Margaret Thatcher Posters

Margaret Thatcher was the United Kingdom’s first women prime minister. She came to Office in May 1979 and remained until her resignation in November 1990, making her the longest continually serving prime minister in 150 years.

This short biography provides a simple, chronological, non-biased introduction to the life and career of the former prime minister. This page will be of use to younger students, or anybody interested in discovering in general who Margaret Thatcher was and what she did.

Margaret Roberts was born on 13th October 1925 in the small town of Grantham in the north of England. Margaret’s father, Alfred, was a self-educated man who had been forced to leave school at fourteen. He worked his way into the grocery business until he owned his own shop, above which the Roberts’ family lived. Margaret’s mother, Beatrice, a women of little ambition, had been a seamstress. Alfred and Beatrice gave birth to another daughter, Muriel, in 1929. The sisters were brought up in a serious, practical and religious environment.

Margaret was educated at Kesteven & Grantham Girls’ School, before proceeding to Oxford University to read chemistry. In 1943 Margaret became the president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, the first women to hold the position.

After several unsuccessful attempts to become a member of parliament (MP), Margaret married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman of the chemicals industry, in 1951. Two years later they gave birth to twins, Mark and Carol.

In 1959, Margaret Thatcher was elected member of parliament for Finchley, near London. Unusually, parliamentarians took favour to the bill proposed in her maiden speech in the House of Commons, 1960, which duly became legislation. Within just two years she had been appointed parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Pensions.

Following Edward Heath’s election as prime minister in 1970, Margaret Thatcher was promoted into the cabinet as the Secretary of State for Education. She made some highly controversial moves which quickly earned her the title of ‘the most unpopular women in Britain’. She scrapped the entitlement of primary school children to free milk, giving way to the nickname ‘Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’.

Following Heath’s election loss in 1974 due to a bitter dispute with the trade unions, Mrs. Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975. Together with Keith Joseph and John Hoskyns, she began the task of understanding what had gone wrong with the British economy, then in a dire state. She called for a reversal of socialism - less state intervention, less taxation, less public expenditure, more individual power and responsibility, more competition, more private ownership.

On 4th May 1979, before a dismal economic backdrop and bitter industrial relations, Margaret Thatcher won the general election and became Britain’s first women prime minister, with a Conservative majority of 44 in the House of Commons.