Is Margaret Thatcher a woman? No woman is if she has to make it in a man's world.

Is Margaret Thatcher a Woman?

No woman is if she has to make it in a man's world.

Among world leaders, Mrs. Thatcher stands out in the crowd. In a row of suits, the eye is drawn to the single dress among Western leaders. Love her or loathe her, she isn't ignored. Women who succeed are twice as admired, because no one really thinks a woman can do it. As Dr. Johnson cruelly said, "The wonder is not that they do it well but that they do it at all."

So has she been a good thing for women? Most feminists say unequivocally, No. For her catalog of unsisterly sins is long, and growing.

The only prime minister since the war to appoint no woman to her cabinet, she has given fewer government jobs of any kind to women. Conservatives overwhelmingly predominate in the House of Commons, and the small number of women in Parliament is in large part due to the failure of the Conservative party to select women as candidates in any but the most hopeless seats.

She is a Queen Bee and she likes to stand out alone. In cabinet photographs, she doesn't want some other woman diverting the eye. The longer that there are no other women at the top in politics, the more remarkable her success looks.

However, the only reason she rose to such power herself was as a token woman. Edward Heath, the Conservative leader she eventually deposed, admits having appointed her to his cabinet as secretary of state for education only because he needed a statutory woman. After Heath lost the 1974 election, certain elements in the Conservative party were determined that he should go. Mrs. Thatcher, by a stroke of opportunism and daring, offered herself as a candidate against him when others demurred. She toppled Heath on the first ballot. It was a remarkable coup. Most of the Conservative members of Parliament had thought she had little chance. They only wanted to give Heath a fright. Imagine their horror when they found that, overnight, the most dominantly male, reactionary, and antiwoman party in the land had voted itself a rightwing woman leader and future prime minister.

She would probably not have made it to the cabinet if she hadn't been a token woman, for her politics were not in tune with the leadership of that time. She would never have made it to leader, albeit accidentally, if she hadn't been a woman. She has experienced nothing but advantage from her gender.

Once Thatcher was leader, everyone, or nearly everyone, said she could never be elected. The country was not ready for a woman prime minister, they said. The British were not accustomed to more than the occasional token woman in public life. As education minister, Mrs. Thatcher herself said in a television interview that she thought there would never be a woman prime minister in her lifetime.

According to feminists, we still haven't got a woman prime minister--not a real one. Mrs. Thatcher is only a surrogate man. When she first won the leadership of her party, she pronounced clearly to her press officer that she would never give interviews on the basis of being a woman. She was not interested in being a woman--and she certainly had no particular policies for women.

Do not imagine, either, that in some more subtle, back-door way, her womanhood has shone through. Women have lost, not gained, ground under her rule. Women at work have fewer employment rights. While women earned 75 percent of men's wages when an Equal Pay Act was passed in 1975, they now earn only 65 percent. Government ministers actually praise women's low pay, pointing out how low pay means women have more opportunities in the job market than men, and how job growth is greatest in women's sectors--cleaning, caring services, and catering. Her government has wriggled out from under European Economic Community directives on equal pay for work of equal value. She has packed the Equal Opportunities Commission with people guaranteed to render it silent and toothless.

On the welfare front, child benefits have been reduced, along with social security payments. The cuts have fallen hardest on the largest and most vulnerable group of welfare recipients--single mothers. At the same time she has introduced a new divorce law designed to let men pay less maintenance to their families. So with 84 percent of single mothers divorced, a higher proportion are on welfare--more since the new divorce law.

A man might not have gotten away with all this. Male politicians can always be made to feel at least a little guilty about women. But Mrs. Thatcher is a woman--no guilt there. It took a woman to put down women's rights so effectively. It took a woman to brave all the accusations about not caring for the old, the sick, the poor, and the helpless in a country that still firmly believes in the welfare state. It took a mother to do in mothers, a wife to do in wives, a working woman to do in working women. Womanhood has been her ace card, never her Achilles heel.

Sacrifice the children

This has left the women's movement virtually speechless. So, you've got a woman prime minister--what more do you want? What is the point of putting more women into power when they act no differently (or worse than) men? Gone is all that woolly rhetoric about how women are all sisters under the skin. Gone is that curious mysticism of the seventies that dwelled upon some imaginary golden age of matriarchy, where under women's power there would be no hierarchy, no war, no ambition. Gone is the idea that sisters are essentially, genetically, spiritually better than men.

(Or almost gone. You will still hear some such incantations from the weird sisters to be found outside the gates of Greenham Common--the ferociously feminist pacifists camping out against Cruise missiles.)

So how is she to be explained? The explanation goes like this: one woman doesn't make a matriarchy. In order to succeed in the most male of all worlds--politics--a woman has to make herself into an imitation man. Worse, she has to be twice as tough. To prove she is as good as them, she's got to be one of the boys. Being one of the boys means cutting off the girls. It means refusing to admit you are a girl. And just to prove it, you have to be twice as brutal to them, twice as savage.

After all, she has had to make big sacrifices in her life to get where she is. She never managed to Have It All. She married a rich and stupid man who had all the necessary credentials to help her on her way. Few imagine it was a love match. First, Denis Thatcher had money, which is essential in the Tory party. Second, he had little ambition for himself. Thirdly, he was willing to let her forceful ambition have its head. Those who are close to Mrs. Thatcher believe she will go on until she drops rather than go into a contented retirement with boring old Denis.

The she had to sacrifice her children. She entered Parliament when her twin children were only two years old. Those who know her well say that privately she has a deep and strong sense of guilt and regret about them. Politics and young children combine particularly badly in Britain, where the House of Commons sits from 3 p.m. until midnight most days, and often later.

