Read There is No Alternative for Free Online

She was an exceptionally hardworking student and self-righteous, even as a child, about her unnatural discipline. At the age of nine, she was congratulated by her school headmistress for her luck in winning a poetry-reading contest. “I wasn’t lucky,” she replied. “I deserved it.”
    Through her diligence she earned a place at Somerville College at Oxford University. Oxford’s self-governing colleges, of which there are now thirty-nine, are united in something like a federal system. At that time only a small number of these colleges admitted women; Somerville was an all-women’s college.
    By the time I arrived at Oxford, roughly half a century later, all of its colleges admitted women. My college, Balliol, had done so for only a decade, however, and the ratio of men to women at the graduate level was still about five to one. It is commonly assumed that being a woman in this largely male environment must have been a terrible disadvantage for her, and I am sure that at times this was so. She was unable to join the Oxford Union, for example, the debating club that is the traditional first step to a parliamentary career. But from personal experience I can say that for a woman of the right temperament, this environment was a huge advantage. “Largely male” need not mean “male-dominated.” If you were one of only a handful of women among a group of young men who have barely seen a woman before in their lives—sex-segregated
schools were and still are common in Britain—it was almost trivially easy to stand out from the crowd, terrify your peers, receive special attention from your tutors, and be the cynosure of any social gathering. It was a clearly observable law that the more bitterly a woman could be heard complaining of the university’s institutional sexism, the more likely it was that she was ugly, hopelessly passive, or not all that bright. If Thatcher subsequently had no patience with feminists—“Some of us were making it before Women’s Lib was even thought of,” she once snapped—I would wager it was because she made precisely the same observation.
    Politically, she did well for herself at Oxford, becoming president of the university’s Conservative Association. Academically, she did less well; she took a Second Class degree in chemistry. Oxford degrees are classified into Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds; they are awarded based on a student’s performance in a single set of exams at the end of a three- or four-year study period. That she received a Second might be seen as evidence for a claim commonly made about her, to wit, that she was a woman of relatively modest intellectual gifts. On the other hand, when she subsequently decided to become a lawyer, she qualified after only two years of part-time study, all the while working full-time as a research chemist and assiduously seeking election to Parliament and getting pregnant—with twins, no less. She passed the bar exam only weeks after giving birth. However hardworking you are, I doubt you can do that without being quite fast on the draw.
    But we are getting ahead of ourselves. After graduating from Oxford, she worked in an Essex plastics factory while immersing herself in politics. She ran for a seat in Parliament twice, in 1950 and 1951, both times unsuccessfully. She had not been expected to win. The contested constituency was a Labour safe seat; running an inherently doomed campaign or two is a political rite of passage in Britain. But she gave her opponent an unexpectedly vigorous workout. Her uncommon energy in campaigning was widely remarked.

    She was only twenty-three when she made her second attempt. In the same year she became engaged to Denis Thatcher, whom she met while campaigning. He was the heir to a prosperous chemicals business. Here the story of Margaret Roberts, the middle-class girl from a background of no special privilege, comes to an end. She believed in