Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Mrs Thatcher herself was about as likely to train for the London Marathon as she was to invest in a new pair of Levi’s. But like many women, she thought a lot about her waistline. ‘Your clothes tell you. You don’t need to weigh yourself,’ she told Rosalie Shann. She had to be careful, because ‘if you come in late, you know, and you pick something up the chances are that you pick something up starchy’. Before the election, she had spent two weeks on a strict diet of grapefruit, eggs and meat, ticking off each meal against a list that included the stern warning ‘NO EATING BETWEEN MEALS’. Later, she switched to a different diet, about which she gave a hilariously incongruous interview to the Sun (‘My Face, My Figure, My Diet’). She was not a fan of lettuce, she said, and hated oysters. But her real weakness was for anything sweet. ‘Lovely toast and marmalade. I can never eat that,’ she said sadly. ‘Now and then I eat chocolates, but I find it hard to stop at one. It’s often best, you know: to do without completely. You can’t indulge. It will sit on your hips.’11

  Mrs Thatcher also gave considerable thought to her clothes. Like many professional women, she experimented with various looks before hitting on one that suited her. As she told the Observer, her role models, in fashion as in so much else, were her parents, who had ‘always looked neat, well-tailored, but never flamboyant’. In later years, she adopted a more obviously American style, all hairspray and shoulders, like an extra from Dynasty. But in the first years of the 1980s she was keen not to appear too expensively groomed. After all, as a self-described ‘plain straightforward provincial’, the Prime Minister could hardly splash out à la Nancy Reagan. So her look was more understated: plain, sensible, tweedy and professional, with leather shoes and an omnipresent handbag. And when Rosalie Shann asked where she got her clothes, she immediately cited the national favourite. ‘Marks and Spencer’s always sends one down for me to look at, they know what I like,’ she mused. ‘Lots of blouses. And they do some excellent suits and I have one overcoat from there. And, of course, everything.’ Shann pounced: ‘What, all your undies are Marks?’ Mrs Thatcher detected danger: she did not want her knickers splashed all over the News of the World. ‘Yes, yes, I’m sorry, please don’t put it like that,’ she said hastily, ‘but you know, yes we all do.’12

  It would be easy to dismiss all this as trivial. But as all working women knew, clothes were more than mere fripperies. To give an obvious example, Shirley Williams, Mrs Thatcher’s only rival as the leading female politician of the 1980s, was widely seen as a clever, decent and good-humoured woman, which is why she was often mentioned as a possible Prime Minister. But she was hobbled by the perception that she was ‘scruffy’, which supposedly showed how disorganized she was. In her case, the personal really was political. In a spectacularly rude profile, the Express’s Geoffrey Levy suggested that while Mrs Thatcher ‘exudes precision, as befits a research chemist’, Mrs Williams (‘a lover of chips’) was notable for her ‘legendary untidiness’ and a ‘brown thatch as uncontrollable as the Marxists in the Labour Party’. Some of Mrs Williams’s worst critics, though, were other women. ‘Her clothes look like they might come from jumble sales,’ wrote Lucy Abelson in the Sunday Express, who again drew a contrast with the ‘neat and tidy’ Mrs Thatcher: ‘Being well dressed is a sign of efficiency and such people are usually far better able to help than messy people precisely because they are better organised.’ Even ordinary readers agreed. ‘What a scruffy lot the Labour Party leaders are – especially Shirley Williams,’ Mrs Constance of Bexleyheath, south-east London, wrote to the Daily Mirror. ‘I dress smarter than her, even on my pension.’13

  The problem for women like Margaret Thatcher and Shirley Williams was that there was no universally accepted office uniform. As The Times’s fashion writer Suzy Menkes pointed out in 1981, women were damned whatever they wore:

  How can a man, who is forever perfectly dressed in a decent business suit, understand the effort and the anxiety his female colleagues go through to be appropriately dressed for the same executive role?

