Why Do Third Wave Feminists Hate Margaret Thatcher?

For the third-wave feminist, there is no woman in Western history who is more dangerous than Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, a classical conservative, and staunch individualist who viewed genderized affirmative action and communism as moral evils. In that sense, she opposes group-think, a contractual requirement to be a third-wave feminist. Thatcher is not a woman who requires any sort of historical revisitation, but the authors found what they deemed a natural place for her in a chapter titled “Ruthless Villains:

These claims, of course are not based in scholarly thinking. In fact, the authors are so blinded by confirmation bias that they’ve committed the same injustices that they’re protesting. What tragic irony that Sarkeesian and Adams have glossed over critical details that put Thatcher’s acts as Britain’s longest serving PM into proper historical context, thus rewriting her history to poison her reputation for future generations; to cudgel the reader to accept a resentful view of Thatcher, which is, dare I say it, propagandistic in its intent.

One example is how they’ve presented specific moments, including the IRA-led hunger strikes at the Maze prison. “When Northern Irish prisoners initiated a hungry strike in 1981,” they write, “demanding that they be treated as political prisoners rather than criminals, Thatcher allowed them to die…” Allowed 10 members of the resistance to simply die? Nonsense. Their language not only removes individual agency away from the strikers, who chose to starve themselves in order to gain the status of “political prisoner,” in order to avoid prison work, among other things, but it reveals ignorance regarding Thatcher’s psychology, who viewed free will as the core principle of humanity. Thatcher once said that, “individuals must take responsibility for their outcomes of their choices.” The strikers risked their lives for special category, a noble effort, but they did it knowing Thatcher would likely refuse those who aligned themselves with radicals or the IRA . Though the tragic loss of life in the Maze prison deserves a lot more sympathy than I’ve afforded it here, it is unfair to hold Thatcher entirely responsible. But complexity allows for the appearance of inconvenient slivers of truth—which is kevlar to a feminist hit-piece.

Another misleading fiction found in History vs. Women is their argument that previous historians treated Thatcherism a sacrosanct. Even sympathetic conservative biographers haven’t glossed over the brutal growing pains of Thatcherism. Claire Berlinski detailed the consequences of Thatcher’s economic policies in her book “There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters,” where she describes Thatcherism as producing considerable “collateral damage,” where the British underclass remained “degraded” and the poor became even poorer. It’s worth adding that Berlinski fairly assesses Thatcher’s complex economic legacy without becoming consumed by her own favoritism for the Iron Lady. Berlinski credits Thatcher for restoring faith in the British economy through deregulation, monetarism, and a necessary thwarting of labor unions that had, prior to Thatcher, been able to dictate the astonishing pay of some 70-percent of British labor. Labor unions had set wages that hardly determined fair market demand, coal in the mines that Thatcher deregulated to ensure Britain was producing coal at a fair price. In yet another example of their negligence, the authors of History vs. Women refuse to provide any necessary detail of the UK miner’s strike, which was led by a Marxist named Arthur Scargill, a member of Britain’s Stalin Society. His name doesn’t appear in their assessment of Thatcher’s suppression of the strikers, as Scargill is another crucial detail that’s been extracted from their hit piece. Scargill was and remains a man who viewed British labor unions as a means to subvert the state to wage a workers’ revolution. Berlinski tells a story of one of Scargill’s reported fantasies, where he imagined Britain as the “Soviet Socialist Republic of Britain.” They were certainly not led by a patriot, and to make matters worse, the strikers were doing all this while asking for higher wages to produce coal that was increasingly unaffordable.

The authors seduce their readers into accepting a zero-sum view of Thatcher as a barbarous dictator whose only admirable achievement was “simply attaining, wielding, and maintaining power in a male-dominated space,” which are one of the only lines of credit they reward her without interest. They go on, “But power is not in itself a virtue,” summing up Thatcher’s 11-years of service as a power play. This is a woman who permanently restored confidence in a British economy that Henry Kissinger in 1975 characterized as “sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing.” When Thatcher left office in 1990, her economic reforms had managed to curb inflation and produce the longest period of growth the nation had seen in the postwar era. Over the years, Labour essentially adopted Thatcher’s free-market economic policies because they worked not because, as History vs. Women argues, the PM’s cult of personality was so pervasive that the parties were smashed into being “effectively identical to each other.”

Thatcher’s colossal success and lack of solidarity with the cult of second and third-wave feminism presents the best argument against authoritarian views of feminism, or that the system is rigged against women, as she rejected their desire for mandating diversity and propping up women to help close the gender-gap; placed the individual above the group, and had as much use for victimhood currency as she did Soviet rubles. Naturally, feminists view Thatcher as complicit in the crimes of the patriarchy, as a double-agent whose radical challenges to every male-constructed prop of Great Britain was done without playing the victim, which is to say it lacked the genetic makeup of third-wave feminism. She also earned privilege as a “Gentleman” in aristocratic institutions like the Carlton Club, not because she shrieked in the House of Commons, stomping in her heels for gender-equality, but because she bested them all. For the third-wave feminist, Thatcher puts a giant crack in the structural integrity of their war against the patriarchy (an endless campaign fueled by propaganda, like Orwell’s “perpetual war” ). Thatcher never fought for or against her gender. She simply conquered everyone with a female panache that was as about as gender-neutral as how French President Francois Mitterand once described her, “Bridgette Bardot with Caligula’s eyes.”

