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How Thatcher rejected feminism The Crown flags up something vital to the rise of our first female prime minster

Gillian Anderson in The Crown: tantamount to camp. Credit: Netflix

Gillian Anderson in The Crown: tantamount to camp. Credit: Netflix


November 16, 2020   5 mins

I know I’m supposed to hate Margaret Thatcher. I know that someone with my politics is meant to detest her as a union-busting, milk-snatching, women’s-lib-baiting, Belgrano-sinking, Section-28-devising, society-destroying nightmare. I know that when Gillian Anderson was cast as Thatcher in series four of The Crown, I should have played up a shudder of disgust at Gillian Anderson, who is good, playing Thatcher, who is bad.

But here’s the thing: I don’t hate Thatcher. It’s not that I’m a huge fan of her legacy or anything (although anyone who thinks that industrial relations were doing fine before her or that the Falklands were some kind of unjustified expedition is clearly a fantasist), it simply doesn’t matter whether I like her or not because she is just too interesting.

Thatcher wasn’t the first woman to lead a country, but unlike her predecessors, Indira Gandhi in India or Isabel Martínez de Perón in Argentina, she didn’t arrive sanctified by a political dynasty. She was, as Prince Phillip snobbily points out to the Queen in The Crown, a grocer’s daughter. In real life, such condescension came strongly from the Left. The Blow Monkeys, one of the bands involved in the Red Wedge tour to support Labour, released an album called She was only a Grocer’s Daughter in 1987; and even though several pop songs fantasised about her death, that never seemed quite as ugly as supposed defenders of the working class announcing that Thatcher was just too common to rule.

Previous series of The Crown dig deep into the problems of exercising power while female. One of the most fraught moments comes in series one, when the young Queen wants her children to have the surname Mountbatten after their father, and her advisors overrule her on the grounds that the royal family must carry the royal name: should feminist sensibilities celebrate the triumph of the matrilineal principle, or mourn the crushing of a woman’s will? But Thatcher never had a name worth fighting over, and she certainly didn’t have anything as grand as service to God and country to rest her claims on.

Instead, she had to invent what being a woman in power on her own account looked like. She had to invent herself. As Caroline Slocock put it in People Like Us, her memoir of her time as Thatcher’s private secretary, Thatcher had to “manage the tensions between ‘being feminine’ — and therefore submissive — and being authoritative”. Women in politics walk a narrow path with firepits either side. Four decades and many female world leaders on from Thatcher, the strategies to make that crossing are better defined, but plenty of women still flounder on the problem that power is perceived as a masculine trait: succeed at being in charge and you risk failing at being a woman.

Donald Trump played off this relentlessly to help his defeat of Hillary Clinton, and Clinton wasn’t nimble enough to neutralise it. Part of her problem was that she really is a feminist: she has a consistent analysis of women’s oppression, and she used that analysis to explain the attacks on her. Unfortunately, telling people why they’re wrong to find you chilly isn’t a great way to make them warm to you. Thatcher, on the other hand, was the one who said: “I owe nothing to women’s lib.” She never appointed a woman to her cabinet. In The Crown, she tells a nonplussed Queen that women are “too emotional” in general for the business of government.

All this was (and remains) maddening, because of course Thatcher owed something to women’s lib, whether you mean the right to engage in politics as established by the suffrage movement, or the right to have a job as established by the second wave. But tactically, separating herself from feminism was fundamental to her success. Feminism was something ugly, dangerous, even seditious.

Not very long after Thatcher came to power, the female separatist Greenham Common Peace Camp was established to protest against nuclear arms. This was something truly radical: a defiance of the patriarchal family, a denunciation of militarism. You could tell they’d got under conservative skins when Auberon Waugh claimed Greenham smelled “of fish paste and bad oysters”, as though it were a sickening riot of femaleness in excess. It was also in a way a gift to Thatcher, I think, because here was exactly the thing she was not. If you found the Greenham women alarming, look to Thatcher instead – trundling around in a tank with her head peeping out the turret, headscarfed and smiling, an unlikely but perfect confection of feminine grace and firepower.

Feminine grace. One of the caricatures of Thatcher was that she was mannish — Spitting Image put her in an aggressively tailored suit that was nothing like the gem-bright skirt suits she actually wore. Although she cultivated her voice into an artificially low register to avoid sounding “shrill” (if anything, Anderson’s excellent portrayal softens the Thatcher voice, which in retrospect is an extraordinarily odd instrument), in every other way she played up her femaleness. The Crown shows her to us at her dressing table, surrounded with the implements of ladylike self-creation; it shows her dishing up supper for her cabinet, a performance of the good housewife that is tantamount to camp.

