Thatcher is noteworthy, and not just for her gender

When nominations for the shortlist of faces for the new £50 note were opened in October, I wrote that I was in favour of giving it to the one and only Lady Thatcher – though boy did I get a hard time about this from my Lefty academic colleagues.

Unlike them, however, I do see the Lady as something of a feminist icon – not because she was a feminist (she adamantly wasn’t), or particularly dedicated to a state solution for the burdens faced by single and/or poor mothers (she wasn’t), but because she was a thrilling symbol of a woman with real, tangible power. So, for me, there would be something deliciously gratifying, on an unorthodox feminist level, about having her on the £50.

But it’s not as a woman that she has finally been added to the official long list. The Bank of England decided it wanted a scientist and Lady Thatcher has made it on those terms, having read chemistry at Oxford before working at the Lyons food company in the Forties, where she helped invent soft-scoop ice cream. Given the Lady’s own adamant refusal to define her success as that of a woman, her preliminary triumph under the new criteria is all the sweeter (though she’s one of 800 names suggested, so victory is not yet assured). She herself once said she’d far rather be remembered as the first scientist in No10 than the first woman.

But even in feminist terms, ignoring her gender in favour of her prowess with the periodic table feels like a triumph. For in doing so, we have achieved the very thing women’s rights campaigners have worked for since the 19th century, namely getting people to look at a woman in terms of her merit.

Anyway, we’re well into the tenure of our second female PM, in a world in which female heads of state are more and more common. Making Lady Thatcher our scientist figurehead is the truest endorsement possible of the idea that being a woman in power should be, could be, and increasingly is, just business as usual.