CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Iron Ladies

The Iron Lady of the Western World! Me? A Cold Warrior? Well, yes – if that is how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.

MARGARET THATCHER (1976)

When Queen Boadicea, courtesy of the sculptor Thornycroft, did finally take up her position upon the Thames Embankment in 1902, it was as an embodiment of the age of empire. Lest the message be missed, Cowper’s proud lines of prophecy were inscribed upon the plinth:^f1

Regions Caesar never knew

Thy Posterity shall sway.

Queen Victoria had died early in the previous year, at the ripe age of eighty-one. The role of the female ruler, provided it did not involve the actual battlefield, appeared to be conducive to longevity. In 1900 a very different kind of Warrior Queen, Tz’u-Hsi, the so-called Dragon Empress of China, had the impudence to solicit support from Queen Victoria during the Boxer Rebellion which she herself had done much to foment on this very basis: ‘two old women’, so ran her telegram, should understand each other’s difficulties.² (Born in 1835, an approximate contemporary of the Rani of Jhansi, the Dragon Empress was sixteen years younger than Victoria.) Nevertheless even in 1902 the erection of the Boadicean monument should still be seen as celebrating the kind of maternal imperialism – indistinguishable to its practitioners from patriotism – personified by Victoria herself.

Curiously enough, the Embankment site was a second, or if one remembers Prince Albert’s original suggestion of the Hyde Park Arch nearly a half century before, a third choice.³ Thornycroft’s project had passed through various vicissitudes following the Prince’s premature death in 1861. To be sure, there was a melancholy bonus in a series of equestrian portraits of his former patron; but Thornycroft had toiled on the Boadicean group for fifteen years before a favourable review of it in The Times in 1871 suggested the possibility of a government commission. The sculptor resumed work in 1883, but died two years later, at which point his family offered the group to the public, together with a contribution to the heavy cost of casting.

It was a spurt of interest in the supposed burial place of Boadicea near the end of the century which was responsible for the final step. The London County Council proposed to erect the statue at the top of Parliament Fields, on the grounds that a tumulus there was the traditional site; a subscription of £2,800 was raised to have Thornycroft’s statue cast in bronze, with a further £1,500 for a pedestal by J. G. Jackson. Intervention from the Society of Antiquaries, who rejected the Parliament Fields tradition, left the Boadicean group once more siteless, until 1902 when it reached its present resting place, near Westminster Bridge, and within sight of the Houses of Parliament.

Beyond Cowper’s significant lines, the inscription beneath the statue kept various other options open. The subject of the monument was described as ‘Boadicea (Boudicca) Queen of the Iceni Who died AD 61 after leading her people against the Roman invader’. Boadicea’s daughters, however, although shown as part of the group – two strapping females, bare-breasted as Amazons for the fight – suffered from their usual official disregard and were not named or even mentioned. As for the Iceni Queen herself (her hair in a neat pageboy style rather than flowing), ‘One really must admire her sang-froid’, wrote Lord Edward Gleichen in 1928 in a study of London’s open-air statuary. For the horses, modelled – not too closely one hopes – on those of Prince Albert’s stables, are galloping wildly, but Boadicea has no reins with which to control them, as she stands coolly aloft with her spear.⁴

This belief in the nobility of empire, attached to the idealized character of a patriotic woman, was to be one important element in the survival of the Boadicean legend.⁵ The year 1900 for example saw the publication of Britain’s Greatness Foretold, the story of Boadicea by Marie Trevelyan, which traced the foundations of ‘our present freedom’ back to those ancient struggles against the Romans.⁶ (The South African War against the Boers had begun while Marie Trevelyan was in the process of writing.) The book is redolent with direct comparisons between Boadicea and Queen Victoria: also characteristic of the time is the general emphasis placed upon the inspiring femininity of both queens.

British colonization, Marie Trevelyan pointed out, was the task of families, not soldiers, ‘just as it was the woman Boadicea who rallied all the tribes of Britain round her in her day’. Led by Queen Victoria, it was the women of Great Britain who had materially helped to spread and maintain the British Empire. As for Marie Trevelyan’s Boadicea, even in war she never surrendered her natural tenderness: at the last battle indeed the ‘majestic queen’ was described as being ‘lost in the weeping woman’. On the other hand, when Boadicea’s men responded loudly to her speech with the rallying cry ‘For Britain, Boadicea and freedom’, they were of course intent on making aggressive war rather than domestic peace.

So Boadicea, aided both by late Victorian perceptions concerning women and empire, and by the image of Queen Victoria herself, passed into the pantheon of idealized patriotic women. It is a place she has not lost in the century since the erection of her statue and is not likely to lose, so long as national crises arise, demanding reference to comforting historic symbols of courage and endurance.

Patriotic fervour helped to make up one part of the modern Boadicean plinth. At the same time, as women stirred in their struggle for general recognition as a sex (rather than as privileged individuals) Boadicea’s protean legend began to be employed in quite a different connection. Pageants had become increasingly popular in late Victorian and Edwardian times; in this manner the British aristocracy was able to show off both its adequate historical knowledge and its more than adequate historical fancy dress, in a pleasurable real-life example of zeugma. But The Pageant of Great Women, first performed on 10 November 1909 at the Scala Theatre, London, was a pageant with a difference, since it was performed in the suffragette cause.⁷ This was two months after the Prime Minister, Asquith, had instructed the prison doctors to feed suffragette hunger-strikers forcibly. Originally produced by the play department of the Actresses’ Franchise League, written by Cicely Hamilton, designed and directed by Edith Craig, the pageant subsequently toured the country.

Boadicea, ‘a Briton in arms’, was one of the most prominent characters. When she appeared, spectators were adjured to ‘look on her who stood … and spat defiance at the hosts of Rome!’ A photograph of the event in the Daily Mirror shows what they saw: a stalwart Boadicea, towering over her companions and got up more or less according to Dio Cassius’ instructions, with flowing tresses over a barbaric robe, a torc and other jewels, and an enormous spear in her hand (another possible comparison, to Ellen Terry’s famous portrait as Lady Macbeth, reminds one that Edith Craig was Ellen Terry’s daughter).

The character of Prejudice was played by a man. Otherwise the familiar stage army – in this case literally so – of great women was paraded in categories which included ‘Learned Women’, ‘Artists’ and ‘Saintly Women’ as well as ‘Rulers’ and ‘Warriors’. Here Queen Zenobia ‘of the hero’s heart’ was placed among the Rulers; but the Rani of Jhansi – ‘though but a child in years’ – found her place among the Warriors together with Boadicea, Joan of Arc and the fourteenth-century Scot Agnes Dunbar. It was intended by this appeal to the rich past to draw public attention to the ‘physical, intellectual, creative and ethical’ strengths of women, in contrast to Prejudice’s contemptuous declaration that Woman’s innate stupidity made her incapable of thought. Fifty-two actresses took part.

