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 say
Margaret Thatcher, in her Chelsea home in February 1975. Photograph: PA
She was right about hoarding baked beans
Margaret Drabble
My 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. Importantly, from Grantham it's only an hour's drive up what is now the A1 to South Yorkshire, where the bitter and violent battles of the coal mines, our 20th-century civil war, were fought. The territories are adjacent. But the emotional distance between the market towns and communities of rural Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire was considerable. There was, I think, a mutual fear.
As her power increased, her voice deepened, her accent transmuted into a parody of received pronunciation and she acquired a false persona. I could not bear to hear her say "Rejoice, rejoice" or to quote St Francis or Kipling. Snobbishly, I recoil from the deep ring of inauthenticity. But she was right about hoarding baked beans. My cupboard is full and my old national savings certificates, unlike my pension funds, prosper.
Margaret Drabble's most recent book is A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman
Science, for her, was just there as a source of wealth creation
Athene Donald
As an academic scientist, my first thought on Thatcher's legacy relates to the university sector. The introduction, in 1986, of the first assessment of research had its roots in her unwillingness to trust anyone with anything unless it was centrally checked, and from it has grown an ever more burdensome attempt to quantify and rank university departments.
This desire to check and control was manifest in her attitude to science itself. As secretary of state for education and science in 1971, she oversaw a change of policy in science funding that had, and has, far-reaching consequences. Government departments became "consumers" of the work that was to be commissioned by the various research councils: civilian research was expected to have utility in and of itself. Science was just there as a source of wealth creation.
Over the following 20 years or so, control of scientists seems to have become a core strategy. There was a reduction in civilian scientific spend by the government. And what money there was had to be directed towards industrial needs, and industry (which meant large industry) was increasingly at the heart of the decision-making. Little room for unexpected innovations in a model like that.
However, she was a scientist and one can see how she grasped the scientific nettle in a way her ally Ronald Reagan did not in 1989, when she spoke passionately to the UN about manmade damage to the environment. She would have easily understood the greenhouse effect and she explicitly cited its potential for damage. Similarly, she was prepared to take drastic action over HIV/Aids – introducing needle exchanges and running a stark advertising campaign – while, in the US, fear of losing votes meant vital time was lost. On these two fronts at least she deserves to be applauded.
Athene Donald is professor of experimental physics at Cambridge University
The cultural battle gave us books and music of genius
Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
In 1981 I was a secondary school student in the not-so-recently renamed Harare. My teacher, a young white Zimbabwean woman who had studied in England, brought a record to our English class and introduced Linton Kwesi Johnson. The poetry was thrilling, the patois a struggle to understand and the cultural references sometimes opaque. But all of that made it feel vital and necessary. These were protest songs against the harsh truths of political philosophies that declared "there is no such thing as society".
In 1984 Martin Amis would publish Money, as energetic a depiction of life on the other side of fence as Johnson – and worlds apart. Here the death of society is encapsulated in the greed and excess of the me generation. It is the only book that I've ever thrown across a room, and then crawled to retrieve because it was impossible not to finish it.
I spent much of the second half of last year reading young British novelists for Granta's forthcoming list of Best of Young British Novelists. The first list was announced in the fourth year of Thatcher's premiership and we mark her death in the week we announce the fourth. I'm quite confident in saying that while the later generations may have inherited the world of Amis and Johnson, they have not inherited the rage. I don't think it would be right to say that our literature is poorer for it, but that sense of fight isn't there in the same way. Perhaps that passion to re-engineer society from the halls of politics was the necessary fuel for a cultural arsenal. Ellah Wakatama Allfrey is deputy editor of Granta
She showed that standing up for what you believe is right
Heather McGregor
I was 17 in May 1979 when I realised that my ambition to be the first female prime minister of the UK was no longer an option. So I changed my focus to business, and can rightly say that Mrs Thatcher influenced my career from that moment onwards. For a start, she demonstrated a pace-setting work ethic. Energy, I have come to realise, is the single greatest common factor of highly successful people.
She showed that standing up for what you believe is right, regardless of how unpopular it made you. Managing a business, and indeed being a parent, is not a popularity competition. Sheryl Sandberg [Facebook's CEO] relates how Mark Zuckerberg suggested that her wish to be liked would stand in the way of getting things done. Thatcher knew that before Zuckerberg was born.
There were practical things, too. Being strong doesn't mean you don't care. She took the time to write hundreds of handwritten notes to people she cared about, both those she knew and those she didn't. All this, and I never voted for her. I was too young in 1979, away from home in 1983 and voted for a different party in 1987.
I didn't have to share all her political views to find her an inspiration and an example. I don't have any daughters but if I did, I would make her archived papers, available at margaretthatcher.org, compulsory reading.
