Winker's World of Smashin' Things

12.4.13

Ding Dong

" In the end, you are left with the woman herself. Indeed, the very fact that she was a woman may well have been the most remarkable thing about her.

It is astonishing to think that when Margaret Thatcher first joined the cabinet in 1970, the Wimpy hamburger chain still banned women from coming in late on their own on the bizarre grounds that only prostitutes would be out at that time of night.

Indeed, there is a supreme irony in the fact that Thatcher, who loathed feminism, came to embody the extraordinary expansion in the horizons of Britain's women, which was arguably the single biggest social change of the 20th Century.

And in several centuries' time, when the minutiae of the Falklands War or the poll tax have been forgotten, I suspect that what Britain will remember about Margaret Thatcher is the simple fact of her femininity.

Thatcher herself might not agree, but in the end, the interesting thing about the Iron Lady was not that she was made of iron. It was that she was a lady. "

from BBC