Is Margaret Thatcher a woman? No woman is if she has to make it in a man's world

Washington Monthly, May, 1988 by Polly Toynbee

Is Margaret Thatcher a Woman?

No woman is if she has to make it in a man's world.

Among world leaders, Mrs. Thatcher stands out in the crowd. In a row of suits, the eye is drawn to the single dress among Western leaders. Love her or loathe her, she isn't ignored. Women who succeed are twice as admired, because no one really thinks a woman can do it. As Dr. Johnson cruelly said, "The wonder is not that they do it well but that they do it at all."

So has she been a good thing for women? Most feminists say unequivocally, No. For her catalog of unsisterly sins is long, and growing.

The only prime minister since the war to appoint no woman to her cabinet, she has given fewer government jobs of any kind to women. Conservatives overwhelmingly predominate in the House of Commons, and the small number of women in Parliament is in large part due to the failure of the Conservative party to select women as candidates in any but the most hopeless seats.

She is a Queen Bee and she likes to stand out alone. In cabinet photographs, she doesn't want some other woman diverting the eye. The longer that there are no other women at the top in politics, the more remarkable her success looks.

However, the only reason she rose to such power herself was as a token woman. Edward Heath, the Conservative leader she eventually deposed, admits having appointed her to his cabinet as secretary of state for education only because he needed a statutory woman. After Heath lost the 1974 election, certain elements in the Conservative party were determined that he should go. Mrs. Thatcher, by a stroke of opportunism and daring, offered herself as a candidate against him when others demurred. She toppled Heath on the first ballot. It was a remarkable coup. Most of the Conservative members of Parliament had thought she had little chance. They only wanted to give Heath a fright. Imagine their horror when they found that, overnight, the most dominantly male, reactionary, and antiwoman party in the land had voted itself a rightwing woman leader and future prime minister.

She would probably not have made it to the cabinet if she hadn't been a token woman, for her politics were not in tune with the leadership of that time. She would never have made it to leader, albeit accidentally, if she hadn't been a woman. She has experienced nothing but advantage from her gender.

Once Thatcher was leader, everyone, or nearly everyone, said she could never be elected. The country was not ready for a woman prime minister, they said. The British were not accustomed to more than the occasional token woman in public life. As education minister, Mrs. Thatcher herself said in a television interview that she thought there would never be a woman prime minister in her lifetime.

According to feminists, we still haven't got a woman prime minister--not a real one. Mrs. Thatcher is only a surrogate man. When she first won the leadership of her party, she pronounced clearly to her press officer that she would never give interviews on the basis of being a woman. She was not interested in being a woman--and she certainly had no particular policies for women.

Do not imagine, either, that in some more subtle, back-door way, her womanhood has shone through. Women have lost, not gained, ground under her rule. Women at work have fewer employment rights. While women earned 75 percent of men's wages when an Equal Pay Act was passed in 1975, they now earn only 65 percent. Government ministers actually praise women's low pay, pointing out how low pay means women have more opportunities in the job market than men, and how job growth is greatest in women's sectors--cleaning, caring services, and catering. Her government has wriggled out from under European Economic Community directives on equal pay for work of equal value. She has packed the Equal Opportunities Commission with people guaranteed to render it silent and toothless.

On the welfare front, child benefits have been reduced, along with social security payments. The cuts have fallen hardest on the largest and most vulnerable group of welfare recipients--single mothers. At the same time she has introduced a new divorce law designed to let men pay less maintenance to their families. So with 84 percent of single mothers divorced, a higher proportion are on welfare--more since the new divorce law.

A man might not have gotten away with all this. Male politicians can always be made to feel at least a little guilty about women. But Mrs. Thatcher is a woman--no guilt there. It took a woman to put down women's rights so effectively. It took a woman to brave all the accusations about not caring for the old, the sick, the poor, and the helpless in a country that still firmly believes in the welfare state. It took a mother to do in mothers, a wife to do in wives, a working woman to do in working women. Womanhood has been her ace card, never her Achilles heel.

Sacrifice the children

This has left the women's movement virtually speechless. So, you've got a woman prime minister--what more do you want? What is the point of putting more women into power when they act no differently (or worse than) men? Gone is all that woolly rhetoric about how women are all sisters under the skin. Gone is that curious mysticism of the seventies that dwelled upon some imaginary golden age of matriarchy, where under women's power there would be no hierarchy, no war, no ambition. Gone is the idea that sisters are essentially, genetically, spiritually better than men.