But while Thatcher expertly softened the edges of her authority with little-woman details, the truth is that she was able to take her place in politics because she had something that set her apart from almost all her sex: she had a wife. Or rather she had Denis, a husband so unusually supportive of her, and so notably happy to act the consort, that he essentially played the role that political wives have always done, enhancing her prospects rather than draining her efforts to support his own.

Thatcher’s rejection of feminism means she probably had very little idea how unique her own marriage was, although The Crown portrays it very sweetly — and the comparison with what we’ve seen in the previous series of Prince Phillip’s struggles and resentments at playing support act to his own wife makes Denis’s qualities obvious. He especially shines in episode two, when the Thatchers are invited for a hunting weekend with the Windsors at Balmoral. It is a disaster, with the Thatchers floundering against the opaque etiquette, but it’s not purely a matter of the posh excluding the commoners: we see Thatcher briskly telling Denis “we don’t want to catch any upper-class habits”. This is not a couple seeking assimilation to the aristocracy.

For my whole life, I’ve been interested in Thatcher mostly because she was a woman. When I was a child, she fascinated me simply because she had red hair and was female, like me; as I got older, I spent more time thinking about the subtleties of her public image, the calculations that had gone into making that persona. But the version of her in The Crown — and I think this is true to the historical Thatcher as well — is one who sees her sex as the least interesting thing about her. Class, though — class was always a preoccupation, and a propellant for her radical kind of conservativism. Margaret Thatcher, class warrior: maybe that’s a kind of Thatcher it’s politically allowable to like, after all.


Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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A Spetzari
A Spetzari
4 years ago

one who sees her sex as the least interesting thing about her

That is possibly one of the reasons she was so successful. By making it a non-issue. One of the biggest issues with today’s identity-obsessed carousel is that it makes these immutable characteristics the centre of everything. Like or loathe her, she was a person of substance because she focused on what she thought mattered in the real world.

pirh zapusti
pirh zapusti
4 years ago
Reply to  A Spetzari

She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought- and never worried about it again.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

David Morley
David Morley
4 years ago

Not very long after Thatcher came to power, the female separatist Greenham Common Peace Camp was established to protest against nuclear arms. This was something truly radical: a defiance of the patriarchal family, a denunciation of militarism.

Which is presumably why Thatcher distanced herself from women’s lib. The movement was already politicised in a broader sense – a sense which Thatcher didn’t share.

And even for people who shared many of their concerns, Greenham common was a moment of disidentification. Even people on the left started asking – do I really have anything in common with these people?

A Spetzari
A Spetzari
4 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

Indeed – well put. She gave up on the nonsensical nature of the aims pursued by too many in the movement.

but plenty of women still flounder on the problem that power is perceived as a masculine trait

Which is an astute observation by Sarah. Power is power, and those that are better at wielding it and understanding it don’t give a fig if they are wearing trousers or a skirt. Again this navel-gazing is shown by this attitude:

should feminist sensibilities celebrate the triumph of the matrilineal principle, or mourn the crushing of a woman’s will?

It’s such a side issue to the business of state firstly, and secondly clearly demonstrates how identity-based thinking confuses itself through circular arguments that can be argued ad nauseum for both cases.

Tim Corn
Tim Corn
4 years ago

Not only the first Prime Minister with an XX genotype, but the first with a scientific training. One can only speculate on how she might have managed COVID-19.

Quentin Vole
Quentin Vole
4 years ago
Reply to  Tim Corn

She fell for the hoax science on global warming. It wasn’t so obviously a hoax, back in her day.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
4 years ago

However ‘radical’ the Greenham women were, they were embarrassingly wrong on the big issues of the day, a verdict which is completely upheld by subsequent history. In calling for one-sided disarmament by democracies against a totalitarian state they showed their utter naivete and fundamental pettiness.

henrysporn
henrysporn
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

and not just them, of course.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 years ago

A bit ironic how no small amount of sexism drips through here. How about judging Thatcher on her time as PM who happened to be female, rather than female PM.

gordon69
gordon69
4 years ago

Not true that Thatcher never appointed a woman to Cabinet – Janet Young was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 81-82, and then Leader of the House of Lords (Lord Privy Seal) from 82-83.

Samuel Gee
Samuel Gee
4 years ago

There’s some clarification needed about the definition of feminism here and also that of “women’s lib”. Thatcher did not say that she owed nothing to the equalisation of women’s political rights with men’s. If equal political rights is feminism then feminism became redundant a long long time ago. The same goes for women’s lib. Many many women possibly a majority are quite able to distinguish between economic and social unfairness around say equal pay and employment discrimination without buying into a wholesale critique of the patriarchy.

