Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s new book, “The Book of Gutsy Women” tells the stories of hundreds of female pioneers, activists, athletes, and elected leaders, but former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who faced down Communism and won, was left off her list of “Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience.”
On Wednesday, BBC radio host, Emma Barnett asked the pair of Clinton women why the “Iron Lady” was conspicuously absent, despite being one of the first female leaders of a world power — a role Clinton herself clearly aspires to — didn’t make the cut. Thatcher, Barnett said, definitely fits the definition of “gutsy woman” “even if you didn’t like her.”
Clinton’s answer? Margaret Thatcher wasn’t “trying to make a positive difference.”
“She doesn’t fit the other part of the definition in our opinion, which really is knocking down other barriers for others and trying to make a positive difference,” Clinton said, adding that she believed Thatcher’s record is “mixed” on the issue of women’s rights.
Thatcher was “clever to mold herself to be more acceptable in terms of everything from hairstyle and speaking style to clothing style,” Clinton said, apparently implying that, instead of blazing a trail for women, Thatcher, a conservative, tried to pass as more masculine in order to achieve power.
“But on the criterion we were really looking at: ‘OK what were the positive differences, the changes this person made that really opened the doors to more?’ That wasn’t really that apparent,” Clinton added.
Thatcher, of course, may be among the most important political leaders of the modern age, even when both men and women are considered. She’s certainly a more influential figure in global politics than Geraldine Ferraro or Barbara Mikulski, both of whom did, in fact, make the cut for the Clinton’s tome.
As Fox News points out, Thatcher is also a physically gutsy woman, surviving a terrorist attack in 1984 “before going on to make a speech at her party’s conference the next morning,” and commanding the British army during the Faulklands War” — and that’s if Clinton doesn’t consider that Thatcher, along with then-President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, was a key figure in bringing about the fall of the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War.
But, of course, Thatcher was conservative. And her thoughts on “women’s rights” are directly at odds with the pair of Clintons, having famously quipped that she “owed nothing to women’s lib,” and she never thought to use “sexism” as an excuse for failure, the way Clinton has done repeatedly since losing the 2016 presidential election. Thatcher’s official biographer famously noted that, “In Margaret Thatcher’s view, her sex is an irrelevancy, and she is annoyed by people who make too much of a fuss over it.”
But to Thatcher’s credit, she forged a path for Hillary Clinton, telling reporters in 1965 that, “In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”
And Thatcher believed that women were uniquely qualified to run governments, given most women’s experience with domestic management. “Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country,” Thatcher said back in the late 1970s.
The Clintons’ book also leaves off Golda Meir, the former Prime Minsiter of Israel, likely also for her more conservative politics and not her achievements.