In order to facilitate touring, it was Edith Craig’s plan that such a pageant should contain only three speaking parts, all allegorical; these were performed by professionals. Otherwise members of suffragette societies on the spot would supply the colourful heroines, Edith Craig arriving to dress them. This ingenious arrangement was not without its little local difficulties: the extreme popularity of the role of Joan of Arc constituted one of them. Another of a rather different nature was encountered when the members of a suffrage society in a university town thought they knew enough for no one to be anxious to play Catherine the Great: who, ‘whatever may have been her merits as a ruler, was renowned for the scandals of her private life’. Finally a girl was found who presumably shared Edith Craig’s view that a good part was a good part for all that.

The pageant ended with Prejudice taking his stand on force as ‘the last and ultimate judge’, and claiming that force for man alone ‘who takes the sword – The sword that must decide!’ Woman on the other hand, declared Prejudice, ‘Fears the white glint of it and cowers away’. It was at this point that the Warriors, led by Boadicea, were paraded in rebuttal. The stage directions read: ‘Then Prejudice slinks away.’

But Prejudice, if he left the stage of the Scala Theatre, did not slink far, let alone slink away altogether, even with the winning of the vote for women at various dates in various countries across the world. Seventy years after the Pageant of Great Women anextraordinary exhibition was shown in San Francisco for the first time before embarking upon a worldwide tour to packed attendance.^f2

The Dinner Party was conceived by the American artist and craftswoman Judy Chicago and executed by her over five years with ‘a working community of women and men’.⁸ The exhibition consisted of thirty-nine ‘place settings’ upon a large open triangular banqueting table, which in turn rested upon a porcelain ‘Heritage Floor’, bearing the names of 999 women, grouped into categories. Its aim – an avowedly feminist one – was not only to ‘symbolize the long history of female achievement’ but also to remind its audience that ‘the history of Western civilization, as we have understood it, has failed to represent the experience of half the human race’.

The Dinner Party’s categories include ‘Primordial Goddess’ and ‘Fertile Goddess’ but also ‘Kali’, a category described as a ‘traditionally positive view of female power misrepresented as a destructive force’ (such as Celtic Britain’s Rhiannon). ‘Boadicea d. 62AD’ (sic) is, like ‘Kali’, the name which heads a category standing for ‘the tradition of warrior queens extending back to legendary times’. Other Boadiceas include Cartimandua, Artemisia, Cleopatra, defined as a ‘Ruler–Deity’, Medb of Connacht, Tomyris and Zenobia, given the full panoply of description as ‘Queen, warrior, military strategist and scholar’.

Give or take changes in the language of female protest between 1909 and 1979, there is an obvious and significant similarity between the suffragette pageant and the feminist exhibition in method of execution. It is not just that certain devaluations of the nature of women – her innate stupidity and cowardice for example as denounced by the pageant’s male figure of Prejudice – are clearly still perceived to need rebuttal in the late twentieth century, as they have been rebutted by bold spirits throughout history. Further than that, the appeal in both cases to ‘Triumphant Women’ of the past bears witness once again to the enduring importance of heroines such as Boadicea, mythical or actual, to women combating their own inferior status; and this despite the passionate desire of many women to help forward all their sex, not merely the potential leaders.

With the coming of the Women’s Movement, such heroines naturally take on new guises. In The Dinner Party, for example, ‘Elizabeth R’, like ‘Boadicea d. 62 AD’, constitutes a category: the first Elizabeth is described as ‘One of the greatest female rulers who ever lived, distinguished stateswoman and scholar.’ While not dissenting from the verdict, one cannot help wondering what Elizabetha Triumphans herself would have made of the all-female company, she who was accustomed to pikes being couched and ensigns lowered in devotion as she passed, ‘to she alone and none but only she’; to say nothing of her calculated boast of having the heart and stomach of a man. Boadicea, on the other hand, has come to symbolize a kind of female freedom and even sexual liberation.

The discovery by the feminist poet Judy Grahn – to her own satisfaction – that the name Boadicea (in its original Boudica form) was the origin of the word ‘bulldike’, may stand as an extreme example of this.⁹ Grahn, in an article of 1980 entitled ‘The Queens of Bulldikery’, described how in years past the mystery of the word ‘bulldike’ had ‘burbled and thickened’ in her mind; deciding that it stemmed from Old English, she therefore searched for a historical people who once worshipped and valued bulls. From here to Boadicea (‘Bo’ means ‘cow’ in Irish while English friends assured her that ‘bull’ was pronounced ‘Boa’) and thence happily to Boudica, was a short leap of Grahn’s creative imagination.

‘Boudica was a barbarian and a Celt,’ wrote Grahn, ‘and her pudenda would have been active, unashamed, and radiating with female power all her life … Considering Celtic customs it would have been unnatural of Queen Boudica not to be a lesbian. She was, after all, a queen and a military leader of her people.’ With an even greater leap of the imagination, Grahn also drew attention to the large number of puns surrounding Boadicea’s name, such as the soldiers’ dikes which they made in AD 61, and her statue called ‘Boadicea on the Embankment’, embankment being a synonym for dike.

Grahn however derided Dio Cassius’ description of the atrocities committed under Boadicea’s command – the laceration of the women’s breasts in particular – as being ‘too much like the typical patriarchal response to women warriors in general to be believed’. (This point of view, incidentally, provides Grahn with an ally in the shape of Milton, however unlikely the combination; he too dismissed such invented details by which historians hoped to ‘embellish’ their work.)¹⁰ The next leap is to transfer the word ‘bulldike’ to the United States: Grahn’s explanation lies in the slang of Newgate Prison, from which many indentured criminals proceeded westwards, a high percentage of them, according to Grahn, Celts, who remembered their ancestors as homosexual ‘as a matter of course’.

