The Real Iron Lady (18 page)

S
o wrote Margaret Thatcher in the
Sunday Graphic
in 1952, on the accession to the throne of the young Queen Elizabeth II. She added, ‘Why not a woman Chancellor, a woman Foreign Secretary?'

Most of her biographers, and, in particular, feminist commentators, point out that although in 1952, before she started on her own parliamentary career, the young Margaret Thatcher apparently believed that there was no limit to women's potential, she did nothing to help them fulfil that potential once she herself had reached the top.

It is indisputable that Margaret Thatcher did not promote women into her Cabinet. Although she made Janet Young Leader of the House of Lords, the first woman to hold that post, and in that capacity Lady Young attended Cabinet from 1981 to 1983, people were quick to point out that it did
not really count, because it was a House of Lords position. It was a different matter in the Commons. She appointed a number of able women to ministerial posts; some, like Lynda Chalker and Angela Rumbold, reached the position of Minister of State, but she promoted them no further. She encouraged her junior women ministers and took notice of what they said. The same went for Conservative women MPs, who saw her regularly and lobbied her on concerns particular to women, especially on the regular occasions when it seemed that the Treasury might have its eyes on an issue especially relevant to women, for example child benefit. She was close to senior women in the Conservative Party, as Joan Seccombe later explains. She was very conscious of the women's vote, and from the very beginning of her political career, quite shamelessly appealed to women voters by being prepared to be interviewed about clothes and domestic matters. She constantly explained policy matters by using household examples: the housewife needing to balance her budget, for example. But the fact that she did not bring other women into the Cabinet cannot be ignored.

It is also indisputable that she failed other feminist tests. She did not take up the cause of reducing unequal treatment for women in the workplace, although she could have done; she had, after all, always worked herself. Given her strong belief in self-help, she might well have made much of the need to engage in public life the 52 per cent of the population accounted for by women. She could have
encouraged more women to come into politics, although she did support Emma Nicholson's High Flyers initiative in the early 1980s which had that aim, and was indeed very successful.

I believe that there are a number of reasons for her lack of interest, apparent or real. One reason may well be – and many have advanced this argument – that she was a queen bee and wanted no competition in the hive. But as always with Margaret Thatcher, there are no facile explanations, and the truth about her is always complicated.

Chapter 8 of this book explored the various ways in which Margaret Thatcher was an outsider in the world she chose to conquer. We have seen how she described herself as being ‘portrayed as an outsider, who, by some odd mixture of circumstances had stepped inside and stayed there for eleven-and-a-half years; in my case the portrayal was not inaccurate'. If she felt herself to be an outsider by class, education, academic discipline and formation, how much more of an outsider, in the world she had chosen, did she feel herself to be as a woman? And not just any woman, but the first woman to be Prime Minister of Britain?

There is no indication that her father, the formidable Alderman Roberts, saw any particular limit to what she could achieve. There is no record of him telling her that she could not do this or that because she was a woman. She went to a girls' school and a women's college at Oxford, and did not lack for female role models. The thought
that she might be prevented by her gender from doing what she wanted does not seem to have occurred to her. She apparently had no difficulty in getting a job as a research scientist, qualifying for the Bar and entering Chambers, although she does say in
The Path to Power
that she was, as a woman, at times made to ‘feel small in industry, at the Bar, and in Tory constituency politics'. She did have misgivings about becoming an MP when the pay would not have been enough to support her, but once the job attracted a salary of a thousand pounds per annum, she knew she could afford to pursue her aim. In the event, of course, she married a rich man, and, as she always pointed out, this helped in many ways, not least with the cost of childcare and secretarial help in the Commons. It really is possible that she thought that other women could do what she had done.

It is also possible to argue that her generation – she was born in 1925 – had something to do with her apparent imperviousness to the enormous wave of feminist thought which hit Britain in the early 1960s, with much media coverage and discussion of the ideas of Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir. Until she set out on her political career, she had encountered no insuperable problems on account of her gender. She was already a noticeable and ambitious MP by the time that women everywhere were talking about feminism. She would certainly not have wished to be typecast as an MP over-concerned with ‘women's issues', and it is at least possible that she
deliberately concentrated on other policy areas, like the economy. It is entirely understandable that she might not have wanted to become pigeon-holed. The sheer amount of prejudice she encountered on her way to the top might have felled a lesser mortal. To have courted even more prejudice and snubs for devoting herself to causes important mainly to women would have been too much to expect from any politician of her generation determined to reach the top.

