She was the middle-aged woman with the hats, the pearls, the teeth, the strangled high-pitched voice, and the policies which had nothing to do with equal pay for work of equal value, free abortion on demand or take back the night marches. Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party at the height of the women's movement, yet she was completely apart from our campaigns, our passions and our identity. She was a reactionary who cared little for equality of any sort and who had a contemptuous indifference to the arts. I was an active student feminist and, if anything, she was our anti-feminist icon – everything we didn't aspire to. I know she is being ennobled now by the gentle gaze of history (and Hollywood) but I remember loathing her at the time and feeling no solidarity with her achievements as a woman. Margaret Thatcher dominated my school and student years and had a big impact on my political coming of age, but not in the way she would have welcomed. And for that reason she is still a figure that feminists would be unwise to dismiss. 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. 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. We should never forget her destructive policies or sanitise her corrosive legacy. 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. Obviously Thatcher was no feminist: she had no interest in social equality, she knew nothing of female solidarity. It was unacceptable then, as it seems to be now, for feminists to do anything but denounce Thatcher. Nothing I have ever written before or since has brought so much fury on my head. She is the great unsung heroine of British feminism." 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. 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.
Someone of the wrong sex and the wrong class broke through what looked like invincible barriers to reach into the heart of the establishment. No British woman this century can come close to her achievements in grasping power. Thirteen years ago, in The New Feminism, I wrote: "Let's start with Margaret Thatcher.
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