It is too easy to dismiss all this as ludicrously unhistorical (which of course it is). For one might observe with truth that Grahn’s imaginative reconstruction is really no more ludicrous than some of the other theories which have been proposed about Boadicea in the past, including, famously, her ‘rich burial’ at Stonehenge, actually erected nearly two millennia before, but believed as an article of faith in the early seventeenth century. Nor is Grahn’s bold lesbian Celt, ‘radiating with female power all her life’, necessarily further away from the original than Purcell’s meekly apologetic late-seventeenth-century princess (‘My Fortune wound my Female Soul too high And lifted me above myself’).¹¹

Be that as it may, Grahn’s alluring but fantastical theory has its own importance: for it draws attention to the Warrior Queen, here epitomized by Boadicea, as a symbol of sexual freedom as well as female independence. At the same time, such an image looks back to the remote past. Grahn’s poem, written in 1972, ‘She Who’, acts as the epigraph of her article:

I am the wall at the lip of the water

I am the rock that refused to be battered

I am the dyke in the matter, the other …

and I have been many a wicked grandmother

and I shall be many a wicked daughter …

This is once again the language, proud, mystical and ferocious, of the Ptolemaic creed of Isis, invoked to adorn the image of Cleopatra: ‘I am she that rises in the Dog star, she who is called Goddess by women … I am the queen of war, I am the queen of the thunderbolt …’¹²

Liberated sexuality in general – not merely homosexuality – contributes to the modern image of the Warrior Queen. Boadicea: A Tragedy of War by Robert Reynolds, issued by the Poets Press in New York in 1941, has a heroine who is seldom mentioned without a reference to her heavy breasts ‘like pillows …’ and her frank sexual desires characteristic of Celtic women: ‘Yet she attracted the younger tribesmen. She was the eternal, fecund woman of their songs and stories, and their myths.’ Henry Treece’s heroine, in an English novel of 1958, Red Queen, White Queen, has not only Boadicea but her daughters (Gwynedd and Siara), all three of them plump and buxom and blonde, sleeping with whoever pleases them ‘in the old fashion’. In 1986 a British television programme on ‘Imaginary Women’ conducted by Marina Warner, showed Toyah Wilcox, twenty-five-year-old rock singer turned actress and film star, driving a chariot; her hair – an appropriate modern version of Dio’s ‘tawny’ – was a violent punk red.¹³ Toyah Wilcox, who had accepted the role of Boadicea – ‘a character I greatly admire’ – in a film the year before, now described her heroine as a ‘free liberated sexual woman’.

Such a picture of a free-wheeling female rebel against patriarchal attitudes may seem in quaint contrast to the statuesque image inherited from late Victorian times, gravely maternal, deeply imperialist. Yet once again, as in the case of Grahn, the idea of the rebel, give or take her sexuality (the true nature of Boadicea’s sexuality is one of the many things about her which are likely to remain forever obscure), is, of the two, the more in keeping with the few known facts of Boadicea’s career.

There is still a further element in the mythology of Boadicea which has ensured the survival of interest in her image into modern times. That is the emergence of the political female leader. At first sight an elected woman Prime Minister may seem to have little in common with a Warrior Queen of ancient or even more recent times. Yet there is still an equivocal relationship perceived to exist between women and force which can rise to a head whenever a woman is voted into power, or even (significantly in modern democracies) might be voted into power. This equivocal relationship brings the notion of Boadicea, or some other legendary Warrior Queen, into play once more.

In the suffragette pageant of 1909, Prejudice had claimed force for Man alone, on the grounds that Woman traditionally cowered away from ‘the white glint’ of the sword; he also claimed force as ‘the last and ultimate judge’, effectively debarring timorous Woman from the exercise of power. Or in General de Gaulle’s nobler version of the same sentiment, quoted in Chapter One, force was described as watching over civilization and ruling empires, ‘the fighting spirit’ being an integral part of man’s inheritance. On the stage in 1909 Prejudice had been easily roused by the appearance of the defiant Boadicea, epitomizing Woman’s ability to handle any martial matter. But the reality was very different and remains so. The question of what Kleist in Penthesilea called ‘Fate’s iron tongue, the sword’ will not go away.¹⁴

Can women, if voted into power, handle the great issues of war (and death) and peace? Are they not too tender, if not actually too timid? Female leaders of the second half of the twentieth century have conspicuously found themselves having to prove their credentials in this respect by one means or another, not only after election but during the process leading up to it. Geraldine Ferraro was the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in the United States presidential election of 1984: the first woman to figure in such an outstanding position (and at the time of writing – 1988 – the year of the next round of presidential elections, the only one). Her account of her experiences campaigning, as related in My Story, published in 1986, makes illuminating reading. For it shows clearly that deep, primitive fears of women’s potential timidity or weakness lurked in certain quarters of her country. Nothing in the political development of women elsewhere or even in America’s own vigorous Women’s Movement had affected this.¹⁵

Such fears were not exactly nursed in secret. In her confrontation on nationwide television with her opposite number, the sitting Republican Vice-President George Bush, on 11 October 1984, Geraldine Ferraro described herself facing ‘the final and inevitable question’. Thus Vice-President Bush: ‘Congresswoman Ferraro, you have had little or no experience in military matters and yet you might some day find yourself Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. How can you convince the American people and the potential enemy that you would know what to do to protect this nation’s security, and do you think in any way that the Soviets might be tempted to try to take advantage of you simply because you are a woman?’ (This question was posed incidentally five years after Mrs Thatcher had become Prime Minister of Great Britain, hardly a good example of a woman of whom the Soviets had successfully taken advantage!)

‘I didn’t hesitate,’ wrote Geraldine Ferraro. ‘“Are you saying that I would have to have fought in a war in order to love peace?” I shot back …’ And she did of course assure the questioner of her confidence in her own ability to handle such a situation. But she admitted that it was a terribly important question ‘and I had thought a great deal about how to answer it’. George Bush for his part emphasized his own combat experience in the Second World War – for which Geraldine Ferraro, born in 1934, would of course have been too young, quite apart from her gender: ‘Yes, I did serve in combat, I was shot down when I was a young kid, scared to death. And all that … heightened my convictions about peace.’

Marvin Kalb on Meet the Press put the question to Geraldine Ferraro in an even simpler form: ‘Are you strong enough to push the button?’ (Another legitimate question – to candidates of both sexes – might be: Are you strong enough not to push the button? But this was not posed.) Although Ferraro gave the obvious reply that she could do whatever was necessary for the protection of her country, privately she found it endlessly annoying to be presumed weak and indecisive just because she was a woman. There was a bigger underlying issue: if her candidacy was really being judged on the same level as a man’s, she would hardly be asked to answer questions like that. Nor indeed was this question asked of any other candidates, other than members of Congress who were religious ministers.

But of course Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy – in the event unsuccessful since the election was won by the Republicans in a landslide – was not being judged on the same level as a man’s. And those elected female leaders who have emerged triumphant have needed to pull the mantle of the Warrior Queen about them, where appropriate, and use it to lend further mythic authority to the role of mere Prime Minister: sex has had to be made a subtle advantage, instead of a crude disadvantage.

Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India on 24 January 1966 at the age of forty-eight. She was not in fact the first woman in the world to occupy the position: that honour had already gone to Mrs Gandhi’s contemporary, Sirimavo Bandaraneike of Sri Lanka, who was elected in July 1960. Interestingly enough, at their inception, the careers of both Mrs Gandhi and Mrs Bandaraneike indicate that the Appendage Syndrome common to so many Warrior Queens continued to operate under elective conditions as it had done under the hereditary system in the past. That is to say, although the London Evening News wrote concerning Mrs Bandaraneike of the need for a new word – ‘Presumably we shall have to call her a Stateswoman’ – the comment of the News Chronicle was considerably more apt: ‘Gentle widow heads for job as premier’.¹⁶

For Mrs Bandaraneike, Rani-like, was the widow of the veteran Sri Lankan statesman Solomon W. R. D. Bandaraneike, eighteen years her senior, who had acted as premier for three and a half years before he was assassinated in 1959 by a Buddhist monk. An inconclusive political election the following March was followed by an invitation to Mrs Bandaraneike to head the government: ‘she was the symbol, the figurehead that was necessary; the spark to ignite the flame’, in the words of her biographer.¹⁷ (There is an obvious modern comparison to be made with Mrs Corazon Aquino, grieving widow of an assassinated opposition Filipino leader, whose symbolic presence heading a political party, at a time when her remarkable personal qualities were largely unknown, provided the spark to sweep away President Marcos in 1986.)

As for Indira Gandhi, coming from a Kashmiri brahmin family, the only child of Pandit Nehru, she could in a sense be said to have been born to rule: a princess who inherited from her parent, as Matilda of Tuscany inherited from her father Boniface II, or Tamara of Georgia from Giorgi III. Prior to her election, Indira Gandhi, the shy child of a brilliant father, absent much of her childhood in prison, and of an uneducated mother of lower social standing, had indeed held only one political position: she had been President of the Congress Party in 1959, but resigned after less than a year in favour of her maternal duties. Indira Gandhi actually became Prime Minister when Lal Bahadour Shastri died suddenly in office of a heart attack. In this uneasy situation, it was a symbol of that same continuity which Queen Elizabeth I constantly sought to establish with references to her sire ‘Great Harry’, that the crowds in 1966 shouted not only ‘Indira ki jai!’ (Long live Indira!) but also ‘Jawa-harlal ki jai!’ (Long live Nehru!).¹⁸

Mrs Gandhi, the beneficiary of the Appendage Syndrome, quickly became part of another familiar syndrome – that of the Better-Man: in her first year of office, for example, she was described as ‘the only man in the cabinet of old women’. She also received much of the same ‘heroic’ treatment concerning her youth from her admiring biographers, as well as herself stressing such early heroic self-identifications in what was surely a calculated manner. An early girlhood identification with Joan of Arc for example is frequently mentioned even by her family, and confirmed by Mrs Gandhi herself in a letter to her lifelong friend Dorothy Norman: she was ‘a great heroine of mine … one of the first people I read about with enthusiasm’.¹⁹

In other interviews, as with the celebrated Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Mrs Gandhi underlined a tomboy past: she revealed that her very doll play had been militarily oriented: ‘I had many dolls. And I played with them, not necessarily seeing them as babies to feed. In fact I used them as men and women to perform insurrections, battles and so on.’ She told a would-be biographer that sometimes her dolls were arranged to perform a struggle between the Satyagrahis and the police, with the bridegroom doll playing the Satyagrahi leader, while the little Indira shouted slogans such as ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ Mrs Gandhi’s ‘male’ aggressive role was by her own account encouraged by her mother, who had resented the constrictions on her own life, as well as by her father: ‘I was brought up as a boy when I was small. I climbed trees, I ran and I never had any feeling of inferiority or weakness.’²⁰

It was politically adroit of Mrs Gandhi, faced with the problem of being a woman premier in a country which was 83 per cent Hindu, to hint at the honorary male in such statements about herself. Officially however she took a slightly different stance: ‘As Prime Minister, I am not a woman. I am a human being.’ (Although her confidence to Dorothy Norman – ‘I am in no sense a feminist but I believe in women being able to do everything’ – may have come nearer to representing her real feelings on this complicated subject.) Again she stated: ‘I do not regard myself as a woman but as a person with a job to do.’ Golda Meir’s version of this, incidentally, when asked how it felt to be a female Foreign Minister, was to crack back, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been a male Foreign Minister.’ A short biography of Mrs Gandhi ‘for young boys and girls’ by R. Sundara Raju, published in New Delhi in 1980, begins with the prophecy of a dying old man, Sarojini Naidu, at her birth that she would be the ‘Nightingale (the new soul) of India’. Later Indira Gandhi declared that ‘Being a woman has neither helped nor hindered me. During the struggle for independence, nobody was concerned about being beaten up or shot at or anything. Nobody said: “This is a woman and we won’t shoot.” It would be unfair if, later on, this question were to crop up.’²¹

Yet since inevitably it did crop up and would always do so, Mrs Gandhi also employed that other expedient of the Warrior Queen by which she made a virtue of necessity with wonderful dexterity. That is to say, she assumed the role, even the title, of ‘The Mother’, so deeply embedded in the Hindu consciousness, with the aura of those goddesses bright and dark, Durga and Kali, rulers of fertility and destruction, hovering about her. History, or folk memories of history as described in Chapter Sixteen with regard to the Rani of Jhansi, could be said to be on her side, to make of her in the minds of the less educated the last in a long line of queens and empresses, rather than the first woman Prime Minister. Moreover in 1966 Mrs Gandhi possessed to the simple mind the hopeful imperial quality of being the mother of sons – Rajiv Gandhi, later Prime Minister of India in his turn after his mother’s assassination in 1986, was twenty-two at the time. One remembers Isabella of Spain, bolstered up in authority by the birth of an heir during the civil war.

It was however war – the successful Indian war against Pakistan of 1971 – which gave Mrs Gandhi her ultimate prestige and also her ultimate kind of deification, as Durga on the one hand, an imposing leader of her country on the other. Afterwards, as Dom Moraes wrote, ‘She had achieved the status of a myth. She was Joan [of Arc] without the inconvenience of prison, fire and cross.’²² It was not a war of Mrs Gandhi’s seeking (in fact it can be argued that the female premiers of the twentieth century, like the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century queens regnant, have not been of their nature belligerent – merely determined to do their belligerent best in war when it comes – that is to say, to be as good as men if not better). Yet following the first Pakistani air raids against India in December 1971, no one could ever again ask, in India at least: how will this woman react in a crisis? Will she be too timid, or if not too timid, too tender?