  To be taken seriously in a high-flying job, a woman must not dress provocatively or untidily. She should look cool, businesslike and unrumpled, wear sober colours and a simple unfussy cut. Yet … these are not the kind of clothes that are fashionable in any other part of a woman’s life. Flamboyant and casual clothes, and especially trousers, are the staple of most women’s out-of-work wardrobes. To suppress all personality and personal taste when behind a desk is most frustrating. And we cannot even show our colours by choice of tie.

  For card-carrying feminists, this posed real difficulties. During the 1970s, admitted the Guardian, there had been a prevailing view that ‘a flattering frock and a smear of lipstick are defeatist concessions to the traditional male view of women as sex objects and domestics’. But many women had got stuck in a wardrobe of ‘jeans and T-shirts, jeans and shirts, jeans and sweaters’, and were unable to break out. In an entertaining experiment in the summer of 1979, the paper persuaded the feminist academic Joni Lovenduski to submit to a makeover, ditching the sweaters and trying out some Clinique make-up, smart shirts and a Burberry rain-jacket. The result was a triumph: proof, the Guardian said, that even an ‘academic, socialist feminist’ could ‘end up looking right in clothes that, on another body and under another face, would have looked almost county’.14

  This little experiment reflected a wider trend. A decade after women’s lib had hit the headlines, fashion had moved on from the self-conscious informality of the early 1970s. Instead of defying convention, younger women were keen to show that they could be just as smart and efficient as their male counterparts. That meant dressing up, not down. ‘Pride in one’s appearance’, said the Guardian, ‘equals pride in one’s personality and pleasure in expressing it.’ Indeed, in 1981 a marketing consultant told the paper that overtly feminist fashion was on the way out. ‘Women are setting out to abandon their jeans, boots and bra-less image and are adopting a very frilly feminine style,’ explained Anthony Edwards. ‘In the seventies female clothes shops were very casual – chromium-plated poles, denim and canvas. Now there’s going to be a move towards highly feminine boudoirs.’

  A few years earlier, talk of a frilly feminine style would have sent most self-respecting feminists reaching for their copies of The Female Eunuch. But fashion was ‘newly fashionable on the Left’, said the Guardian, which credited the emergence of a generation of feminists who were perfectly happy ‘to compromise with high heels, make up and tight waists’. Even the paper’s feminist-in-chief, Jill Tweedie, thought it high time women stopped feeling guilty about looking good. ‘You don’t have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump,’ she told her readers in October 1983:

  Lace knickers won’t hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word. Stick up two sequinned fingers at the Puritans, kick up two silver heels, come up with all frills flying and remember – the art of exterior decoration is light years older than Paris.15

  On the high street, the big winner from the rise of the professional working woman was Next, which opened in February 1982, specifically targeting the aspirational ‘25-plus younger career girl’. But even high fashion, which often seemed dizzyingly remote from the kind of women who shopped at places like Next, reflected the same trend. The important thing, explained one of the best-known designers of the early 1980s, Katharine Hamnett, was to use ‘the alphabet of the workman while emphasizing erogenous zones’. She herself had ‘benefited from the emancipation of women which has been taking place and I believe my clothes are designed to match the strength and confidence more and more women are gaining’. At the same time, Hamnett was keen to include a ‘sexual element’, since clothes were about ‘allowable fantasies’.

  This was not exactly ground-breaking stuff: for decades designers had boasted that their clothes were all about confidence and sexua
lity. But some of Hamnett’s themes were new. ‘Clothes should enable a woman to be exciting, sexy, efficient, functional,’ she explained. ‘She should be able to play the Las Vegas tart, conduct a business meeting and fry fish fingers in the same garment. Clothes need to perform for the way women live now.’ These were clothes, agreed The Times, for women who wanted to be ‘substantial, active, sexually assertive, glamorous, businesslike, equal’. Efficient, functional, glamorous, business meetings, businesslike: here was the new language of the 1980s.16

  The date is June 1979, the place California, and in the futuristic headquarters of Drax Industries, the United Kingdom’s most celebrated lover of women is in for a shock. Resplendent in his smart new blazer, James Bond has come to investigate the disappearance of the Moonraker space shuttle, and the firm’s boss, the peculiar Hugo Drax, has asked one of his astronauts to show him around. At the entrance, a pretty young woman with a clipboard comes to greet him. ‘My name is Bond, James Bond,’ Roger Moore says, flashing his most dazzling smile, ‘and I’m looking for Dr Goodhead.’ The woman smiles: ‘You just found her’ – and for a fraction of a second Moore’s eyes widen in surprise. And then, coolly, almost flatly, with just the slightest hint of amusement, he says what everybody is thinking: ‘A woman.’

