1979

Britain's Fighting Lady
May 14, 1979

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Cover Story Excerpt:
Savor the moment. For the first time in history, two women were the principals in the traditional "kissing hands upon appointment" — a ceremony in which the leader of the winning party is summoned to Buckingham Palace, there to be designated Prime Minister of Britain by the monarch and asked to form a government. The monarch, of course, was Queen Elizabeth II. The Prime Minister was Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 53, a grocer's daughter from the English Midlands, who last week led her Conservative Party to a decisive victory over James Callaghan's Labor Party. The Tories won a solid majority of 43 seats in the 635-member House of Commons, and Thatcher thereby became not only the first woman to head a British government but the first to lead a major Western nation...Read the full story