Golda Meir, born in 1898, and thus nearly twenty years older than Indira Gandhi, became Prime Minister of Israel in 1969, having served as Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1956 to 1965. She had previously been the first Israeli Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Minister of Labour and would also serve as Secretary-General of the Labour Party. Early in her career Golda Meir had also shown herself capable of oratory on the (imagined) Boadicean scale. On 21 January 1948 she spoke eloquently to the Council of Jewish Federations in Chicago, appealing for funds without which the future state could not survive. It was a speech subsequently praised by the first premier of Israel, David Ben-Gurion: ‘Some day when history will be written, it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible.’²³ To British ears, at least, it has a Churchillian ring: ‘I am not exaggerating when I say that the Yishiv in Palestine will fight in the Negev and will fight in Galilee and will fight on the outskirts of Jerusalem till the very end. You cannot decide whether we should fight or not. We will … You can only decide one thing: whether we shall be victorious in this fight or whether the Mufti will be victorious. That decision American Jews can make. It has to be made quickly within hours, within days …’ Golda Meir returned to Palestine with promises of fifty million dollars.

As with Mrs Bandaraneike, the choice of Mrs Meir was intended to be a healing one, in view of the rival claims of Moshe Dayan and Yigel Allon; and once again Mrs Meir’s elevation followed an unexpected death, that of the premier Levi Eshkol. Otherwise, there was one very important difference: here at last was a female leader who owed nothing to the Appendage Syndrome, one who was neither the daughter or widow of a famous man, nor the regent-mother for some form of infant princeling. To secure her place without the benefit of any specific male connection was in itself a remarkable achievement on the part of Golda Meir; and one far rarer in the history of women than is generally supposed. One can appreciate the judgement of Mrs Meir’s political adviser Simcha Dinitz, later Director-General of the Prime Minister’s Office (and Ambassador to Washington 1973 to 1978), that she had ‘the best qualities of a woman – intuition, insight, sensitivity, compassion – plus the best qualities of a man – strength, determination, practicality, purposefulness’.²⁴

Nevertheless for all the self-made quality of her position, the kind of questions – sometimes innocent, sometimes not – which Mrs Meir faced concerning the implications of her reaching high office have as ever a familiar ring. In My Life, published in 1975, Golda Meir described a visit to the National Press Club in Washington when she was Foreign Minister: ‘there were only two queries that were at all new’. The first concerned Israel’s intention – or otherwise – to employ nuclear weapons if its survival was in jeopardy. The second went as follows: ‘Mrs Meir, your grandson Gideon says you make the best gefilte fish in the world. Would you reveal your recipe to us?’ This was naïve behaviour at worst, and it made Mrs Meir laugh at the time. On the other hand the Jordanian newspaper which mocked Mrs Meir in 1969 for asking for negotiations before war, as ‘a grandmother, telling bedtime stories to her grandchildren’ (she was indeed a grandmother at this point, not surprisingly for a woman in her early seventies), was not naïve but calculating.²⁵ Once again, it is impossible to envisage a male leader being subject to this particular diatribe.

And yet the ambiguity at the centre of the whole subject of the Warrior Queen remains. Mrs Meir also derived strength, surely, from her ‘grandmotherly’ image, not least among her own strongly matriarchal people. It was after all perfectly possible that the president of the Washington Press Club genuinely wanted that recipe, and admired Mrs Meir for her alleged skill: months later in Los Angeles, when she answered a question on television about her chicken soup, 40,000 people wrote in for the recipe! That juxtaposition of Israel’s survival with a recipe could have been evinced only by the sight of a woman minister. And there was indeed something matriarchal – grandmotherly even – about the way she ran her government. To quote Chaim Herzog (later President of Israel), another who knew her well and worked under her, Golda Meir had a particular style of government in which her personality was the deciding factor: and that personality was very much that of ‘the overbearing mother who ruled the roost with her iron hand’.²⁶

This was not always, in his opinion, to the benefit of her government. With little idea of orderly administration, she preferred to work closely with cronies in an ad hoc framework that soon came to be known as her ‘kitchen’ – so named for good reason, since Golda Meir was wont to make coffee and tea there for her associates throughout the long night hours (as well as making coffee at 4 a.m. for her guards). At the same time one might most easily rebut the Jordanian sneer by observing that in the Arab–Israeli War of 1973 – the War of Atonement – the ‘grandmother’ acquitted herself both gallantly and expertly. To quote Chaim Herzog again on her conduct during the war: ‘on many occasions she [Golda Meir], a woman who had reached seventy-five, found herself thrust into a position where she had to decide between differing military options proposed by professionals. She decided, and invariably decided well, drawing on a large measure of common sense which had stood her in good stead.’²⁷ Her stubborn decisiveness proved a national asset during the war, even if her doctrinaire approach to problems and to the operation of government contributed to the failings of that government before it.

And then there was that special rapport which Golda Meir had with the ordinary soldiers of Israel, something bringing her close to Isabella of Spain or Tamara of Georgia. When Golda Meir wept at the Wailing Wall on the fifth day of the Six Day War for the sacrifices of Israel’s youth, the soldiers watched her and wept too.²⁸ There is however one twentieth-century female political leader who has had to be extremely cautious at any overt suggestion of queenship – warrior or otherwise. That is not to say that the subject in all its emotive strength does not arise. Margaret Thatcher, then aged fifty-three, became Prime Minister of Great Britain in May 1979, the first woman to occupy the position, as five years earlier she had been the first woman to lead any British political party. By this date, Queen Elizabeth II, a mere six months younger than the new Prime Minister, had already been on the throne for over twenty-seven years.

‘This nation loves a monarch’, a committee of the House of Commons had advised Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell in 1657, suggesting that he should regularize his position by accepting a crown himself. In the words of Secretary Thurloe advocating the same course: ‘it’s the office which is known to the laws and this people. They know their duty to a King and his to them.’²⁹ Certainly the British love their monarchy, and certainly they love their present monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, who regularly tops polls as the most admired British woman. They also know their duty to her: just as she knows hers to them, the Queen’s conspicuous sense of duty being among the qualities which have endeared her to her subjects in the course of a reign whose span, at the celebration of her golden jubilee in 2002, surpassed by several years that of her illustrious predecessor, the first Elizabeth. It is Queen Elizabeth II who enacts the role of the Holy (Armed) Figurehead to her people in her frequent ceremonial appearances at military parades, naval reviews and so forth; of which her presence for many years in uniform and on horseback at the Trooping of the Colour is probably the best-known.

