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

But if Mrs. Thatcher has helped the image of women in some ways, she has also helped perpetuate the pernicious myth that most women can make it without any change in present structures. There she stands, awesome in her successes, the perfect representation of the macho woman, the surrogate man.

In criticizing Mrs. Thatcher as a surrogate man, feminists mean she has betrayed women--not only politically but spiritually. Antifeminists mutter the same thing. She is abhorrent, anathema, unfeminine. She is herself destroying what is most precious and treasured about womanhood in pursuit of mere manly power.

Hardline feminists and antifeminists have colluded in the past to provide a model for maleness and femaleness that has the same unsavory roots. Feminists say women are better. Antifeminists say so too, but don't really mean it. (They mean they love their mothers more than their fathers.) Feminists say women are in touch with nature, with friendship, with humanity, while men are emotionally retarded, stunted beings, competitive and warlike in their inadequacy.

In clinging to the "specialness" of women, the feminists destroy themselves. What is important about women is how very little different they are from men. Research has shown repeatedly how the differences in class, education, race, background, and emotional experience are far greater between human beings than the gender differences between men and women. Of course there are differences, few would deny it--but they are less important than other differences. And yet the most important dividing line society makes is usually between boys and girls, men and women.

The real difference comes in women's and men's lives and expectations. Despite the social changes of the past quarter century, most women still expect to be largely responsible for the upbringing of their children. Few men do. If women don't care enough for their children, they know their children risk neglect. If men don't care enough, they know their wives will. That is the only important difference and it affects every aspect of all our lives from earliest social awareness. How much or how little chromosones fit into this pattern pales into insignificance beside this near-universal fact.

So Mrs. Thatcher, and tough women like her, pretend they have escaped the trap--but they haven't. They've done it at their children's expense, and at their own, in ways men never have to. Either you have no children, and you lose out on an essential aspect of human life. Or you have children, and they lose out. Successful Mrs. Thatchers who make it on men's terms change little for most women. It is all image and no content. Ostensible barriers may have fallen, but the real tactical barriers are as high as ever.

Mrs. Thatcher as an icon for women is a confusing image. So near and yet so far. She has made it look so easy. And yet so little has changed.