Hisses aside, Hillary can do for US girls what Maggie did for me
SAY what you like about Hillary Clinton, but she is a woman. Granted, around 50% of the US population can make the same boast. But the plain fact is, no one else with two X chromosomes has ever come this close to taking the White House. If she succeeds, Clinton won’t just change history: she will change the life of every girl in the US. I was eight when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, and 19 when she left Downing Street in tears, having been ousted by her restive menfolk. From the moment I became aware of a world beyond my mother’s skirt, I understood that it was ruled by women: a queen on the throne, and a terrifying premier in No 10. It didn’t matter to me that everyone in my family’s social circle — writers, publishers, dons, the left-leaning intelligentsia — detested Thatcher. On the contrary, their apoplexy only made her more fascinating. What kind of woman was this who could provoke — and more amazingly, withstand — such anger? Why did everyone seem so afraid of her, as if she had taken power through dark magic? There was snobbery as well as misogyny behind their hatred. Thatcher came from the eternally despised lower-middle classes. At Oxford she had studied chemistry — then considered (for such are the mysteries of the English class system) a common subject, and referred to dismissively as “Stinks”. Once, around the time of the 1979 election, I overheard two dons bitching about how Thatcher had once had a job inventing emulsifiers for soft-serve ice cream. I was perplexed: here was a woman with the power to make ice cream yield effortlessly to the tongue, and they still didn’t want her to run the country? Thatcher claimed not to believe in feminism: “I owe nothing to women’s lib,” she said. Yet in her independence of thought, her assumption that she was equal to — no, much better than — the men around her, and her refusal to let marriage and motherhood curtail her, she was one of its greatest exemplars. STEEL OVARIES: Hillary Clinton is ’less iconoclastic’ but deserves the top job TOWER OF CARING: Being a good father means rejecting the many forms of violence that men often perpetuate, the writers say ICE CREAM MAIDEN: With Maggie in office, it ’never occurred to me we couldn’t get to the top’, says the writer
The attitudes of the matriarch inevitably rub off on her children. It never occurred to me, or any of my friends, that we couldn’t get to the top in our chosen professions. Thatcher made power seem like our birthright.
She showed us that there were many ways to be a successful female, some of them decidedly “unfeminine”. You could be stubborn and hardhearted and egotistical; you could wear boxy clothes and a thin smile and never flash an inch of flesh, and still have every man in Britain in the palm of your hand.
Clinton is a less iconoclastic and challenging figure: her rough edges have been rubbed off during her long years at the political coalface. But you don’t get to the gates of the White House without balls — or rather, ovaries — of steel. For that alone, she deserves the job. —© The Daily Telegraph, London