Under the circumstances one can understand the alarm, both public and private, which Mrs Thatcher displayed at any suggestion of encroachment on the royal role on her own part. She was obviously well aware of the resentment she might have unleashed.³⁰‘You don’t do that to me, my dear, I’m only in politics’, she observed hastily to an unwary Spanish tourist who curtseyed to her, when the Prime Minister was glimpsed on a shopping tour in 1987.³¹

But, once again, the issue is not so simple. The existence of queens regnant in British history, and the tradition of national prosperity under two of them, the long-reigning Elizabeth I and Victoria, means that every British schoolchild – the one who knows about the knives on the wheels of Boadicea’s chariot – also knows that it is not out of the question for a woman to rule Britain, much as Mrs Gandhi benefited from Hindu traditions of powerful women in religion, literature and history, despite the theoretically inferior position of women in Hindu society.

In January 1988, when Mrs Thatcher became the longest-serving Prime Minister in twentieth-century Britain, there was a plethora of commentaries and comparisons: but after lip-service had been paid to Prime Minister Asquith – whose record she had just beaten – the main comparisons were made unashamedly to British reigning queens. As Robert Harris wrote rather despairingly in the Observer: ‘It is not sexist to use a regal analogy to describe her impact on the country. It is not particularly facetious. It is simply the nearest thing we have to an historical parallel.’ Lord Hailsham, Lord Chancellor in Mrs Thatcher’s government for eight years, openly described his premier as being in the same category as Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, Queen Anne and Queen Victoria, favouring Elizabeth I especially ‘in her handling of men’.³²

So Mrs Thatcher, without visibly seeking it – rather to the contrary – did benefit from that tradition expressed long ago by Tacitus concerning the Britons and Boadicea: ‘they did not discriminate against women in matters of command’. There is a kind of justice in this. For Mrs Thatcher also had to contend with many of those problems special to the Warrior Queen – or Queen Regnant – which have been mentioned throughout this book.

The female voice of command, which grates on the male ear for reasons which are as much psychological as physiological, is one of these problems, from Boadicea’s allegedly ‘harsh’ voice onwards. The disadvantage to Mrs Thatcher of her female lightly timbred voice in a massively male-dominated House of Commons – which means of course deep-male-voice-dominated – is not one to be dismissed lightly, since it entailed exactly that kind of screeching in making herself heard most disliked by men (and many women).

Mrs Thatcher acknowledged this herself: ‘Yes, I do have to shout to make myself heard,’ she admitted in an interview in 1986, ‘and sometimes I say, “I am not going to shout any more like I did last time, I will just stand there until they are quiet”.’ In the same year the Labour Shadow Minister Gerald Kaufman drew attention to what he called Mrs Thatcher’s ‘fishwife’ act in the House of Commons: ‘screaming away in a shrill, strident voice, with her face absolutely contorted’. The Liberal leader David Steel made the same point – and independently used the same epithet: ‘I don’t personally like her House of Commons style. I don’t think that the “fishwife” approach … is at all effective or impressive.’ It was however in vain that Kaufman hoped his own comment was made ‘in an unsexist way’: for the point is indeed a sexist one, whether intended as such or not, in that no man could possibly be subject to the same criticism. (One cannot help recalling Leonardi Bruno’s quattrocento advice to Battista Malatesta about a woman who ‘increases the volume of her speech with greater forcefulness’: she will appear ‘threateningly insane and requiring restraint’.)³³ A man bellowing to make himself heard in the House of Commons, as many men do, does not sound either to his own side or to his opponents like a ‘fishwife’ – that traditional English misogynist term of abuse going back to the fourteenth century – let alone as though requiring restraint.

There is no obvious solution to this particular problem of a female leader’s voice except of course more women members of Parliament – after the 1987 general election, there were forty-one women to six hundred and nine men. But another lingering problem, the problem which will not go away (to judge from Geraldine Ferraro’s experience) – how resolute can a female leader be expected to show herself against a nation’s enemies? – was solved for Mrs Thatcher from an unexpected quarter: the Soviet Union, ironically enough the most likely candidate at the time for the title of Britain’s enemy.

In January 1976, just under a year after she had been elected leader of the Conservative Party, Mrs Thatcher made a major speech in London which described the Soviet Union as a serious threat, both military and political, to which threat it was vital that the West should respond with strength and confidence. It was the Soviet Union’s response, attacking her as the ‘Iron Lady’ in Red Star, the official journal of the Red Army, which presented Mrs Thatcher with what rapidly became, for good tactical reasons, her favourite sobriquet. It was immediately given wide prominence, not only in the Western Press, but by the victorious victim herself. ‘I have the reputation of being the Iron Lady,’ she would say on US television at the time of the Falklands War. ‘I have great resolve.’ (A cartoon in the Daily Express of her visit to the United States on this occasion showed Mrs Thatcher as Boadicea, long sword raised, iron breastplates prominent, with President Reagan at her chariot wheels in a cowboy hat.)³⁴

Even if Mrs Thatcher had been variously dubbed ‘Iron Maiden’ and ‘Iron Lady’ by Majorie Proops in the London Daily Mirror as early as 1973, it was the Soviet Union’s adoption (or spontaneous invention) of the phrase which gave it exactly the endorsement which Mrs Thatcher needed to emerge as a Warrior Queen, at any rate in the estimation of Britain’s ‘enemies’. As Bruce Arnold wrote in a hostile work, Margaret Thatcher: A Study in Power, published in 1984 (that memorable line ‘the female of the species is more deadly than the male’ acts as the epigraph), Mrs Thatcher’s baptism as the Iron Lady ‘effectively created the political reputation on international affairs which, by their dismissal, her Labour opponents had denied her, up to that point’.³⁵ ‘The Iron Lady of the Western World! Me? A Cold Warrior?’ she was able to riposte publicly. ‘Well, yes – if that is how they [the Russians] wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.’³⁶

What propaganda had so felicitously – from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view – begun, war itself was to confirm. Certainly the fact that the Falklands campaign would be the crucible of Mrs Thatcher’s reputation as a leader was appreciated in advance. In the House of Commons in the opening debate following the Argentinian invasion, on 3 April 1982, Enoch Powell (no longer a member of the Conservative Party) actually referred to the phrase ‘Iron Lady’ in order to add: ‘In the next week or two this House, the nation and the Right Honourable Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.’ It is said that Mrs Thatcher nodded her head in agreement.³⁷

