Is Margaret Thatcher a Woman?
Toynbee, Polly
Is Margaret Thatcher a Woman? No woman is if she has to make it in a man's world. by Polly Toynbee Among world leaders, Mrs. Thatcher stands out in the crowd. In a row of suits, the eye...
...Despite the social changes of the past quarter century, most women still expect to be largely responsible for the upbringing of their children...
...They've done it at their children's expense, and at their own, in ways men never have to...
...Feminists respond that Mrs...
...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...
...Thatchers who make it on men's terms change little for most women...
...Women have lost, not gained, ground under her rule...
...So Mrs...
...Gradually, there will be changes, when there are enough women at the top to prevent them all having to turn themselves into Mrs...
...Successful men will go on being largely irrelevant to their families' lives, except as bread winners...
...She was not interested in being a woman—and she certainly had no particular policies for women...
...Advertisers, way ahead of the statistical reality, now show endless images of briefcase-toting women with their American Express Gold Cards, a success symbol more enticing than a mere businessman...
...Of course there are differences, few would deny it—but they are less important than other differences...
...It means refusing to admit you are a girl...
...Sacrifice the children This has left the women's movement virtually speechless...
...Thatcher has done more for women than most feminists recognize...
...Thatcher is a woman—no guilt there...
...She got where she is by climbing up the men's ladder, behaving like a man, sacrificing like a man, and being ten times tougher than all the men around her...
...Just as Mrs...
...Carol is making an embarrassing career in journalism where her name is her main asset...
...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...
...In clinging to the "specialness" of women, the feminists destroy themselves...
...However, the only reason she rose to such power herself was as a token woman...
...Thatcher herself said in a television interview that she thought there would never be a woman prime minister in her lifetime...
...As education minister, Mrs...
...Politics and young children combine particularly badly in Britain, where the House of Commons sits from 3 p.m...
...The longer that there are no other women at the top in politics, the more remarkable her success looks...
...She has made it look so easy...
...Most feminists say unequivocally, No...
...She would never have made it to leader, albeit accidentally, if she hadn't been a woman...
...She toppled Heath on the first ballot...
...Feminists say women are better...
...Women who succeed are twice as admired, because no one really thinks a woman can do it...
...Thatcher as a surrogate man, feminists mean she has betrayed women— not only politically but spiritually...
...Few men do...
...But Mrs...
...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...
...As Dr...
...Thatcher is no sister because she has led a man's life...
...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...
...At the same time she has introduced a new divorce law designed to let men pay less maintenance to their families...
...Or you have children, and they lose out...
...Being one of the boys means cutting off the girls...
...until midnight most days, and often later...
...It took a mother to do in mothers, a wife to do in wives, a working woman to do in working women...
...When there are so many women in valued positions that companies and organizations can no longer shirk their responsibilities to their employees' families...
...There she stands, awesome in her successes, the perfect representation of the macho woman, the surrogate man...
...What is important about women is how very little different they are from men...
...A man might not have gotten away with all this...
...Thatcher, by a stroke of opportunism and daring, offered herself as a candidate against him when others demurred...
...Men and women with young families need not find themselves working the longest overtime in their lives under the greatest stress, just when they most need to be at home more...
...For her catalog of unsisterly sins is long, and growing...
...Their public image is too public and mostly unattractive and unsuccessful...
...So, you've got a woman prime minister— what more do you want...
...Just by being there Mrs...
...Male politicians can always be made to feel at least a little guilty about women...
...After all, she has had to make big sacrifices in her life to get where she is...
...When there are so many of them that it will be safe for them to admit they have a problem and not to hide it...
...Thatchers...
...So near and yet so far...
...Womanhood has been her ace card, never her Achilles heel...
...She despises whining women...
...Those who know her well say that privately she has a deep and strong sense of guilt and regret about them...
...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...
...It took a woman to put down women's rights so effectively...
...Thatcher, and tough women like her, pretend they have escaped the trap—but they haven't...
...Thatcher as an icon for women is a confusing image...
...After Heath lost the 1974 election, certain elements in Polly Toynbee, a former editor of The Washington Monthly, is a columnist for The Guardian in London...
...And just to prove it, you have to be twice as brutal to them, twice as savage...
...People hardly knew the names of Harold Wilson's sons...
...Antifeminists mutter the same thing...
...It is all image and no content...
...It was a remarkable coup...
...How much or how little chromosones fit into this pattern pales into insignificance beside this near-universal fact...
...In a row of suits, the eye is drawn to the single dress among Western leaders...
...In order to succeed in the most male of all worlds—politics—a woman has to make herself into an imitation man...
...The image has chased far ahead of the reality...
...Most of the Conservative members of Parliament had thought she had little chance...
...But if Mrs...
...They only wanted to give Heath a fright...
...What is the point of putting more women into power when they act no differently (or worse than) men...
...Gone is the idea that sisters are essentially, genetically, spiritually better than men...
...Hardline feminists and antifeminists have colluded in the past to provide a model for maleness and femaleness that has the same unsavory roots...
...Who dares try it first, for fear of others overtaking them in their absence...
...So Mrs...
...This will be difficult to do...
...Thatcher believe she will go on until she drops rather than go into a contented retirement with boring old Denis...
...She entered Parliament when her twin children were only two years old...
...Most will not be willing to sacrifice their families as Mrs...