  Dr Goodhead bristles. ‘Your powers of observation do you credit, Mr Bond,’ she says icily. No doubt she has been through this many times before. Despite her unfortunate surname, she is clearly a woman of great intellect: when, later in the film, Bond runs into her in Venice, she tells him that she is ‘addressing the European Space Commission’.fn1 ‘Heady stuff!’ Bond says. ‘There again, I keep forgetting you are more than just a beautiful woman.’ ‘If you’re trying to be ingratiating, don’t bother,’ she says wearily. But this is James Bond, so we all know how it will end: ‘I think he’s attempting re-entry, sir!’

  By the time James Bond and Holly Goodhead found themselves hurtling into outer space, the strong, self-willed, independent woman, asserting herself against the prejudices of her colleagues, had become a familiar feature of British popular culture. In Doctor Who, Tom Baker’s companions in the late 1970s and early 1980s included a knife-wielding warrior from an alien planet (Leela), a Time Lady who always knows best (Romana) and an Australian air hostess for whom he can do no right (Tegan). In December 1980, just before Baker hung up his scarf, Grange Hill acquired its first headmistress, the formidable Mrs Bridget McClusky, for whom the words ‘firm but fair’ might have been invented. The actress who played her, Gwyneth Powell, said later that she had been written as a ‘twin set and pearls’ part, but she wanted her to be more assertive. ‘I think Mrs McClusky became memorable’, she remarked, ‘because we had a prime minister like that.’ And almost a year later, the BBC began showing a drama series dominated entirely by female faces, Tenko, which follows a group of women imprisoned by the Japanese during the Second World War. The Guardian complained that its characters were merely a parade of female stereotypes (‘the spoilt beauty … the battleaxe … the flirt’) but Tenko proved enormously popular. The Mirror, in a glorious misunderstanding, thought it was ‘the saga of women imprisoned in a supermarket’.17

  Perhaps the most striking examples of change, though, were two series exploring the lives of women police officers in a male-dominated world, both of which began in mid-1980. The first was ITV’s The Gentle Touch, which was first shown in April and starred Jill Gascoine as a widowed single parent, Maggie Forbes, who is an inspector with the Metropolitan Police. Maggie is far more than a cardboard heroine: even as she engages with some remarkably hard-hitting social issues, from rape and homosexuality to racism and child abuse, she is struggling to cope with her teenage son and elderly father. By contrast, the heroine of the BBC’s Juliet Bravo, launched four months later, has life a little easier. Jean Darblay (Stephanie Turner) is a police inspector in Lancashire, and although her husband has been made redundant, at least he is still alive. Like Maggie, though, Jean has to fight for every inch against her colleagues’ prejudices. Even her superintendent warns her that ‘there are quite a few around who’d be pleased to see you fail’.18

  Juliet Bravo was written by Ian Kennedy Martin, the man behind The Sweeney. He based its central character on a real officer, Inspector Wynn Darwin, who ran the police station in Great Harwood, Lancashire. ‘When she’d arrived in her new post, it’d taken months to stop her men opening squad car doors for her,’ Kennedy Martin recalled. ‘She was always in the hairdressers under a dryer when news of a major incident came through, and if she was in civvies she would then have to tear back home, put on her uniform, and then go to the incident because without the uniform she’d be ignored.’ Turning her experience into a drama, however, had its complications. Kennedy Martin had to persuade the BBC not to call the series A Fair Cop, while some of his writers had never put a woman centre stage before. But the show was a tremendous hit, although the best thing about it was the theme tune. Talking to the Express, Stephanie Turner hoped Jean would inspire real women to join the police. ‘I’m sure most policewomen feel, as she does, that they have to be twice as good as a chap to get ahead in the force,’ she remarked. Alas, the Mirror rather let the side down. ‘It was girls, girls, girls yesterday as BBC bosses unwrapped their autumn TV package,’ began its story announcing the new show. The headline was ‘Watch the Birds’.19

