Just like the Mintoff years I don’t remember much of the Thatcher years either. All I know about the two is what I’ve heard and read; ultimately second, third and fourth hand information. But as unreliable as such information can be, one thing is crystal clear - Margaret Thatcher was loved as much as she was loathed, not unlike our very own Dom Mintoff.

For women all around the world Thatcher presented a double edged sword - on the one hand she was Britain’s first (and only) female Prime Minister and thus to be admired, but on the other, she seemed to hate women, and did nothing in her power to help them during her tenure.

Like me, she was a grocer’s daughter with humble roots, but then, unlike me (insert smiley here), she married a millionaire, and this made lots of things possible that otherwise would not have been. Yes, she did her bit of course; she studied and worked hard, she persisted and never gave up, but had her husband not paid her fees to study and provided her with a life that permitted her to focus on her career, no amount of hard work would have got her to where she got. In short, with her two mansions and full time nannies, I do not quite think of her as the working class heroine some would like to make her out to be.

When it came to recognising the obstacles that women faced in the work force Maggie took the moral high ground. As broadcaster and writer Anne Karpf wrote back in the 1980s, “having struggled into elevated positions, women may defend the existing structure with more conviction than any man. This is because they interpret their position in individualist terms, failing to take into account the evidence for systematic discrimination against women as a social group.”

Like many women who make it to the top, Thatcher was convinced that she was working within a meritocracy that rewards talent and hard work irrespective of gender. But unlike most women, her career was not interrupted by motherhood. Once born, her two children were quickly handed over to full-time nannies and the food on the table and the roofs on their heads were not issues she had to bother with. To make matters worse, at one point during her tenure, she even froze child benefits.

Thanks to some of her policies, many women did leave their homes to work, but most did so because they had to and not because they wanted to. Many women got into the service sector to make ends meet and would have much preferred to be stay at home mums. Such situations are completely different from that of pursuing a career because you find it fulfilling.

There seems to be no record of her ever saying anything against domestic violence, rape or harassment, and she was even reluctant to identify with the women’s movement, maintaining that she owed absolutely nothing to women’s lib.

If you ask me, besides the dress, she embodied all the typical male traits of men in power – she was ruthless, hard headed and uncompromising. She even took elocution lessons to be able to lower her voice’s pitch and sound more authoritative like a man. She displayed none of the typically feminine traits of compassion and co-operation and, was more famous for her macho attitude during the Falklands than for anything else.

Yet despite all this, Margaret Thatcher’s story is still a remarkable tale of individual achievement. Like most women in politics she too was segregated into female ghettoes such as welfare and child care, but instead of complaining and droning on about unfairness she made sure to know more about the subject at hand than anyone else. In fact one of her most admirable characteristics as PM was that she was generally more knowledgeable on a subject than her departmental minister.

The saddest truth about the Thatcher years were that whether she liked it or not, whether she recognised it or not, being Britain’s first female Prime Minister meant that she was going to be viewed differently. The fact that she was a woman meant that she was going to stand out no matter what she did or didn’t do. Whatever she wore or didn’t wear, she was still going to look different from all the suits surrounding her, and no matter how strong her no nonsense attitude was, all over the world, or at least here in Malta, people, especially women, were mostly interested in what she was wearing and how she looked. They also wanted to know about her family life, where she shopped and what she cooked.

And to this day, whether she likes it or not, Margaret Thatcher is still more talked about as a woman, than as a politician. And her most popular quote is the one thing she ever uttered in favour of her own gender- “In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”