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?

sportsfanatic I remember the 70s. I wasn't old enough to vote, but I have a very clear recollection of life before Thatcher was elected. And I still hate what her government did to this country with every fibre of my being.

I've also seen both sides of the negative effects of Thatcherism. I grew up in the shires in a middle class family who suffered financially because of her government's policies; I now live in Yorkshire in an area that was destroyed by the same policies, the effects are still visible today.

Please don't try to pull the age card, we aren't all naive twenty-somethings here.

Part of the vitriol I feel for her is that she was a woman chose to deliberately turn her back on 'women's issues' as beneath her.

She attracts so much vitriol because she was PM for a very long time, much of which was spent destroying industries and communities, while simultaneously beginning the de-regulation of the financial markets which created spendthrift banks which has resulted in our current woes.

I see the fact that she was a woman as a disappointment, nothing else.

Similar to TheresaMayHaveABiscuit here... I can clearly remember the 70s. The three day week being a particular "high".

I mean a "high" of the 70s not Thatcher's governments. The only reason she served more than one term (IMO) was the Falklands War which created a very strange, jingoistic feeling in the country and created support for her when she had previously been suffering very bad ratings in polls. Also, she was lucky in her adversaries.

I don't hate Margaret Thatcher and I think she did a great deal for women... I don't understand your OP.

what do you think she did for women?

She showed the world that a woman could lead a country nationally and internationally in multiple circumstances and command the respect of male politicians. She educated the British in economics (sadly subsequent, male, leaders have failed dismally to maintain this major advance over other European nations).

and how do you see that as having helped women?

But she did those thing by becoming pseudo-male. I don't feel she furthered the cause of feminism at all, really.

I don't think she became "pseudo-male." What does that mean? It is true she wasn't a feminist and didn't seek to undermine women's unequal position in society, but I really don't understand what is meant by "pseudo-male," and it makes me worry that there is an idea that simply being a robust, powerful, ruthless politician is somehow masculine. Womanliness can encompass all of those things.

And womanliness can also encompass injustice, cruelty, lack of concern for the poor, etc. I don't want to think that being female corrals me into a smaller space, with less room for moral failure. That reminds me of the way men use women in war: they position them as the embodiment of all the virtues they are fighting for while they go off killing people. The conception of women as morally better than men is a stultifying one that deprives women of the whole arena of moral failure, moral challenge and struggle, and consequent moral achievement. So I like having the iconic example of Thatcher as a bad woman.

I don't think she became remotely pseudo-male. I know women who have discarded all their traditionally feminine features to succeed in public life, but Thatcher is not among them.

I don't think Thatcher was interested in feminism. There are many, many things she destroyed - i remember 'cardboard city' at Waterloo full of young people down from the north, unable to work up there, unable to claim housing benefit because she took it away, unable to find work in London.
I remember Docklands when it was this huge White Elephant - just empty office blocks. I remember how she dismantled the GLC (bloody awful idea) and allowed people to buy up council housing (leading to the chronic shortage of social housing we have today.) I remember the queues for magistrates court made up of women with children in buggies, who could not pay their poll tax. Chronic underinvestment in the railways, building the M25, school dinners just becoming the lowest grade food ever, my parents with pay frozen again and again.

She was not middle class - she was a working class grocers daughter, part of a working class culture where you looked after your own, cleaned your car on Sundays and kept your front step clean. Our society has changed since then - once you could be an ordinary person and become prime minister, but now you seem to have to attended a public school and have had media training and fake tan.

But the 1970's under Callaghan was bloody awful too.

Bonsoir - i know some people love/like Thatcher. But my post was really about the level of vitriol that is aimed at her amongst those who don't like her. The level of hate seems to me far higher than that aimed at male politicians that many dislike - especially after so many years since she was PM.

I think the level of vitriol is because she oversaw such a huge change in this country. She changed the culture, the fabric of Britain.

I think the level of vitriol is because she exposed socialism for the sham it is. Many people would love to believe in socialism...

She does deserve that level of hate, though. She was a really significant innovator. She challenged the state, and the whole idea of public services as a repository of our social solidarity in the face of economic dislocation, in a radical way that was wholly new and breached the post-war social settlement in a major way for the first time. In that sense she paved the way for current Coalition policies -- and for the erosion of public services under Blair. Blair and Cameron have just carried forward her radical break with the past.

The enormity of that achievement warrants the enormous hatred. Cameron tends to attract contempt more than hatred, because he is so much more middling than her. And her contemporary colleagues attract less hate because she was a very strong leader, with a high degree of personal responsibility for what her govt did.

Although, having said that, perhaps "hate" isn't the proper feeling. I don't think I hate her. Continuing strong and vocal disapproval, rather than "hate".

Indeed, Thatcher's greatest achievement is Tony Blair.

I don't understand why you think public services have been eroded since Thatcher's day.

I think Thatcher's achievements as a woman from her background to study what she did where she did and to enter politics at all, has been conveniently air brushed out of feminist history because we don't like what she did next.

Indeed, wordfactory. And probably Thatcher's greatest failing was not understanding that most people didn't have 1000th of her energy or determination to get on in life.

Yes indeed.
I think she trully believed that if you took away the comfort blanket people would pull themsleves up by their bootstraps. And that ultimately this would benefit them and society.

But she didn't get the fact that some people just can't. A failing of imagination perhaps.

To be fair to her, there are some people who cannot pull themselves up by the bootstraps but there are also an awful lot who don't really want to...

I must admit I used not to belive that. I thought society and circumstances prevented most from changing their lives.

But I am daily gobsmacked on MN at how posters seem to be passive in their own lives. No plans, no goals...it's alien to me.