Kulak and Feminist Icon

R.P. says: On her own terms Margaret Thatcher was a failure. She neither rolled back the frontiers of the state, nor created a property owning democracy. Those who surrounded her were happy for her to espouse these ambitions, but they had no intention of letting her realize them.
Neither did she galvanize the British economy after allowing the old industries to die away. The provincial centres of capital and power were moribund. The City preferred to invest in privatized monopolies. North Sea Oil paid not for reconstruction, but for the dole.
In foreign policy the ideas she proclaimed had a small role in the liberation of Eastern Europe. The word Freedom was forever on her lips. In that respect she was an inspiration to ordinary people who were oppressed by bureaucrats in many countries, and for that alone she deserves our respect.

Mary Malone writes: Margaret Thatcher was one of the few women in the history of the world to have made an impact on her own account. Until the moment that she became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, there had only ever been one woman Prime Minister on her own account  - Golda Meir, who had been Prime Minister of Israel.
Sirimavo Bandaranaike was the widow of the previous Prime Minister of Sri Lanka.
Indira Gandhi was Nehru's daughter.
And if we look at other women, Queen Elizabeth II is the daughter of a man who was king, as was Queen Elizabeth I.
Eva Peron shagged the boss.
Lady Di was a breeding mare.
Apart from Theresa May there have been no other leading Conservative women politicians.
The first woman elected to the U.K. Parliament was Countess Markievicz. The first woman to tale her seat as an M.P. was Lady Astor.
During Margaret Thatcher's time as an M.P., before she became Prime Minister, there were two prominent women Labour politicians, Barbara Castle, the daughter of a middle ranking tax collector, a member of the state loving managerial class, and Shirley Williams, the daughter of Vera Brittain, whose family owned a large paper mill in Staffordshire. Like most prominent Labour women, they had a few bob, though not as much as Harriet Harman, the niece of an earl, or Margaret Hodge (who used to fly the red flag over Islington Town Hall) who is mega rich on account of her family's steel trading business.
Compare these to Margaret Thatcher, whose father came from a shoe making family, learnt the trade of grocer, managed to open two shops, whose family was brought up in the flat above one of them.
Unlike most of the above, she grew up without servants.
Margaret Thatcher was a kulak who got above her station.
But above all, she was a woman, a woman who did it herself.