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Margaret Thatcher

October 13, 1925 – April 8, 2013

Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first woman to hold the office of prime minister and the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century. Her economic policies came to be known as Thatcherism, and she was earlier elected MP for Finchley in 1959 and served as Secretary of State for Education and Science from 1970 to 1974.

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Biography

Margaret Thatcher was born in Grantham in 1925, the daughter of a grocer. She studied chemistry at Oxford, became a barrister, and entered Parliament as a Conservative in 1959. She was Education Secretary under Edward Heath.

She became party leader in 1975 and the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, serving until 1990. Her government privatised state industries, reduced the power of trade unions, defeated the miners' strike of 1984-85 and deregulated the financial sector. She won the Falklands War in 1982.

A close ally of Ronald Reagan against the Soviet Union, she also welcomed Mikhail Gorbachev as a man she could 'do business with'. Her poll tax and hostility to closer European integration led to a party revolt, and she resigned in 1990. She died in 2013.