Stephen Crossley
Stephen Crossley
4 years ago

A plea to Sarah Ditum. Please use your formidable writing talents to inspire young women to succeed in life by introducing them to more modern role models. May I suggest a profile of Denise Coates, CEO of Bet365, to get the ball rolling?

Ms Coates’ name recognition among twenty-something British women will be miniscule compared with the column inches devoted to such eminent but distant figures as Hilary, Michelle and AOC as she has been all but ignored by feminist commentators, possibly because white, middle class capitalists are not exactly flavour of this or any month.

In 2019 Ms Coates was the highest paid CEO of any UK company (man or woman). In the same year she paid over £200 million in UK income tax, more than any other individual. She foresaw the online revolution in the gambling industry and turned her father’s provincial betting shop business into a global leader over a twenty year period. She is also one of the most generous UK philanthropists donating more than £100 million so far to charities in her local area around Stoke On Trent including a £10 million gift to local hospital charities when the pandemic struck. She is also the mother of five children, four of whom she adopted from the same family.

Were I either young or indeed female I would be tired of constantly being told by feminist writers that it is impossible for me to succeed in life until the (illusory) patriarchy is destroyed. Give young women positive British role models (of which there are many out there) rather than hobble them with the “tyranny of low expectations” pushed by writers whose personal agendas and politics seem more dear to them than the inspiration of their readers.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 years ago

Were I either young or indeed female I would be tired of constantly being told by feminist writers that it is impossible for me to succeed in life until the (illusory) patriarchy is destroyed.
Feminism is not about women succeeding. Like any other cause, it exists for its own sake, and the platform and income that it provides to the activists. The goals of the original feminists have largely been achieved. Is there some field from which women are barred? Yet to hear them tell it, society remains locked in a 1600s mentality.

This applies to any cause. There is no real goal, an end point at which victory can be declared. Because if the goal was achieved, those who profit from the activism would have to find something new to do.

D Ward
D Ward
4 years ago

Brilliant. Making a fortune out of other people’s misery. Another triumph brought to you by the odious Bliar and “New Labour”.

Adrian Smith
Adrian Smith
4 years ago

What I most admire about Maggie is the way so many of the sort of people I detest still detest her now, even though she is long dead and buried – what a great legacy for our longest serving prime minister.

It is such a shame our second ever female prime minister let the cause for women in power down so badly. How we could have done with a reincarnation of Maggie hand bagging the hopeless eurocrats following the leave vote. What we got instead was the duplicitous Maybot.

As for Hillary her problem was she was as corrupt if not more corrupt than her philandering husband.

David George
David George
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian Smith

“The people who detest her” sound like a very dull bunch without an original thought between them. This closing line from Sarah illustrates the mentality of the half blind, simplistic ideologues that dominate our discourse:
“that’s a kind of Thatcher it’s politically allowable to like”
Politically allowable?
How wet do you have to be to even think like that.

Blue Tev
Blue Tev
4 years ago

Firstly, I know of a grand total of one woman who had to sacrifice career for family.
Pretty much every “career woman” I know, has a husband who massively helped out in childcare etc (and those fathers would be treated as a pariah by family courts if it came divorce)

Secondly, a large part of female emancipation came about because of men fighting for rights, inventing stuff that made women’s lives easier or merely dying by the thousands in ww1 to shame upper classes into granting universal suffrage.

Never heard too many females on the other hand, giving a toss for father’s rights, male suicides or men’s right to vote….remember those ww1 soldiers, majority of them didn’t have the vote either.
Nope, it was always, about themselves.

pirh zapusti
pirh zapusti
4 years ago
Reply to  Blue Tev

Ah, you bring up fathers getting screwed in family court, so you get the downvotes! Didn’t you know we aren’t allowed to talk about that? Or mention the fact that children of single mothers do substantially worse than children of single fathers, or that women are more likely to default on child support payments than men? Shhh!

Dr Irene Lancaster
Dr Irene Lancaster
4 years ago

Interesting that you have omitted Israeli PM Golda Meir from your list. But then snobs probably can’t bear the fact that the first Jewish PM anywhere didn’t attend Somerville College Oxford, or have a good grammar school education. Golda’s only higher education was the university of life and fled Ukraine as a girl and didn’t marry money like Maggie. By the way, the company providing the latest cure for Covid, which our fantastic government has been extraordinarily late in ordering, is also run by an Israeli …!

Graham Ward
Graham Ward
4 years ago

I thought exactly the same about the omission. A war leader as well.

