Wednesday marks the beginning of Women’s History Month, and feminists are well-prepared to offer their own version of that subject over the course of the next thirty days. More often than not, those efforts deliberately exclude the accomplishments of women whose worldviews do not conform to the standards of contemporary feminism.
One such woman happens to be among the most consequential historical figures of the 20th century.
Born the daughter of a grocer, Margaret Thatcher ascended the ranks of British politics and served eventually as the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. Her talent for packaging wisdom into pithy phrases left us with countless concise quotes to return to for years to come. Here is a brief selection to help you celebrate her successes this Women’s History Month.
1. “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
2. “There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
3. “Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.”
4. “In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”
5. “I owe nothing to women’s lib.”
6. “I’ve got a woman’s ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it.”
7. “What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.”
8. “To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.”
9. “The woman’s mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its activities.”
10. “You don’t suddenly appear on the bottom rung of a ladder and then at the top. You have to climb up each rung as it goes.”
11. “The fact is that women have children, and this mother-child bond is the greatest bond in the world. It’s far better to make something of it than try to act as if you had never had it.”
12. “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning!”
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
