John Campbell: Ladies, You're No Maggie Thatcher

John Campbell is the author of "The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, From Grocer's Daughter to Prime Minister," which will be published by Penguin on Oct. 25. The movie "The Iron Lady," starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, will be released in December.

With Ronald Reagan in his centenary year now regarded as one of the great presidents, and two of his political heirs, Michele Bachmann and possibly Sarah Palin, eyeing bids for the White House, it is a good moment to look again at Reagan's great British ally, Margaret Thatcher.

More than 30 years after Britain's first woman prime minister entered Downing Street, America is still searching for its first female president. Sarah Palin has named Thatcher as one of her heroines, and Michele Bachmann compared herself to the former prime minister last week (and may well do it again during tonight's GOP debate). How do the Tea Party pretenders measure up to Britain's Iron Lady?

The important thing to realize about Margaret Thatcher is what a remarkable phenomenon she was. She fought her way up from a very modest background purely by merit, determination and hard work, at a time -- the 1950s and 1960s -- when women politicians were very few, mainly unmarried or childless and usually confined to "feminine" portfolios like education or government price controls. While her children were still very young she read for the bar, practiced as a tax lawyer, overcame the prejudice of selection committees to get herself elected to Parliament and quickly became a junior minister. Professional women juggling motherhood with demanding jobs are quite normal today; but Thatcher was a feminist pioneer long before she became prime minister....