Nick Taylor
Nick Taylor
4 years ago

The Crown is an incredible series. First and foremost it is a dramatic representation of events and characters and therefore owes as much to fact as fiction. We will never quite know how such scenes transpired but its anchoring in real events and people and the way it sources and does this is amazing. It also allows us to explore and keep our history alive and contemporary and relevant and encourages us to think and debate all sorts of issues. Gillian Anderson’s performance is stunning.

Alan Thorpe
Alan Thorpe
4 years ago
Reply to  Nick Taylor

The only message I got from the latest series was how awful the royal family appears to be.

opn
opn
4 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

Of course I have not seen it, nor do I intend to. But I suspect that is the message that you are intended to take away. Don’t believe them.

Arnold Grutt
Arnold Grutt
4 years ago
Reply to  Nick Taylor

Dramatised history (docu-drama) is always a lie, because real life is not a drama, i.e. not a succession of selected points arranged for effect. Real history is entirely ‘factual’, that is it has to be supported by verified (in various ways) evidence, supported by plausible, grounded (that is philosophically defensible) interpretation. Drama is entirely fictional, and should always be treated as such.

The difference between a real historian, and the docu-dramatist, is that the real historian can be picked up on for omitting relevant information, whereas the docu-dramatist avoids that responsibility altogether. Propagandists exploit this categorical vagueness and ambiguity.

Meghan Kathleen Jamieson
Meghan Kathleen Jamieson
4 years ago

I just can’t really be in sympathy with an article that sees Hilary Clinton as having lost because of being a woman, and having some kind of real insight into that, or even care for the lot of women generally.

The kind of liberal feminism that Clinton embraces is not really about women at all, it’s about bourgeoisie class solidarity and global capitalism.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

The ability of the commentariat to eke out another article on the subject of Mrs T is quite astonishing to behold.

Last Jacobin
Last Jacobin
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Don’t read it, then.

George Wells
George Wells
4 years ago

When I was a small boy the three most important people in the world were my mother, Maggie, the Queen. Now I have daughters, I am a little nostalgic for that time.
Happily, we still have my mother and the Queen.
P.S. a joke – at that time I heard someone on the radio (Dennis Skinner?) say –
“Mrs Thatcher’s devious hand is afoot!”

Andrea X
Andrea X
4 years ago

Am I the only one who, when watching the first episode of the crown, was expecting Anderson’s Thatcher to say “My precious”?

David Cockayne
David Cockayne
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrea X

Yes, I suspect. But actually, your comment says rather more about your bigoted fantasies than it does about either Mrs Thatcher or the portayal of her in ‘The Crown’.

Andrea X
Andrea X
4 years ago
Reply to  David Cockayne

Well for sure she didn’t move like that, nor did she speak like that. Gillian Anderson makes her look like she 90 and on death bed…
This portrayal did remind me of Gollum…

Last Jacobin
Last Jacobin
4 years ago

I’ve not seen The Crown but appreciate this thought provoking piece which makes me rethink some of my knee jerk and ‘came of political age during the miners strike’ reactions.

I think there was some irony in the Blow Monkey’s naming of their album ‘She Was Only a Grocer’s Daughter’. I’m not sure it was condescension more a wry comment on the portrayal as Thatcher as ‘one of us’ when actually she was fortunate enough to fall in love and marry a very, very wealthy man.

I do think the Greenham Women were magnificent though – have had the honour of meeting a few recently.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Last Jacobin

What on Earth was “magnificent” about the Greenham Common Women?
They were a bunch of menopausal nutters, and adolescent ‘fruit cakes’, with dubious personal hygiene, coupled with anarchic and delinquent tendencies.

They continued to squat outside the airfield long after the United States Airforce had withdrawn its excellent Cruise Missiles in 1991. In fact I gather there is even now, a spurious affliction known a Greenham Common Syndrome.

When one studies the chronology of the collapse of the United Kingdom, Greenham Common certainly illustrates how dreadful things had become by the early 1980’s.

David Morley
David Morley
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

“They were a bunch of menopausal nutters, and adolescent ‘fruit cakes'”

It’s true many saw them that way at the time. And whether they form part of the story of the decline of the U.K., I do think they form part of the story of the drift of the Labour Party away from working class people.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

As Orwell told us many years ago, the only thing the Labour Party really despises is the Working Class.

Nun Yerbizness
Nun Yerbizness
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

what Orwell actually wrote…

“One has got to be actively a Socialist, not merely sympathetic to Socialism, or one plays into the hands of our always active enemies.”

Quentin Vole
Quentin Vole
4 years ago

The Crown is a fun TV series, but it’s not a documentary. Apart from the names of the main characters, most of the ‘facts’ are wrong.

chris carr
chris carr
4 years ago

Ditum bases so many of her comments on a TV series rather than on what people who were there remember or admit. That is unfortunate.

