Laura Beers
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Feminist responses to Thatcher and Thatcherism
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The specific policies which Bridget Christie highlights were all implemented during Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron's first government. However, her broader anti-Tory tone highlights a crucial transformation in feminist attitudes towards party politics that began under Margaret Thatcher. This chapter considers socialist feminist journal Feminist Review, the Marxist New Left Review, and Spare Rib, the monthly magazine of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), which included contributions from socialists, radicals and other members of the diffuse and fragmentary women's movement. It argues that the entrance of militant feminists into the Labour Party in the 1980s should be understood principally as a response to the perceived radicalisation of right-wing women, and particularly to the perceived threat of Thatcherism to feminism. Both women's liberation activists and some historians of the movement have argued that there was comparatively little difference between Labour and Conservative attitudes towards feminist demands in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Rethinking right-wing women

Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the present

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