When she arrived in the Commons, it was to encounter an atmosphere of comfortable clubby male exclusiveness, where women were an oddity and emphatically not One of Us. She apparently felt that ability was valued regardless of gender among MPs, but her view does not seem have been shared by many of her male colleagues. There were only twelve women Conservative MPs, including her, and as Jim Prior put it, ‘The few women in the parliamentary party tended not to be accepted so easily by their male colleagues' (Campbell,
Margaret Thatcher,
p.123).

(Old House of Commons habits die quite hard. When I arrived there in 1987, thirty years later, one senior Conservative colleague called me Betty. When I corrected him, he said, ‘Oh, I call you all Betty, you all look the same to me.')

According to Brenda Maddox, when Margaret Thatcher first entered the Commons she was not regarded as particularly clubbable even by other women MPs. But she did understand the importance of women in Parliament working together in a common cause, which was, as she
confided to Shirley Williams: ‘We have to show them (the men) that we're better than they are.' Shirley Williams added that she got the impression that Mrs Thatcher found men ‘agreeable, playful, and in the end not very serious creatures'.

If women were a rare breed as backbenchers, they were even rarer in government. There are countless examples in this book of the condescension and disdain with which Margaret Thatcher was treated, as a minister and Secretary of State, and as Leader of the Opposition, simply because she was a woman. Some civil service mandarins were as patronising as her political colleagues. Both in the country and within the Conservative Party, there was a broad body of opinion that doubted her ability, as a woman, to lead the party to victory in the 1979 election, and, when she had done that, to be a credible Prime Minister.

Interestingly, this perception was never shared by the so-called blue-collar voters in the C1 and C2 categories, or to put it another way, the skilled working class, who consistently supported her throughout her premiership. I will always remember, in 1987, canvassing around 300 or so women agricultural workers, or gang women, during their lunch break in a horticultural nursery. These women were as tough as it gets, on a par with the famous ‘buffies' in the Sheffield steel industry, or those sorting coal at the drift mines of Cumbria. I asked which way they were going to vote in the election. They said, ‘For Mrs Thatcher.' I asked why. They replied, ‘Because she tell the men.'

But one should not underestimate the degree of disbelief
and anxiety from others that surrounded her as a woman leader who held the party's fortunes in her hand. After her first speech as leader at the Conservative Party Conference in 1975, Denis Thatcher confessed that he had not been so frightened of anything since the war, such was the apprehension about the reaction of the party faithful to a woman leader. The speech got a warm welcome, in the event, but that welcome was by no means guaranteed beforehand.

Even when she became Prime Minister, the sniping from male colleagues did not stop. Sir Richard Parsons gives a truly dreadful example of Cabinet disloyalty in the early 1980s. He begins by describing his first meeting with Margaret Thatcher at a meeting of the European Security Conference in Budapest, in 1977.

Between 1980 and 1984, Sir Richard served as Britain's ambassador in Madrid.

Sir Richard might have added, ‘and also those she might legitimately have assumed to be on her side'.

One could therefore argue that a woman politician who
had endured all of this would be very cautious in what and how much she said about the cause of women, for the sake of her own credibility, not to say survival, in the context of the 1970s and 1980s. Given the nature of the particular challenges she had to face – extraordinary economic problems, the Falklands conflict, the Miners' Strike, and European issues – she might perhaps be forgiven for not giving the advancement of women more prominence, or, if not forgiven, at least understood.

One of the best records that exists of Margaret Thatcher's own views on the subject of women is contained in the lecture she gave in late July 1982 to the Society of Townswomen's Guilds, reproduced in full in the Appendix. The lecture was in celebration of the centenary of Dame Margery Corbett Ashby, the distinguished campaigner for women's rights.

She points out in the lecture that at that time, 1982, there were only twenty-one women MPs in a House of Commons with 635 members in all, a fact she thinks would have disappointed the early suffragettes. She says that, following in the tradition of Asquith and Gladstone, who opposed women's suffrage,

She asserts that while her generation takes the view that ‘the home should be the centre but not the boundary of a woman's life', women bring ‘special talents and experiences to public life', precisely because they ‘bear the children and run the home'. This is a view she often repeated, emphasising that women are the doers in public life, while men are the talkers. (It is also a view frequently advanced by today's prominent women; they call it multi-tasking.)

She also claims that

The content of this lecture is drafted with the utmost care, to balance her view that women could and should achieve as she had, with her equally strong view that women's domestic role brought particular insights and skills into the workplace.