Arnold Grutt
Arnold Grutt
4 years ago
Reply to  chris carr

Yes. They should read e.g. Alan Clark’s Diaries for a more intelligent perspective.

Lee Jones
Lee Jones
4 years ago

Nice article.

Pippabournegordon
Pippabournegordon
4 years ago

Although I remember how Thatcher’s manner and way of speaking came across as silted and cultivated, I found Gillian Anderson’s portrayal awkwardly unconvincing with mannerisms (especially the extended neck tilt, stoop and pouting lip) over exaggerated. This in effect never let me forget that her every move was being overacted. As far as the script was concerned, it could have demonstrated how Thatcher had initially captured the imagination of budding young feminists as well as a large majority of the electorate who were so frustrated with the impoverished economy and esteem of the country at the time.

Lindsay Gatward
Lindsay Gatward
4 years ago

Loved Thatcher maybe for the same reasons fondness for Trump grows and grows – Maybe because they piss off all the right people but definitely and most extraordinarily because they actually do what they promise which seems of itself to piss of the entitled elite while deeply pleasing the people the entitled elite hold in utter contempt – So many report how unexpectedly sexy Thatcher was – And it is increasingly obvious from the rallies and other public events that tens of millions of Americans (and millions around the World) love Trump and their otherwise would be entitled elite overseers hate him beyond all logic.

pirh zapusti
pirh zapusti
4 years ago

Stopped reading at “Hilary is a feminist.” Because, you know, she like totally cares about womyn!

Daniel Björkman
Daniel Björkman
4 years ago

I have the personal belief that a man, in order to be a good man, must learn to stop thinking with his testicles, and a woman, in order to be a strong woman, must learn to stop thinking with her ovaries.

I also think that liberal and conservative politics encourage feminine and masculine traits, respectively. I think this is why liberal women and conservative men are so thoroughly irritating. The latter do nothing but brag about how great they are, and the former do nothing but whine about how mean everyone is to them. Useless. Liberal men and conservative women, though? Love them or hate them, at least they’ve proven that they can overrule their hormonal programming.

So yeah. I was one of the people who gloated when Thatcher died, but I actually regret that now. I still think she was wrong about absolutely everything, but she came by her opinions honestly, and she deserves credit for that.

Graham Giles
Graham Giles
4 years ago

I agree and recall that John Cleese and Robyn Skynner made a similar point in their book “Families And How To Survive Them” – they equate the Labour party’s political stance to that of the mother in the traditional family, an the Tory party’s with that of the father.

Maybe that’s the most succinct and accurate way of characterising the difference.

Clare Haven
Clare Haven
4 years ago
Reply to  Graham Giles

Very interesting idea that had never occurred to me before.

Also thanks for the book ref – looks good am about to Kindle it! : )

David George
David George
4 years ago
Reply to  Graham Giles

Jordan Peterson explores this in great depth in his book Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief. The archetypal masculine and feminine as fundamental characteristics though not confined to (or be confused with) male or female as Maggie T demonstrates.
Yin and yang, the unknown and the known, the nurturing caring feminine and the protective provider masculine, chaos and order are examples of the opposing but complementary nature of reality itself. Fascinating subject.

Pete Kreff
Pete Kreff
4 years ago

I have the personal belief that a man, in order to be a good man, must learn to stop thinking with his testicles, and a woman, in order to be a strong woman, must learn to stop thinking with her ovaries.

What does that actually mean? I know that “think with his testicles” is figurative, but I can’t really work out what it’s supposed to signify: stop thinking about having sex with lots of women? Stop thinking about impregnating women? Why does that make for a “good” man?

And what does “thinking with her ovaries” mean? Stop thinking about trying to get pregnant? And why does that make for a “strong” woman?

kecronin1
kecronin1
4 years ago

Great read. I agree that her sex was the least interesting thing about her. Yet it was her sex that probably opened more doors for other female leaders both in government and industries.

martinbrittany.em
martinbrittany.em
4 years ago

She knew was feminism meant, actually… Unlike some of us

Neil Pennington
Neil Pennington
4 years ago

‘someone with my politics is meant to detest her as a union-busting, milk-snatching, women’s-lib-baiting, Belgrano-sinking, Section-28-devising, society-destroying nightmare’. Hang on a minute, this women destroyed working class communities by closing down steel & coal production leaving them to rot. This woman lacked compassion and set the template for female Conservative MPs, not least for ‘Windrush’ and ‘Bullying’. You know who I’m talking about?