  Behind shows like Juliet Bravo was a seismic shift in the experience and aspirations of millions of women. For young women who, like Jean Darblay, had come of age since the 1960s, modern Britain offered unprecedented educational and economic opportunities. By 1980 four out of ten university applications were from women, with the total rising every year. Even at Oxford and Cambridge, three out of ten students were women. As women were better educated, so they were likely to have loftier career goals; as contraception freed them from the routine of childbearing, so they tailored their family lives to suit their ambitions. Perhaps the most important thing, though, was the transition from labour-intensive heavy industry, which suited men, to white-collar clerical and service work, which women could do equally well, if not better. In other words, not only were there more women who wanted to work, there were more jobs for them to do. By the time Mrs Thatcher took office, almost six out of ten women were working in some capacity, a higher proportion than in any other Western European country outside Scandinavia. As the Guardian remarked in 1981, this was ‘one of the biggest social revolutions since the war. Neither the tax system, nor the social security system nor many personnel directors nor the trade unions nor many husbands have even begun to adjust to these changes.’20

  In many ways the outlook for Britain’s women at the turn of the 1980s was rosier than ever. Only a few years earlier, many professions had been virtually all-male. In the City, women were not even allowed on to the floor of the Stock Exchange until March 1973. But as female recruits flooded into the professions, it became more common to see a female doctor, a female lawyer or a female bank manager. Even more tellingly, ambitious young women were very quick to react to the boom in self-employment. Between 1979 and 1992, the number of self-employed women rose by a staggering 109 per cent, while the number employing staff went up by 49 per cent, compared with just 14 per cent for men. Evidently many women preferred working for themselves to enduring the patronizing jokes of the male-dominated office. Researching the subject for the Guardian, the economics writer Frances Cairncross came across ‘women with children who cook for boardroom lunches, who decorate Moses baskets for Liberty’s, who teach English to foreign students and foreign languages to English students, who do typing or editing or translation’, as well as a woman who had opened her own toy shop and a woman who sold dried flowers. She even met a woman with two small children, who, working from home, handled public relations for the Chicago Pizza Pie Factory chain. She made very little money, but did it ‘because it gives me a tremendous sense of achievement. I’m not creative enough to paint the house or do patchwork. This keeps me in touch with the real
world.’21

  Of all Britain’s female entrepreneurs, the best known was Anita Roddick, who opened her first Body Shop in 1976 and had forty-three outlets by the spring of 1984, exploiting young women’s newfound fascination with ‘ethical consumerism’. But a more surprising example was Stephanie (‘Steve’) Shirley, who had founded F International, one of Britain’s biggest software companies, as far back as 1962. As Britain’s first female computer entrepreneur, she became one of the faces of the computer boom, turning over some £7 million and employing 1,000 people by 1984. Remarkably, more than nine out of ten of her staff were women, reflecting Shirley’s determination to support mothers juggling children and careers. In her own words, she had ‘never considered myself an entrepreneur’, but had wanted to show that she was as good as any man. ‘I also used to wear grey suits so that I could hide amongst them,’ she told Polly Toynbee. ‘But I’ve grown out of that now. No more grey suits.’ She still called herself ‘Steve’, though, having adopted the name because ‘Stephanie’ would have deterred investors. Mrs Thatcher, as a woman, a scientist and a champion of entrepreneurship, looked very kindly upon her, awarding her an OBE in 1980 and inviting her to join various public bodies. Shirley herself, though, was not a very political animal. At her first Downing Street reception, she went up to a man on his own, introduced herself and asked who he was. ‘The name’s Thatcher,’ he said.22