6/13/2023 0 Comments A woman in her prime pdf![]() ![]() She was leader of the House of Lords from 1981 to 1983, but had never been elected to parliament. We went through the lack of promotion of women in her cabinet – Baroness Young, a close friend of the prime minister, had been the only woman elevated. She would, I knew, fix me with a piercing cold eye, bat aside concerns about part-time work, low pay, lack of childcare facilities, poverty in old age and sneer that the f-word (feminism) simply wasn't in her lexicon. She was the most terrifying prospect for a young and relatively inexperienced interviewer and I was, frankly, physically sick at the thought of turning up at Downing Street and trying to engage her in the kind of issues that were of paramount interest to Woman's Hour listeners. And, of course, unlike Evita, she was nobody's consort. She oozed that indefinable something that can only be described as star quality. She fizzed with an almost superhuman energy. Alan Clarke in his diaries compares her with Eva Perón – his assessment did not seem to me an exaggeration. I had witnessed the baffling charisma of the woman and seen the power she had over an audience. I faced her properly for the first time in the mid-1980s, although I had covered her progresses around the south of England for some years as a reporter for BBC South and subsequently for Newsnight. ![]() W hat did Margaret Thatcher do for women? Nothing.
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