Thatcher, Margaret, Baroness Thatcher

Thatcher, Margaret, Baroness Thatcher (of Kesteven)

 orig. Margaret Hilda Roberts

Margaret Thatcher, 1983.

(credit: AP)

(born Oct. 13, 1925, Grantham, Lincolnshire, Eng.) British politician and prime minister (1979–90). She earned a degree from the University of Oxford, where she was one of the first woman presidents of the Oxford University Conservative Association, then worked as a research chemist. After her marriage to Denis Thatcher (1951), she read for the bar and specialized in tax law. She was elected to Parliament in 1959 and served as secretary of state for education and science (1970–74). As a member of the Conservative Party's newly energetic right wing, she succeeded Edward Heath as party leader in 1975. In 1979 she became Britain's first woman prime minister. She advocated individual initiative, confronted the labour unions, privatized national industries and utilities and attempted to privatize aspects of health care and education, pursued a strong monetarist policy, and endorsed a firm commitment to NATO. Her landslide victory in 1983 owed partly to her decisive leadership in the Falkland Islands War. A split in party ranks over European monetary and political integration led to her resignation in 1990, by which time she had become Britain's longest continuously serving prime minister since 1827.