Another observer of the political spectrum hostile to Mrs Thatcher, Anthony Barnett, author of Iron Britannia: Why Parliament Waged its Falklands War (the epigraph this time was merely the biblical name JUDITH in heavy black type), wrote cogently that Mrs Thatcher remained ‘a misfit’ until the 3 April debate ‘elevated her into the war-leader of a bipartisan consensus’. An important inside testimony, on the other hand, is that of Patrick Cosgrave, the author of three successive biographical studies of Mrs Thatcher, since he worked for her as her Special Adviser for four years. In 1985 Cosgrave wrote that not only did the period between 2 April and 14 June 1982 show the Prime Minister at her most typically daring and resolute, but ‘the war in the South Atlantic will undoubtedly be seen in the future, as it was at the time, as bearing witness to Margaret Thatcher as most truly herself’.³⁸

As a result of the British campaign in the South Atlantic to recover the Falkland Islands from the Argentine invader saw Mrs Thatcher’s personal popularity as a leader jump from 36 per cent approval in March 1982 to 59 per cent after the war – a staggering leap. There can be no starker illustration of the continuing potency of the image of the Warrior Queen in a nation’s consciousness. As for the armed forces themselves, and the men who lead them, they have been described as responding to her as a war-leader ‘in a way that hasn’t been known since the time of Elizabeth I, with a passion and loyalty that few male generals have ever inspired or commanded’. For the army at least Mrs Thatcher began to have her own mana as a goddess: an apparition transcending that of the Armed Figurehead, for example, holy or otherwise, because of its sheer personal strength. It was suggested (by Selina Hastings in the Sunday Telegraph) that in view of ‘the aphrodisiac pull of power itself … for the armed forces she is far and away the favourite object of sexual fantasy’.³⁹

Equally, for those for whom power is not necessarily thrilling (Mrs Thatcher at the time being the most powerful woman in the world), she sometimes seemed like Kali, ‘the grim Indian goddess of destruction’, as she ruthlessly demolished ‘old ideas, policies and personalities’, while at the same time exercised her other talents as ‘the great creative stateswoman, the Blessed Margaret’. This remarkable double-headed comparison to the goddess-destroyer on the one hand and the sainted female was that of the historian and political journalist Paul Johnson on the eve of the Conservative Party Conference in 1987. He warned discontented Tories: ‘Don’t get caught under the wheels of the juggernaut. Blessed Margaret the creative-radical is driving it, but Kali-Thatcher the Destroyer is at hand – if required.’⁴⁰

Opinions vary about what use Mrs Thatcher actually made of her own unavoidable femininity, consciously or unconsciously, and what difference the whole intricate topic made to her premiership. Commentators of both sexes and all shades of political opinion have gazed at her with fascinated awe: some seeing in Mrs Thatcher that Medusa on the ‘snaky-headed Gorgon shield’ wielded by ‘wise Minerva’, which froze her foes to stone; others viewing her with more admiration as wise Minerva herself, whose own ‘rigid looks of chaste austerity and noble grace’, as Milton pointed out in Comus, were enough to dash ‘brute violence’ without need of any Gorgon shield. But there has been remarkable unanimity among commentators and biographers that it did make some difference. Hugo Young and Anne Sloman, for example, in The Thatcher Phenomenon of 1986, agreed that her style of leadership turned heavily on her being a woman – without being sure how.⁴¹

While the independent-minded Conservative MP Julian Critchley described her as deploying her feminine qualities ‘like artillery pieces’, one biographer summed it up more ambivalently thus: ‘she has played the matter of being a woman, and that of woman’s place in modern society, in a variety of not always very clear-cut ways’.⁴² The explanation for this lack of clear-cutness lies surely in Mrs Thatcher’s own intuition concerning her situation. As the brilliantly instinctive politician she undoubtedly is, Mrs Thatcher realized either consciously, or unconsciously (the effect is the same) that if the issue were to be clear-cut, it would rob her of a great deal of support on the one hand, a good deal of manoeuvrability on the other.

On the one hand she played the role of the ‘honorary male’ with all the aplomb of Queen Elizabeth I, as when in 1979 on a visit to Northern Ireland following the murder of Lord Mountbatten and a number of British soldiers, Mrs Thatcher adopted the red beret and flak jacket of the Parachute Regiment (thus pleasing the regiment itself but not the Northern Ireland Office). This can be directly compared to Queen Elizabeth I’s choice of a silver cuirass and plumed helmet for her appearance at Tilbury, since neither lady actually intended to take to the battlefield. There were to be numerous other carefully organized sightings of Mrs Thatcher in military situations, particularly in the early days of her premiership, where her symbolic presence as a Warrior Queen was hard to miss.

Like Queen Elizabeth again, Mrs Thatcher displayed another interesting characteristic of the honorary male; she had no visible preference for the advancement of her own sex. After nine years of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, only one other woman was to be appointed to the Cabinet, and she incidentally a member of the non-competitive House of Lords, not Commons: Baroness (Janet) Young’s two-year stint, in her capacity as Leader of the House of Lords, included the period of the Falklands War, a fact which Mrs Thatcher either had temporarily forgotten, or chose grandly to ignore, when she told her Cabinet on 2 April 1982: ‘Gentlemen, we shall have to fight.’ It ended when Baroness Young was demoted to a minor role in the Government outside the Cabinet. It was percipiently observed that the presence of another woman in the Cabinet photograph spoiled the radiance which the leader alone possessed in photographic terms, making her so clearly unmistakable in her visible female dress.⁴³ At some very primitive level, did Mrs Thatcher resent Baroness Young’s presence?