Whether it's their mother's fault or not (she feels it is), her children have become a slightly pathetic national spectacle, which is rare in Britain where prime ministers' children have usually remained quite private and unknown. People hardly knew the names of Harold Wilson's sons. But Margaret Thatcher's childrens' careers and public image bear little relation to the kind of values she promotes, nor much resemblance to her own rigorous upbringing as a small town shopkeeper's daughter. Their public image is too public and mostly unattractive and unsuccessful. Mark made a bad start as a racing driver. He is now married to a Texas millionairess and makes his living out of business consultancies. Carol is making an embarrassing career in journalism where her name is her main asset.

So Mrs. Thatcher the woman has had to sacrifice many of the joys of a happy family to get where she is--just the way top men do. She got where she is by climbing up the men's ladder, behaving like a man, sacrificing like a man, and being ten times tougher than all the men around her. There was no other way it could be done. And now that some women are breaking through to the top in most occupations there are women like her all over the place--in their executive suits with the little string ties or floppy jabots and padded power-dressing shoulders.

Mrs. Thatcher is the icon for today's successful woman. She's never complained about being a woman--she's turned it to her advantage. She despises whining women. If she can do it the hard way, why can't every other woman with the guts and determination?

Feminists respond that Mrs. Thatcher is no sister because she has led a man's life. If there were more women at the top, more women in power, the argument goes, then the entire nature of life, work, and power would change. If there were enough women on the ladder, they could insist that abandoning family and children was not the inevitable price of professional success. Men too would be freed to spend more time at home. Career patterns would change. Flexible work arrangements would be the norm. No promotion need be lost to go part-time for a year or two when the children are young. Men and women with young families need not find themselves working the longest overtime in their lives under the greatest stress, just when they most need to be at home more. Offices, organizations, power structures could be thus "feminized" to the great benefit of men and women everywhere.

This will be difficult to do. How do you hold back the ambitious striving for success in the years when children are young, the very same years when a career is at a critical stage in the making? Who dares try it first, for fear of others overtaking them in their absence?

But unless it is made possible, women will never be equal, not in any great numbers. Most will not be willing to sacrifice their families as Mrs. Thatcher has. Women will still have to choose between children and top jobs, in a way no man is ever expected to do. Successful men will go on being largely irrelevant to their families' lives, except as bread winners.

Gradually, there will be changes, when there are enough women at the top to prevent them all having to turn themselves into Mrs. Thatchers. When there are enough women for them not to have to prove they are one of the boys. When there are enough women struggling to bring up children and keep up a high-powered career. When there are so many of them that it will be safe for them to admit they have a problem and not to hide it. When there are so many women in valued positions that companies and organizations can no longer shirk their responsibilities to their employees' families.

Just by being there Mrs. Thatcher has done more for women than most feminists recognize. No one says any longer in Britain that a woman couldn't do such-and-such a job, in the way they did before her. There is a lot less talk--especially on the Conservative benches of the House of Commons--about the woman's place being in the home. The image of the successful go-getting woman is now chic, where it used to be unfeminine or Joan Collins voracious. Advertisers, way ahead of the statistical reality, now show endless images of briefcase-toting women with their American Express Gold Cards, a success symbol more enticing than a mere businessman.

The Thatcher trap

Powerful women are in fashion, though they aren't anywhere else for the figures show how little and how slowly things have changed. The image has chased far ahead of the reality. Just as Mrs. Thatcher has heralded no change in the numbers of women in politics, so one or two women on prominent company boards does not mean a significant increase in numbers of women in junior- and middle-management, nor in the middle or high ranks of the civil service.

But if Mrs. Thatcher has helped the image of women in some ways, she has also helped perpetuate the pernicious myth that most women can make it without any change in present structures. There she stands, awesome in her successes, the perfect representation of the macho woman, the surrogate man.

In criticizing Mrs. Thatcher as a surrogate man, feminists mean she has betrayed women--not only politically but spiritually. Antifeminists mutter the same thing. She is abhorrent, anathema, unfeminine. She is herself destroying what is most precious and treasured about womanhood in pursuit of mere manly power.

Hardline feminists and antifeminists have colluded in the past to provide a model for maleness and femaleness that has the same unsavory roots. Feminists say women are better. Antifeminists say so too, but don't really mean it. (They mean they love their mothers more than their fathers.) Feminists say women are in touch with nature, with friendship, with humanity, while men are emotionally retarded, stunted beings, competitive and warlike in their inadequacy.

In clinging to the "specialness" of women, the feminists destroy themselves. What is important about women is how very little different they are from men. Research has shown repeatedly how the differences in class, education, race, background, and emotional experience are far greater between human beings than the gender differences between men and women. Of course there are differences, few would deny it--but they are less important than other differences. And yet the most important dividing line society makes is usually between boys and girls, men and women.

The real difference comes in women's and men's lives and expectations. Despite the social changes of the past quarter century, most women still expect to be largely responsible for the upbringing of their children. Few men do. If women don't care enough for their children, they know their children risk neglect. If men don't care enough, they know their wives will. That is the only important difference and it affects every aspect of all our lives from earliest social awareness. How much or how little chromosones fit into this pattern pales into insignificance beside this near-universal fact.

So Mrs. Thatcher, and tough women like her, pretend they have escaped the trap--but they haven't. They've done it at their children's expense, and at their own, in ways men never have to. Either you have no children, and you lose out on an essential aspect of human life. Or you have children, and they lose out. Successful Mrs. Thatchers who make it on men's terms change little for most women. It is all image and no content. Ostensible barriers may have fallen, but the real tactical barriers are as high as ever.

Mrs. Thatcher as an icon for women is a confusing image. So near and yet so far. She has made it look so easy. And yet so little has changed.