Helen Raine revisits some mothers who were prominent in history to find out whether they were as formidable in the nursery as they were out if it

When it comes to motherhood, there are two mythical camps; they’re either perfectly warm and loving, like Mother Theresa minus the wimple, or they’re evil, ambitious harridans like Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother.

But of course nothing is as black and white as this, least of all being a mother. Margaret Thatcher, Emmeline Pankhurst and Anne Boleyn, three of the world’s most iconic women, somehow managed to bring up their small children while they changed the political landscape. So were they superwomen or arch-villains for daring to look beyond the nursery?

Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst was a leading light for women’s rights in Britain. She spearheaded the movement to win the right to vote for women and was a founding member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a group which rapidly became famous for its militant campaigns.

She also had five children and historian June Purvis notes that when Emmeline’s husband died in 1898, Pankhurst became a single parent with four dependent children (one had died) from age eight to 17.

She was suddenly almost entirely reliant on her small WSPU salary. To earn this, she had to travel around the country, lecturing on the suffragette movement. She was also regularly imprisoned for her acts of civil disobedience. Not surprisingly, there was little time left for family life.

While her daughter Christabel joined her movement, siblings Sylvia and Adele became increasingly uncomfortable with the sometimes violent methods used by the Suffragettes and gradually became estranged from their mother, although they share her objectives.

Emmeline faced the conflicts that so many single mothers without a secure income faced

When her son, Harry, began to ail, earning money became increasingly urgent for Pankhurst. Purvis notes: “In the days before a National Health Service … Emmeline realised that she needed to earn more money to secure Harry’s future.” That included a paid lecture tour to America.

Purvis writes: “Just before she was due to leave, Harry was struck down with inflammation of the spinal cord and was paralysed from the waist down. Although the sight of her sick son tore at Emmeline’s heart, she felt she had no option but to go ahead with her tour since her son might be an invalid for life.”

She returned from the tour to tragedy. Harry would never walk again and he subsequently died. “Inconsolable and dejected, she used her work as a prop to help her cope with her deep sadness,” says Purvis.

Purvis sums up the challenges that Pankhurst faced as a working mother. “Emmeline Pankhurst, a single mum, faced the conflicts that so many single mothers without a secure income have faced throughout the ages; dilemmas that were magnified because she was a feminist public figure, fighting for a cause in which she passionately believed in a society that regarded women as second-class citizens.”

Emmeline and her daughters laid the groundwork which led to the vote for all women in the UK. It’s an impressive legacy from a single working mother.

Margaret Thatcher,

former British Prime Minister

When Margaret Thatcher’s twins were just four months old, she passed her bar exam to practise law. It was the beginning of a career that would take her to stratospheric heights. She was fully aware of the challenges of mixing family and career on her way to the top, however. When she became an MP six years later, she said in an interview: “Certainly until these two are a little older I couldn’t take on any more political responsibilities.” She was true to her word; it was ten years before she became Education Secretary.

Nevertheless, her children often felt hard done by, despite perks such as expensive boarding schools and foreign trips. Carol in particular has spoken about this at length. In a BBC documentary she said: “All my childhood memories of my mother were just someone who was superwoman before the phrase had been invented. She was always flat out, she never relaxed, household chores were done at breakneck speed in order to get back to the parliamentary correspondence or get on with making up a speech.”

She adds: “You couldn’t distract her… she had tunnel vision in terms of whatever she was doing.”

Carol longed for a ‘normal’ home life. In her book A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl, she writes: “I remember finding my mother in the kitchen one day making Scotch pancakes and I said: ‘Why can’t you be at home more? All my school friends’ mothers are around. Why can’t you be more like them?’ She stopped making the pancakes. ‘Darling, you have to understand that you have a lot of benefits that other children don’t have: you can come to the opening of Parliament and have supper at the House of Commons. You can go on overseas holidays.’ She was quite right, of course, although it wasn’t until I was older and wiser that I realised it.”

Thatcher did make an effort to balance family and work. Her Chief Press Secretary Bernard Ingham said, “she’d often say, ‘weekends are for the family’”, and while he recognised that her family life was far from average, he observed her to be a caring and loving mother.

Thatcher did make an effort to balance family and work

Equally, former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken claimed that when a Thatcher family holiday was risked by a vote that required the presence of all Tory MPs, Mrs Thatcher, “rearranged parliamentary business so as not to disappoint her daughter”.

Thatcher made several comments about how she felt she might have failed as a parent, saying in a 1995 interview, “if I had my time again, I wouldn’t go into politics because of what it does to your family”.

And to Saga Magazine, she said: “Look, you can’t have everything. It has been the greatest privilege being Prime Minister of my country… Yes, I wish I saw more of my children. We don’t have Sunday lunch together; we don’t go on holiday skiing anymore. But I can’t regret. And I haven’t lost my children. They have their lives. I took a different life.”

The price for being an absentee mother was a distance in her relationship, particularly with Carol, which perhaps became more pronounced once grandchildren arrived. Carol said: “A mother cannot reasonably expect her grown-up children to boomerang back, gushing cosiness, and make up for lost time. Absentee mum, then gran in overdrive, is not an equation that balances.”

And clearly, even in adult life, she felt the lack of her mother’s attention. When she won the TV show, I’m a celebrity, get me out of here, she describes how Mrs Thatcher phoned. When Carol picked up, expecting congratulations, her mother said, “oh bugger….I’ve dialled the wrong number”.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Carol remained resigned to the fact that she’ll never escape the shadow of her mother. “I am extraordinarily fortunate to have had the life that I had. My mum worked, and that was that, and to my dying day I will admire how hard she did work.”

She finishes by saying: “I’ve written books. I won I’m a Celebrity. But nobody will ever know me for being anything other than Margaret Thatcher’s daughter, so at the end of the day, whatever I did was never good enough.”

Thatcher left an incredible legacy behind her. And while her children perhaps bear some of the battle scars, British politics was changed forever for all women MPs that came after the indomitable Iron Lady.

Anne Boleyn,

Wife of Henry VIII

Anne Boleyn cemented her place as a historical mother-villain when she dethroned the beloved Katherine of Aragon as Queen of England and married King Henry VIII, changing the institution of marriage in Britain for ever.

Historians are divided on whether Anne was a scheming wannabe queen or a clever woman desperately trying to make the best of a situation engineered at least in part by her family and by the King himself.

Whatever the truth, she quickly did her duty, delivering the King a child; sadly it was the wrong sex. The future Queen Elizabeth had been born and would eventually rule for 45 years. But her father wanted a boy. After Elizabeth, all of Anne’s pregnancies ended in miscarriage. She was eventually beheaded in 1536 when her daughter was just two years old.

She had little time to prove herself as a mother, but historian Tracy Borman writes in Elizabeth’s Women, that Anne “lavished affection upon Elizabeth and could hardly bear to be apart from her”. Unusually for women of her class, she loved to have Elizabeth next to her on a cushion, rather than shut away in a nursery.

Being childless was preferable to being part of a motherhood myth

Despite being separated from her mother at three months to go to her royal nursery a few miles away and then losing her permanently before her third birthday, Elizabeth displayed an intellect and political savvy reminiscent of her. Her reign is often described as the Golden Age in English history.

When Elizabeth died, the Tudor line died with her. In a striking illustration of her views on balancing career and motherhood, the Virgin Queen chose to govern alone rather than risking the loss of power associated with taking a husband and having children. For her, being childless was preferable to being part of a motherhood myth.