thehopelessfanatic asked: Regarding your Thatcher/Feminist post: I support women's rights, which makes me a feminist. I may not be in full support of what Thatcher did, but you cannot deny that what she did was short term loss/hardship, long-term gain. How can you say that she was not only the UK's first female leader, but the first WESTERN female leader is not a feminist because of your views? That's silly! You shouldn't diminish someone's accomplishments because it doesn't fit your narrow-minded agenda!
lmao
OH MY GOD FUCK OFF FUCK OFF FUCK OFF HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE NORTH OF ENGLAND DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING NO YOU DON’T BE QUIET GO AWAY
‘accomplishments’ fucking christ.
*OBLIGATORY NORTHERNER AGREEMENT*
Okay, I have been meaning to make this post for a long time and this is the final straw. This is a brief and non-exhaustive list of reasons why Thatcher was not a feminist icon, but it’s a start.
- Thatcher was openly anti-feminist. She actually said, “The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison."
- She did pretty much nothing to raise the status of or help other women while in power; she only had one female cabinet member throughout the eleven years she spent in office and almost entirely ignored women’s rights (I can’t remember which journalist it was who said that she “smashed the glass ceiling and then pulled the ladder up after her”, but that about sums it up).
- Thatcher’s government introduced Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools (i.e. effectively banning teachers and staff from discussing it in a positive light or giving support to LGBT+ students who turned to them for help). A lot of support groups for LGBT+ youth were shut down because schools were afraid they’d get into trouble for “promoting homosexuality”, taking away one of the few safety nets young LGBT+ people had at the time.
- She supported the racist apartheid regime in South Africa and refused to impose economic sanctions, despite international pressure. She also called Nelson Mandela and the ANC a “terrorist organisation”.
- Thatcher was actually just all-round racist and xenophobic. She blamed black people (rather than institutional racism in the police force) for the 1981 Brixton riot and refused to recognize that people of colour were discriminated against. Turns out she also made some rather nasty comments about immigration.
- Thatcher did not give a single shit about working-class people. Her economic policies widened the wealth gap drastically, allowing the rich and privileged to prosper at the expense of some of the poorest people in the country. Spending cuts led to mass unemployment, yet people who couldn’t find jobs were still demonized and branded as lazy despite the fact that there simply wasn’t enough work. Council houses were sold off to private landlords. Her government dismantled industries such as coal mining in areas which depended on these industries for their livelihood, despite a year-long strike in which miners were forced to depend on charity handouts to feed their families and faced horrid police brutality on the picket lines. Thousands more people lost their jobs because of this. Thousands and thousands of families were left in poverty. The north-south divide got a hell of a lot worse. Have you ever been to the north of England? I grew up in the north-east, one of the areas badly affected by Thatcher’s closure of the mines, and it’s never truly recovered economically since the 1980s. People still suffer under the government’s continued use of capitalist, neo-Thatcherite policies. This was and still is class war, plain and simple.
- She let hunger strikers in Northern Ireland starve to death. Paramilitary forces killed innocent people and Thatcher let it happen.
- She was friends with and supported Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator whose government tortured and killed thousands of people, and campaigned for his release after he was arrested for war crimes and human rights violations.
tl;dr Margaret Thatcher was NOT A GOOD PERSON. AT ALL. And I am sick and fucking tired of people hailing her as a feminist icon simply because she was a woman in a position of power. How on fucking earth can anybody have such a simplified view of feminism that they will align themselves with a powerful female figure who despised the feminist movement and used her power to actively harm marginalised people, women included? Do you honestly, seriously want to associate somebody like that with the feminist movement?
Because if you do, I don’t trust you and I want no part in your narrow-minded brand of feminism.
See also: Jimmy Saville, Hillsborough, snatching milk, the assisted rise and enabling of the homophobic, misogynist, xenophobic murdoch press.
*obligatory northerner anger*
Seriously, my grandparents spent years in their tiny Durham village watching kids go hungry because of thatcher.
The ‘smashing the glass ceiling and pulling the ladder up behind her’ quote comes from Hadley Freeman.
