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Artist News
Tracey Thorn: Does Thatcher’s death expose negative attitudes to powerful women?
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 11 April 2013
Singer-songwriter and former member of Everything But The Girl, Tracey Thorn, has written an article on Margaret Thatcher’s death for the ITV News website, offering a more measured view than some other musician commentators. Although not saying that she ever agreed with Thatcher’s politics, Thorn questions whether the type of vitriol the former Prime Minister’s demise has raised would ever be directed at a male politician.
Thorn writes: “I was a product of 1970s feminism, an era of good old-fashioned collectivism, women’s groups and belief in The Sisterhood. To me a feminist was someone who believed in attempting to remould society in terms that were more favourable to women in general. What I didn’t realise was that during the 80s the idea of what a feminist was would be redefined, and in the individualist mood of that decade would be relocated into the persona of any individually successful woman, whether it was Madonna or Margaret Thatcher. To those of my generation and ideals this was anathema”.
However, on musical criticism of Thatcher by some of her male counterparts, Thorn continues: “I never liked that Costello lyric about dancing on her grave, or Morrissey’s about seeing her on the guillotine. I was on the same side as both of them politically, but couldn’t see the value in reducing the politics of a decade down to the personal dislike of an individual. I worried that some of the vitriol of that personal dislike had roots, however deeply buried and unacknowledged, in the fact of her being a woman, a particular type of woman even – bossy, prim, school-teachery”.
She concludes: “Her male equivalent often seemed to me to be Norman Tebbit, and while he was widely loathed, I don’t remember songs about stamping on his grave or executing him. So there is a core of unease in my feelings about her, and my response to the anger she provokes. I share so much of it, and understand where it comes from. But when I see a banner, as I did this morning, strung up proud and joyful, declaiming ‘THE BITCH IS DEAD’, I still feel that it’s a response that perhaps only a powerful woman could provoke, and that the implied violence and loathing embodied in the phrase is something that all of us women still have good reason to fear'”.
Of course, the rise of ‘Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ up the UK charts possibly falls within this trend too. Whether harmless fun or something more sinister, it is indeed difficult to think of a similar song that might immediately ignite the charts upon a male Prime Minister’s death.
Read Thorn’s article in full here.
