Feminist critiques of Margaret Thatcher ranged from her being a retrogressive supporter of the patriarchy to her awful hair. It's this second point I'll focus on. Margaret Thatcher's hair was the terror of her cabinet and of the public. According to eyewitnesses, her cabinet would avoid looking directly at it in meetings, and she would punish disobedient ministers with a forced look at the terrible coiffure.[1] During the general strike of 1984-1985, as a stunt Arthur Scargill built a giant coal fire and burned a lock of Thatcher's hair on it (it's unknown how he obtained it). This created a deadly smog which covered all of South Yorkshire for two days, one local was reported as saying "There's nowt so queer as that woman's hair. I couldn't find me way to the pub, the fumes was so thick."[2]

Specifically feminist critiques centred around the hair's "oppressive" nature. Late 2nd wave thinkers were adamantly opposed to "patriarchal hairdos" and claimed that Thatcher's style "Emulated the penetration of male dominance, turning her head into a symbolic battering ram, pushing its way into female spaces and spreading its ideology all over the place."[3] Left-leaning households would cut out Thatcher's hair from pictures of her in newspapers in protest, which inspired a campaign of seizing newspapers from husbands and boyfriends to "wrest control from that nasty prime minister on the cover and from the tyrannical male sports section on the back, which he pays more attention to than me." This action was later condemned in third wave feminism for implying that women couldn't enjoy sports.[4] In the end, it was much a hairdo about nothing: by focusing on fashion disasters, the opposion to Thatcher left itself open to internal split-ends and failed to rally around a mane issue.

[1] Wan, Gok (2006) Mad March Hair: The Role of Thatcher's Horrendous Hairstyle in the General Strike of March 1984 to March 1985. London

[2] Mushy Pea & Gravy Gazette, December 1984, issue #1385

[3] Hairman, Harriet (1997) Temporary Cuts, Perm-anent Damage: The intersection of reduced government spending and poor follicle care. Peckham

[4] Lineker, Garry (1994) Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Maggie's Bad Do and How it Nearly Ended Footie Journalism. Leicester