Was Margaret Thatcher the first Spice Girl

Was Margaret Thatcher the first Spice Girl
Was Margaret Thatcher the first Spice Girl
Was Margaret Thatcher the first Spice Girl

Was Margaret Thatcher the first Spice Girl?
Thatcher's impact on popular culture and status as a role model for women are issues as contested as her political legacy
'Geri Halliwell's tweet lamenting the passing of the woman she described as “our 1st Lady of girl power” was deleted after negative responses from followers.' Photograph: Richard Young/Rex Features
One of social media's more unexpected responses to the death of Margaret Thatcher was the attempt to enlighten fans of ubiquitous boyband One Direction as to who she was, following a tweet from Harry Styles which left several of his followers confused. Thatcher's continuing ability to divide opinion was apparent as observers variously envied these young people their blissful ignorance of Thatcher or argued that the pros and cons of Thatcherism be taught in every school.

Twitter was also awkward for Geri Halliwell, whose tweet lamenting the passing of the woman she described as "our 1st Lady of girl power" was deleted after negative responses from her less enamoured followers. In her former incarnation as a Spice Girl, Halliwell memorably declared Thatcher to be "the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology", a quote from which her mortified co-vocalists attempted to distance themselves. But in some ways Halliwell was correct.

The Spice Girls, like their 90s pop-cultural sister Carrie Bradshaw, purveyed a consumerist and individualist feminism, their exhortation of "girl power" paying little attention to structural reasons why some girls might be less empowered than others. A function of this thinking was the elevation of high-achieving individual women as positive role models, regardless of how collectively progressive their achievements might be.

So in 1998, for instance, Natasha Walter's book The New Feminism described Thatcher as an "unsung heroine" of British feminism who normalised female success, even though, as Shirley Williams emphasised amid the coverage of Thatcher's death, she did little while in office to promote female colleagues or protegees and was openly disparaging of "strident" feminists – to say nothing of the negative material impact of her policies on many ordinary women. Other commentators have further noted that, while Thatcher's election to PM was indeed a landmark for women in British politics, her much-vaunted "grocer's daughter" outsider status was mitigated by an Oxford education and marriage into wealth, while a number of prominent women – Nancy Astor, Jennie Lee, Barbara Castle – had also served as MPs and cabinet ministers prior to or alongside her.

Thatcher's impact on popular culture and as a role model for women, then, remains as contested an issue as her political and economic legacy. In 2012 Meryl Streep's portrayal of her in Phyllida Lloyd's biopic The Iron Lady was the catalyst for a multitude of articles on Thatcher as both a style icon and a feminist inspiration, with the former suggestion proving to be less open to dispute than the latter. These same discussions have been reanimated by Thatcher's passing, prompting at least one blogger to castigate the manner in which the media, despite eulogising her as a woman who was able to "out-man" several of her political peers, have chosen nevertheless to focus heavily on what Angela Carter termed Thatcher's "balefully iconic" brand of stylised femininity.

Like that other 80s icon, Princess Diana, Thatcher's image was partly built on performing the right kind of femininity. Wearing an apron and washing dishes while contesting the party leadership, and, once in power, drawing on "softening" feminine trademarks like her bouffant blonde hair, pussy-bows and handbag, her image was in other ways a mixture of conflicting signifiers. In the 1981 Falklands war she was photographed on a tank in an image that the Daily Telegraph described as "a cross between Isadora Duncan and Lawrence of Arabia", while her "Iron Lady" speech echoed the "body of a weak and feeble woman … heart and stomach of a king" construction employed by Elizabeth I. The current push for a state funeral for Thatcher is in part a demonstration of the extent to which her image became almost that of a royal by proxy. The flurry of tweets questioning who she was, however, provides a useful reminder that awareness of, let alone reverence for, Thatcher is as far from universal as it is for other aspects of her era.