Margaret Thatcher: a feminist icon?

By focusing on gender and class, the biopic The Iron Lady paints Margaret Thatcher as a feminist icon. But was she? We asked a number of influential women

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Margaret Thatcher: a feminist icon?

By focusing on gender and class, the biopic The Iron Lady paints Margaret Thatcher as a feminist icon. But was she? We asked a number of influential women

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Photograph: Weinstein/Everett/Rex Features

Natasha Walter, writer and campaigner

Thirteen years ago, in The New Feminism, I wrote: "Let's start with Margaret Thatcher. No British woman this century can come close to her achievements in grasping power. Someone of the wrong sex and the wrong class broke through what looked like invincible barriers to reach into the heart of the establishment. Women who complain that Margaret Thatcher was not a feminist because she didn't help other women or openly acknowledge her debt to feminism have a point, but they are also missing something vital. She normalised female success. She showed that although female power and masculine power may have different languages, different metaphors, different gestures, different traditions, different ways of being glamorous or nasty, they are equally strong, equally valid … No one can ever question whether women are capable of single-minded vigour, of efficient leadership, after Margeret Thatcher. She is the great unsung heroine of British feminism."

Nothing I have ever written before or since has brought so much fury on my head. It was unacceptable then, as it seems to be now, for feminists to do anything but denounce Thatcher. Obviously Thatcher was no feminist: she had no interest in social equality, she knew nothing of female solidarity. I knew that then as I know it now; by the time I left school I was a veteran of protests that resounded to the chant of Maggie Maggie Maggie Out Out Out. We should never forget her destructive policies or sanitise her corrosive legacy. But nor should we deny the fact that as the outsider who pushed her way inside, as the woman in a man's world, she was a towering rebuke to those who believe women are unsuited to the pursuit and enjoyment of power. Girls who grew up when she was running the country were able to imagine leadership as a female quality in a way that girls today struggle to do. And for that reason she is still a figure that feminists would be unwise to dismiss.