LEGACY - There have always been women like Margaret Thatcher in power. Never more than one or two at a time, of course. Thatcher was the embodiment of what Katha Pollitt memorably called “the Smurfette syndrome,” which is “a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined.” She was not a feminist icon, nor any kind of feminist, as she took pains to remind people.
“Some of us were making it before women’s lib was even thought of,” she once sniffed. To make it any more obvious, she might as well have literally kicked the ladder out from under her.
For decades, Thatcher’s gender provided some public relations cover for her most noxious politics. That was true even today in the White House’s statement on her death, which included the following treacly sentence: “As a grocer’s daughter who rose to become Britain’s first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.” (Read the rest … including why she was hated and what she did for women … here.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 29
Pub: Apr 9, 2013
