Thatcher Born: Britain's Iron Lady Enters the World

Margaret Thatcher came from Grantham, the daughter of Alfred Roberts, a grocer who also served as an alderman and lay Methodist preacher. She grew up above the shop. She studied chemistry at Oxford, worked as a research chemist, qualified as a barrister, and entered Parliament in 1959 as the member for Finchley. She became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, at a time when nobody in the British establishment expected a woman to hold that position. Born on October 13, 1925, she was shaped by her father's Methodist values of hard work, thrift, and personal responsibility. She brought those values into government with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. She became Prime Minister in 1979, inheriting an economy battered by inflation, strikes, and the "Winter of Discontent." Over the next eleven years, she dismantled much of the postwar consensus: nationalized industries were privatized, including British Telecom, British Gas, and British Airways. Council houses were sold to their tenants. Union power was broken, most dramatically in the miners' strike of 1984-85, a year-long confrontation that ended with the defeat of Arthur Scargill's National Union of Mineworkers and the effective end of organized labor as a political force in Britain. Her economic policies, collectively called Thatcherism, reduced inflation and created new wealth, particularly in southern England and the financial sector. But they also devastated industrial communities in the north, Wales, and Scotland, producing unemployment rates above 20 percent in some regions and a geographic inequality that persists decades later. She won the Falklands War in 1982 after Argentina invaded the British-controlled islands in the South Atlantic. The military victory transformed her political fortunes and secured her second term. Her relationship with Ronald Reagan aligned British and American foreign policy on the Cold War. Her opposition to the European Community's moves toward political integration anticipated the Brexit debate by decades. She resigned in November 1990, in tears, after her own Cabinet withdrew its support over the poll tax controversy. She died on April 8, 2013, at 87, still one of the most divisive figures in British political history.