...When there are enough women struggling to bring up children and keep up a high-powered career...
...The real difference comes in women's and men's lives and expectations...
...How do you hold back the ambitious striving for success in the years when children are young, the very same years when a career is at a critical stage in the making...
...In cabinet photographs, she doesn't want some other woman diverting the eye...
...If women don't care enough for their children, they know their children risk neglect...
...They mean they love their mothers more than their fathers...
...But Margaret Thatcher's childrens' careers and public image bear little relation to the kind of values she promotes, nor much resemblance to her own rigorous upbringing as a small town shopkeeper's daughter...
...Few imagine it was a love match...
...In criticizing Mrs...
...When there are enough women for them not to have to prove they are one of the boys...
...the Conservative party were determined that he should go...
...She's never complained about being a woman—she's turned it to her advantage...
...by Polly Toynbee Among world leaders, Mrs...
...Offices, organizations, power structures could be thus "feminized" to the great benefit of men and women everywhere...
...Then she had to sacrifice her children...
...That is the only important difference and it affects every aspect of all our lives from earliest social awareness...
...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...
...Men too would be freed to spend more time at home...
...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...
...While women earned 75 percent of men's wages when an Equal Pay Act was passed in 1975, they now earn only 65 percent...
...Do not imagine, either, that in some more subtle, back-door way, her womanhood has shone through...
...So with 84 percent of single mothers divorced, a higher proportion are on welfare—more since the new divorce law...
...No one says any longer in Britain that a woman couldn't do such-and-such a job, in the way they did before her...
...Antifeminists say so too, but don't really mean it...
...No promotion need be lost to go part-time for a year or two when the children are young...
...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...
...Thatcher has...
...Women will still have to choose between children and top jobs, in a way no man is ever expected to do...
...She is herself destroying what is most precious and treasured about womanhood in pursuit of mere manly power...
...She has packed the Equal Opportunities Commission with people guaranteed to render it silent and toothless...
...Thatcher is only a surrogate man...
...Ostensible barriers may have fallen, but the real tactical barriers are as high as ever...
...Successful Mrs...
...Her government has wriggled out from under European Economic Community directives on equal pay for work of equal value...
...On the welfare front, child benefits have been reduced, along with social security payments...
...She is a Queen Bee and she likes to stand out alone...
...Once Thatcher was leader, everyone, or nearly everyone, said she could never be elected...
...Thatcher the woman has had to sacrifice many of the joys of a happy family to get where she is—just the way top men do...
...Love her or loathe her, she isn't ignored...
...He is now married to a Texas millionairess and makes his living out of business consultancies...
...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...
...First, Denis Thatcher had money, which is essential in the Tory party...
...She married a rich and stupid man who had all the necessary credentials to help her on her way...
...Women at work have fewer employment rights...
...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...
...If there were enough women on the ladder, they could insist that abandoning family and children was not the inevitable price of professional success...
...There is a lot less talk—especially on the Conservative benches of the House of Commons—about the woman's place being in the home...
...Whether it's their mother's fault or not (she feels it is), her children have become a slightly pathetic national spectacle, which is rare in Britain where prime ministers' children have usually remained quite private and unknown...
...Flexible work arrangements would be the norm...
...If she can do it the hard way, why can't every other woman with the guts and determination...
...Thirdly, he was willing to let her forceful ambition have its head...
...She is abhorrent, anathema, unfeminine...
...Mark made a bad start as a racing driver...
...She has experienced nothing but advantage from her gender...
...You will still hear some such incantations from the weird sisters to be found outside the gates of Greenham Common—the ferociously feminist pacifists camping out against Cruise missiles...
...There was no other way it could be done...
...Second, he had little ambition for himself...
...Thatcher has heralded no change in the numbers of women in politics, so one or two women on prominent company boards does not mean a significant increase in numbers of women in junior- and middle-management, nor in the middle or high ranks of the civil service...
...The explanation goes like this: one woman doesn't make a matriarchy...
...She never managed to Have It All...
...According to feminists, we still haven't got a woman prime minister—not a real one...
...Either you have no children, and you lose out on an essential aspect of human life...
...The image of the successful go-getting woman is now chic, where it used to be unfeminine or Joan Collins voracious...
...If there were more women at the top, more women in power, the argument goes, then the entire nature of life, work, and power would change...
...To prove she is as good as them, she's got to be one of the boys...
...And yet so little has changed...
...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...
...Or almost gone...
...And yet the most important dividing line society makes is usually between boys and girls, men and women...
...The Thatcher trap Powerful women are in fashion, though they aren't anywhere else for the figures show how little and how slowly things have changed...
...Worse, she has to be twice as tough...
...If men don't care enough, they know their wives will...
...Thatcher is the icon for today's successful woman...
...And now that some women are breaking through to the top in most occupations there are women like her all over the place—in their executive suits with the little string ties or floppy jabots and padded power-dressing shoulders...
...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...
...So how is she to be explained...
...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...
...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...
...The cuts have fallen hardest on the largest and most vulnerable group of welfare recipients—single mothers...
...But unless it is made possible, women will never be equal, not in any great numbers...
...Gone is all that woolly rhetoric about how women are all sisters under the skin...
...Those who are close to Mrs...
...Career patterns would change...
Vol. 20 • May 1988 • No. 4
