history. So she is hated for having to shovel up the shit left by the previous Government.

You see a similar situation this time around - irrespective of the global 2008 crunch - not unions this time but a spendthrift Government who, though borrowing less than the previous one, had the major difference of borrowing against a background of having already spent a lot of the country's assets (e.g. selling off our gold at the bottom of the market - great decision that). So the Government was the equivalent of the sub prime mortgagees in the US - borrowing when they had no backup to support it when times got rough. Remember Liam Byrne "Dear chief secretary, I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left."?

So this time it's Cameron and the coalition being hated for having to shovel up a previous Government's shit.

I wish Labour had won so it could be hated for shovelling its own shit for a change. It would be doing precious little different than the present Government.

And no, I am not a natural Tory, but I have a sense of deja vu over a Labour government's ability to foul up the economy.