It is, no doubt, an irony that some women who do not give a damn about
women and even think of themselves as having made it on their own
because they are so far superior to other women do have greater
possibilities open to them because of feminism.  In that sense, one could
also claim Rice and Powell as having feminism and civil rights activists to
thank despite their not thinking so.  Even Clarence Thomas for all his self-
serving faith in being a self-made man must know that nothing he could
have done even a decade or two earlier would have made any difference.
But another way of looking at that is the disheartening fact that they DON'T
see the way they stand on the backs of the courageous who challenged
prevailing bigotry.  In that sense, they hurt feminism and civil rights
because they serve as a smoke screen to the maintaining of old attitudes.
Powell at least has many insights that help to mitigate what he
nonetheless serves.  Rice does not as far as I can see.  But at least she
counters any naive ideas that women are "naturally" anti-war.
Nancy



Date sent:              Sat, 30 Nov 2002 17:22:57 +0100
Send reply to:          "T. S. Eliot Discussion forum." <[log in to unmask]>
From:                   INGELBIEN RAPHAEL <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:                OT: Thatcher (was Marianne Moore...)
To:                     [log in to unmask]

From Nancy:

> Margaret Thatcher does
> not have feminism to thank anymore than did Indira Gandhi or Elizabeth
> I.

Thatcher was not grateful to feminism, but she did owe a debt to it.
Elizabeth owed her position to heredity, Gandhi to a mixture of heredity
and brains. Thatcher's political career was an individual choice. And it
was certainly helped, however indirectly, by the advances that feminism
had made by the 1960s and 1970s.

From Carroll
> And how do you know she didn't let men make her decisions for her? All
> her decisions were more or less anti-woman,

She certainly listened to male advisers (e.g. Keith Joseph), but most
people would find it hard to believe that she was just a puppet in the
hands of powerful men operating behind the scenes. All in all, she was
extremely opinionated, and far less consensual than most British prime
ministers.

> and all conservative men thought her decisions quite correct.

A brief list of some who didn't would include: Harold Macmillan, Edward
Heath, Francis Pym, Jim Prior, Michael Heseltine, Geoffrey Howe. To them,
she was or became Terror Incarnate - and some of them paid dearly for
daring to stand up to her.

Eliot, a conservative mind, would probably have been horrified at the way
she transformed the Tory party - though he didn't always vote
conservative. Jeffrey Perl and others mention that he voted Labour in
1945.

Yours,

Raphaël
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