Thatcher made the constant nagging for gender-equality seem futile and limp-wristed. “The pursuit of equality itself is a mirage,” she said in 1975, as a voice for the libertarian belief that equality goes against our very beings as hierarchal creatures. Thatcher also put to rest the biological determinism of feminists who would like us to believe women are less violent than men. Thatcher’s decision to destroy the Argentinian Naval cruiser Belgrano during the Falklands War, killing 323 Argentines, squashed that fiction. In History of Women Thatcher’s decision to protect a sovereign British territory from a foreign invasion is described as being “brutally indifferent to the actual cost of the conflict and the men who returned from the war traumatized.” Where is any evidence of this claim? They should corroborate it. They don’t even explain what they mean by it. Like capitalism and free will, it is clear that British patriotism is not be celebrated in this book, but maligned. Vietnamese patriotism, or really any other kind of nationalism besides Western, is treated with far more sympathetic eyes.

“Rage into the wind! Feel the dreadful thunder of mighty war elephants trampling the ground. Raise your fists and sound your terrible war cry…” is how they introduce us to Lady Trieu, a mythical figure from third century Vietnam known as the “Vietnamese Joan of Arc,” which they admit does “not have an overwhelming number of sources,” or any known portraits, which results in an imaginatively fierce and, dare I say it, patriotic illustration. Profiles like those on Lady Trieu dabble in myth, as they retell stories that cannot be verified, offer no skepticism, and only occasionally admit that some of these women are more important symbolically than historically. In their chapter on pitcher Jackie Mitchel, who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in 1931, they refuse to investigate whether this even was staged, which is a continued debate amongst baseball historians. They only say, “we believe her.” But History vs. Women would rather empower, then educate. The result of their myth-making lends itself to a kind of historical fantasy, more in the vein of Marion Zimmer Bradley, than the scholarly work of Doris Kearns Goodwin or Mary Beard.

The reader is suffocated by the ideology of the authors, who only begrudgingly admit that Thatcher voted to decriminalize homosexuality in 1967. They refuse, however, to say that she was one of the few Tory MPs to vote that way. That this was, at the time, a radical move. Thatcher’s history on voting for and against gays rights—she later oversaw the passage of a measure that banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools—is the one similarity we can draw between Thatcher and Hillary Clinton, who was against gay rights when it was unpopular, and for it when it became electorally advantageous. Though it was only Thatcher who was for gay rights when it was dangerously unfashionable.

As I noted earlier, Thatcher appears as the coup de grâce in their chapter on “Ruthless Villains,” where the authors argue that “putting women on a pedestal is really just another way to keep them in a box,” which is what they’ve done with 20 of their 25 subjects, whom they place on heroic pedestals; a kind of absurdist Beyonce hero-worshipping they balance by dragging Thatcher through the mud, as they present her in the same light as Queen Isabella I of the Spanish Inquisition, an underworld pickpocket (Mary Firth), a Chinese pirate (Ching Shih), and Columbian drug lord (Griselda Blanco), all villainous women they seem to treat with more fairness than Thatcher, a genuine feminist icon (in spite of herself), who is only denied the royalties of women’s empowerment by those who view her as a threat to their hegemony over the free-will of young women. The maverick, albeit unpopular notion that Thatcher is a feminist icon was brought back into vogue by non-authoritarian feminist Camille Paglia, who characterized Thatcher as a more austere version of a femme fatale, who was able to use her charisma and sex appeal to outfox the aging aristocrats in Parliament. Berlinski echoes this version of Thatcher by describing the Iron Lady’s frequent visits to the White House as possessing “old-fashioned movie-star glamour,” as she knew how to weaponize her beauty for the Reagans, while back home in the House of Commons, she’d use her voice like a “trained stage actor,” using the full range to demonstrate remarkable oratory control during “Question Time” in Parliament, which is how William F. Buckley was drawn to the Iron Lady’s appeal. Thatcher used her femininity to neutralize chauvinists who were foolish enough to view themselves as equals to the Iron Lady. The patriarchy for her functioned much as it did in many households, where the husband took it as his birthright, while the mother hijacked it from behind the apron of domesticity.

For Paglia and perhaps even Berlinski, Thatcher was a blueprint for a kind of female empowerment that rejected infantilism, where young girls would study more military history and science, rather than flirting with the unproven theories found in gender and ethnic studies. I suppose Thatcher invites a kind of Randian individualism that terrifies the clubbable third-wave feminist. “Thatcher herself was not particularly interested in women’s issues, and she would not have considered herself a feminist—no matter how insistently people try to grant her that label now.” Indeed, but they refute their own argument against Thatcher’s feminist implications when they write that Thatcher had a “preternatural self-possession and disregard for the opinion of others.” What, I ask, is more unabashedly feminist than refusing the guidance of men and being religiously self-reliant? Nothing, which is why Thatcher is a threat to the cult of third-wave feminism. She is the defiant figure that they don’t want you to know about.