Photo: Hulton Archive / Getty Images
Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Great Britain, taking office on May 4, 1979, one day after the Conservatives won a majority of 44 seats in the general parliamentary elections.
Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in Grantham, England, in 1827. Her story of conquering spaces dominated by men begins at the University of Oxford, where she was the first president of the Conservative Association.
In 1959, after marrying businessman Denis Thatcher and later giving birth to twins, was elected to Parliament as a Conservative from Finchley, a North London district. During the decade of 1960, he rose rapidly through the ranks of his party.
With the victory of the Conservative Party under Edward Heath in 1970, the “Iron Lady” became secretary of state for education and science.
She was the first woman to lead the Conservatives and under his leadership, it moved even further to the right in its politics, calling for the privatization of national industries and public services. He also strongly criticized the ineffective handling of the chaotic labor strikes of 1978 and 1979.
The May 3 general election gave the ‘Iron Lady’ Conservatives a majority in Parliament. The next day, Prime Minister Thatcher immediately set out to dismantle socialism in Britain. She privatized numerous industries, cut government spending and gradually curtailed union rights.
In 1983, despite the worst unemployment figures in half a decade, Thatcher was re-elected for a second term, in largely thanks to the decisive British victory in the Falklands War of 1982 with Argentina.
In other foreign affairs, the “Iron Lady” presided over the orderly establishment of an independent Zimbabwe in 1979 and took a strong stance against Irish separatists in Northern Ireland. In October 1984, an Irish Republican Army bomb exploded at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton.
In 1987, a rebound in the economy led to her being elected to a third term, but Thatcher soon alienated some members of his own party because of his poll tax policies and his opposition to further British integration into the European Community.
In November 1990, he did not obtain a majority in the Conservative Party’s annual vote for the selection of a leader.
The 28 November, Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister and was succeeded by Major. Her three consecutive terms in office marked the longest continuous tenure by a British Prime Minister since 1827. In 1992, she was made a Baroness and held a seat in the House of Lords.
Although he stopped appearing in public after suffering a series of minor strokes in the early 1990s 2000, his influence remained strong.
Margaret Thatcher died on April 8, 2013, at the age of years.
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