TEMPO.CO, London - The world mourns with Britain as they lost one of their most phenomenal female world leaders. The first and only female prime minister to have ever lead Britain, Margaret Thatcher, died yesterday at the age of 87 after battling a stroke.
"I'm sure she will be remembered in the context of other great men like Winston Churchill. She made a real difference to the way we live our lives," the Thatchers' spokesman Lord Bell said yesterday.
Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts by name in Grantham, Lincolnshire, a small town in eastern England, October 13, 1925. Her political debut began when delivering a speech at the age of 20 years. She read Chemistry at Oxford University.
After becoming a chemist and a lawyer, Thatcher's political career took a big step up when she was elected chair of the Conservative Party in 1975. Just four years later, she made history by becoming the country's first female prime minister.
"I never thought there would be a female prime minister in my life," Thatcher said in an interview after his first victory.
During her first term as PM, Thatcher's name came to prominence when she declared war with Argentina after they made claim to the Falklands in 1982.
The British victory in the Falklands helped Thatcher get re-elected in 1983. A year after her second term began Thatcher escaped a bomb explosion planted by the IRA during the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton.
In 1987, Thatcher was re-elected Prime Minister for the third time. She resigned in 1990, accepting peerage, following pressure on her administration over tax policies that spurred turmoil among Britons.
Thatcher remains the only female Prime Minister Britain ever has. Her 11-year tenure is longer than any British politician of the 20th century.
She was given the nickname "Iron Lady" by a Soviet military correspondent, Captain Yuri Gavrilov, due to her consistency in opposing the Soviet Union and communism. The moniker first appeared in the Red Star daily in 1976. Lady Thatcher, of course, had something to say about it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you tonight in my red chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up; my fair hair gently waved… the Iron Lady of the Western World. Me? A Cold War warrior? Well, yes--if that is how they wish to interpret my defense of values of freedoms fundamental to our way of life," she said on Jan. 31, 1976.
Her assertiveness arose amid a harsh, male-dominated world of politics. But even before she became prime minister, Margaret Thatcher knew that she was to do something big in politics. On May 20, 1965, she gave a speech to the National Union of the Townswomen's Guilds Conference where she delivered one of her most memorable lines as a woman paving her way in politics, "In politics if you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman."
BBC | REUTERS | NATALIA SANTI | RAJU FEBRIAN