For there is the element of chivalry which the woman in a man’s world traditionally evokes (an honorary male perhaps, but not sacrificing any of the prerequisites allowed by society to the female). At Mrs Thatcher’s first Party Conference as Conservative leader, in October 1975, Barbara Castle, a prominent Labour politician in the Wilson government who had yet to see her own party elect a female leader, confided to her diary, possibly not without a small jealous pang, that Mrs Thatcher now displayed a special bloom, produced by ‘the vitamin of power’. In March she had written, ‘Margaret’s election has stirred up her own side wonderfully: all her backbenchers perform like knights jousting a tourney for a lady’s favours, showing off their paces by making an unholy row at every opportunity over everything that the [Labour] Government does.’ Thirteen years later, the official photograph to commemorate Mrs Thatcher’s long-serving record certainly did give her a remarkable air of a Tudor sovereign, in her long gold brocade dress, surrounded by males including Cabinet ministers, top civil servants and her own husband: twenty-six black-and-white (dinner-jacketed) knights.⁴⁴

Then there is Mrs Thatcher’s celebrated reaction to a question concerning Women’s Liberation, at her first Press conference as Conservative leader: ‘What’s it ever done for me?’ Queen Victoria, among past female rulers, might have approved of this disdain, with her well-known antipathy to Women’s Rights in principle and professional women in practice. But in her own time such contempt earned Mrs Thatcher the justified dislike and disapproval of the Women’s Movement. An editorial of August 1982 in Spare Rib, a leading feminist magazine, criticized the way ‘masculinity’ had been propagated throughout the whole Falklands crisis, military and sexual powers mixed up together as glorious, most notably by the (female) Prime Minister: ‘We are not saying women should avoid positions of power, but that unless we direct our efforts to the good of all women … we are likely to promote rather than challenge the current notions of masculinity.’ In short, there is the ‘very real danger of leading to more Margaret Thatchers’.⁴⁵

On the other hand, with Mrs Thatcher’s denial of any specifically female qualities went an ability to capitalize on them where necessary – once again, probably successful just because it was instinctive. (One has to admit that even her reaction to Women’s Liberation may, fortunately or unfortunately depending upon one’s view of the subject, have gained her far more support than she lost in Britain in 1975.) Nor can Mrs Thatcher fairly be blamed for capitalizing on her sex, since she has had to suffer a good many slings and arrows on the subject, from the first moment when Labour supporters shouted ‘Ditch the bitch!’ until honourably restrained by women members of the Labour movement.

During the Falklands campaign, insults in the Argentine Press varied from ‘chicken brain’ (because she was a woman) to ‘go back to knitting’ and ‘stay in the kitchen’. Although such outbursts were smoothly dismissed by President Galtieri of Argentina in an interview, once more with Oriana Fallaci, on the grounds that ‘humour and caricature belong to the Latin temperament’, the area of attack chosen was surely significant.^{f3 47} Under the circumstances, Mrs Thatcher was well entitled to use that metaphorical knitting needle, to which she was told to return, as an offensive weapon.

As early as 1979, on the eve of her first general election as Conservative leader, Mrs Thatcher emphasized the practical value of her female domesticity: ‘I know what it is to run a home and a job …’ and quoted the recent example of Golda Meir for authority, that characteristic technique of the female leader through history, back to Zenobia stressing her descent from Cleopatra. In an important and prominent interview with George Gale in the Daily Express, shortly after the Falklands War was over, Mrs Thatcher directly compared the running of the campaign to household management – something on which she, as a woman, could be presumed to be an expert, or at least by implication more expert than the men surrounding her.⁴⁸ This was in answer to the question: ‘Did being a woman make any difference?’ ‘It may just be that many, many women make naturally good managers and organizers. You might not think of it that way, George,’ she went on sweetly, ‘but each woman who runs a house is a manager and an organizer. We thought forward each day, and we did it in a routine way and we were on the job twenty-four hours a day.’

Mrs Thatcher’s reaction to George Gale’s next topic is however a perfect illustration of the kind of manoeuvrability she allowed herself. ‘Was it difficult for a woman to issue orders involving blood being shed?’ he asked. ‘We were thinking in terms of saving lives,’ she answered (without directly replying to the question), ‘but bearing in mind that our people had been invaded by a pretty awful dictatorship. One lived with the agony of the troops who were going down on the supply line on ships. One lived with the agony of the soldiers. But we didn’t look only at the agony: we also looked at the professionalism, the loyalty and the devotion of our troops.’ In a trice, the cosy super-feminine housekeeper has become the dedicated Warrior Queen, the ‘singular exception’ in Gibbon’s phrase, the woman ruling proudly in the man’s world.

So Boadicea marched on in her third modern personification, not the abstract patriotic symbol of empire, not the independent woman, free of shackles which may be political or sexual, but the elected female Prime Minister and occasional war-leader, whose existence continues to enrage, fascinate and inspire, in equal quantities, beyond any capacity of her male contemporaries to do these same three things. The innumerable allusions and comparisons to Boadicea during Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, far from being monolithically favourable in intention (or unfavourable), in fact illustrate just this many-sided aspect of her own image, as well as that of Boadicea herself.

At the time of the Falklands campaign, the left-wing New Statesman in a critical editorial called Mrs Thatcher ‘this Boadicea’ who would have to come back into ‘the real world’ when the war was over. Adam Raphael in the Observer also called her Boadicea at roughly the same date (late May): ‘every time she opens her mouth she castrates one of her ministers’. When the action was over, however, she would need ‘to pipe down’. In 1985 however Woman’s Own magazine interviewed a lady who had just been voted ‘the most feminine woman of the year’ for believing that a woman’s place is not in the office but to stay at home having babies. The happy winner also professed herself a great admirer of Mrs Thatcher. When it was pointed out that this was a contradiction in view of Mrs Thatcher’s manifest career as Prime Minister, ‘the most feminine woman’ was at first nonplussed; then she took refuge in a safe historical comparison: ‘Well, ideally she shouldn’t be there [in office], but she is an extremely exceptional woman and the exceptions will always find their way to the top. Look at Boadicea …’⁴⁹

The most potent image is a visual one, that of the cartoonist Gale in the Daily Telegraph (the foremost newspaper of Conservative sympathies) on polling day, 11 June 1987. Mrs Thatcher is seen dressed as Boadicea, late-twentieth-century version, in a Celtic robe but with pearl necklace and stud earrings (as Thomas Heywood’s seventeenth-century heroine wore the lambent pearls of her own day). As the leader urges forward her chariot towards the third-term Conservative victory – which would in fact resoundingly be hers by the next day – the huge knives set in its wheels dominate the foreground of the picture. Meanwhile sundry small male figures in chains from other political parties drag behind; even Mrs Thatcher’s own recognizable jubilant supporters are tiny in stature compared to the dominant figure of the Warrior Queen.

f1 It was not missed. As late as the Second World War, Prime Minister Churchill’s Private Secretary, John Colville, strolling through London in the Blitz to inspect landmarks he might not see again, described Boadicea’s statue as ‘a monument to successful imperialism’.¹

f2 There were, for example, long queues in London when it was shown at a converted warehouse in White Lion Street, Islington, in the spring of 1986.

f3 Nor was the ‘kitchen’ reference confined to the Latin temperament. The puppet Iron Lady, as depicted by Luck and Flaw, the British cartoonists, on television in November 1976, had her breastplate and armour created out of colanders and other pieces of kitchen equipment.⁴⁶