The British will have the final say on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, who died on Monday morning at the age of eighty-seven. She was their leader, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, the first woman to lead a European (or North American) country. But she has a presence in so many political images and ideologies—and world historical and cultural moments—that the rest of the world has some reckoning to do, too. She was a grocer’s daughter. She died as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. She went to war with Argentina. She seemed ready to provoke the Soviet Union to a civilization-ending conflict, bringing American nuclear missiles to Europe, and instead was present at the Warsaw Pact’s mostly peaceful disintegration. She once told George H. W. Bush that it would be “wobbly” of him not to go to war with Iraq. She met with Nelson Mandela, smiling, after years of what might generously be called ambivalence on her part about what he represented for South Africa. If the relationship with Northern Ireland was still as it was when she was in charge, her obituaries today might have a sharper tone—from both sides. She was the most powerful woman in the world and went regularly to pay homage to a Queen.
Thatcher, undeniably, was a revolutionary figure in terms of women’s power. There is some mystery in why she didn’t always feel that way—why she isn’t entirely experienced as a feminist icon. She was the Iron Lady—and the lady part, with its carefully chosen accoutrements, may explain part of why she could come across as an affirmer of the status quo, rather than the breaker of barriers that she certainly was. Perhaps, with her death, that will change. As with Angela Merkel, her place in her country’s domestic-political constellation is complicated by other factors—class in Britain, the East-West divide in Germany—that can be hard for outsiders to sort out. (Coincidentally or not, both women trained as chemists.) Thatcher’s status not only as a leader but as the evangelist for an ideology—anti-union, pro-privatization, militaristic, disdainful, or so it felt, of those who couldn’t manage—is part of what confounds anyone who tries to tell her story simply in terms of gender and power. Even more than that, she was a character so singular that it is hard to conjure up the feeling of wanting to grow up to be Margaret Thatcher. That is a triumph, if one as cold as it is dazzling.
For Americans, especially of a certain age, she is difficult to disentangle from one’s overall feelings about Ronald Reagan and his Presidency—their alliance and affinity made it harder for those who were not Reaganites to like her, and something like a sainted conveyer of the Churchillian blessing to those who did. There were those who saw her as the savior of Britain and a pathfinder for Americans, and those who danced to “Stand Down Margaret,” by the English Beat, and worried about the poll tax while being vague about the details. In different ways, the extremism of today’s American Republican Party and the relative moderation of the British Conservative Party have softened both pictures. She neither ruined nor defined everything. That both she and Reagan had a long departure, marked by dementia, adds another screen in looking back at those years. But to be an Iron Lady is not to be forgotten.
The New Yorker has written about Thatcher many times over the years: John Newhouse wrote a profile of her in 1986; Julian Barnes wrote about her memoirs in 1993; Lauren Collins wrote last year about traces of Thatcherism. When “The Iron Lady,” with Meryl Streep, came out, we put together a look back at our coverage.
Above: Margaret Thatcher, in 1982. Photograph by David Robertson/Eyevine/Redux.