Margaret Thatcher and her influence on women

Men queued up to laud the Iron Lady. Here, four women from different walks of life, who did not necessarily like her ideas, have their sayShe was right about hoarding baked beansMargaret DrabbleMy aunt knew Mrs Thatcher's father. She taught in Long Bennington school on the Great North Road, a few miles north of Grantham where Mr Thatcher kept his grocery store. Their connection was through national savings certificates, in which my aunt had much faith and for which she was an agent. She encouraged children and nieces and the people of Grantham to invest in them. She believed in thrift, and taught us to save and to avoid debt, and Margaret Thatcher had much in common with her.Despite my dislike of Thatcher's policies, I could not help but have a regard for her commonsense attitude to good housekeeping, her wartime spirit of keeping the larder full of baked beans and dried goods just in case. Many economists despised this spirit, and warned her you couldn't run the country as you ran a household budget, but I had a gut respect for it. It didn't square up with monetarism and privatisation and the reckless deregulation of financial services and the Big Bang. It was atavistic, cautious, conservative with a small c. It's claimed that Mrs Thatcher's convictions were clear and strong but I find them full of paradoxes.Grantham is Middle England, it's Middlemarch. It's not a remote Lincolnshire town, as Shirley Williams thinks it is. It's on the spine of England, it's central. Importan...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Tags: Politics past Margaret Thatcher Margaret Drabble Science policy Feminism World news Books Women UK news Life and style Editorial Gender The Observer Conservatives Source Type: news