I would never have voted for her as an adult, but Mrs Thatcher came to power when I was four and I'm sure that contributed hugely to the fact that I grew up not even questioning the right and ability of women to lead.It's been a slow afternoon (in a good way!) and as I've pottered around doing washing up I've been thinking a bit more about the impact women have had on me over the last thirty-seven years.
Let's start with Maggie, since she prompted the post! I was fourteen when she resigned as prime minister and although I understood it was important I couldn't really have told you why. I remember the Falklands War, the miners strike and the Brixton and poll tax riots. But even in 1990 I didn't understand their significance. Before you start thinking that I must have been brought up in some kind of political and social vacuum I should point out that we always listened to the news at tea time (we didn't have a telly) and by 1990 I was doing a morning paper round which always took three times longer than it should have done because I spent too much time reading the papers.
For me, growing up in 1980s, the significance of Mrs Thatcher was the simple fact that she was a woman and she was in charge. And why shouldn't she be? We had a woman in Downing Street and a woman - a very different woman - in Buckingham Palace. Our civic and ceremonial lives were led by women.
Growing up, home was a largely female environment - I have three younger sisters. By some miracle we managed to figure out how to be all girls together and now I count all three sisters amongst my closest friends. Mum was at home full time until my youngest sister was almost finished secondary school, although parenting was clearly something Mum and Dad did together.
And then there were my two feisty grandmas and even feistier great-grandma, legends all of them in different ways. Quite how my grandads coped I have no idea.
At primary school we were ruled (not literally) with a rod of iron by the formidable Mrs Wellman. Mrs Wellman was not a woman you crossed. Fortunately she liked me - I think on reflection that this was a combination of being an able student who didn't get into trouble and coming from a Christian family. But she was in charge; everyone knew that.
I went to two all-girls secondary schools - on reflection I'm not sure this was necessarily a good thing, when I consider just how much my personal and social development was dominated by women. I suspect that having to learn to deal with boys at 11 might have been more helpful than having to learn to deal with them at 19, but that's a post for another day.
I don't remember a huge amount about Mrs Merrick, my first secondary school headmistress. To be honest, she struck me as a bit wet - maybe if I'd have been at the school longer (I left half-way through Year 8) I'd have seen a different side to her.
Mrs Vanderstock, however, was a completely different proposition. A staunch feminist, the refrain I remember most clearly from assemblies was that we girls could be as good as men (and probably better) at whatever we turned our hands to. I imagine there were times when she considered herself the school's answer to Mrs T - she even had her very own Dennis who used to pop up at school functions periodically looking a little brow-beaten.
Even at church, at a time when it would have been unthinkable to have a woman minister in the Baptist church in which I grew up, my spiritual and theological development was shaped by the amazing ladies who taught me in Sunday School, and by the single women who served as missionaries in Africa.
Fortunately (for everybody), my experience of leadership has been a little more gender-balanced since school, but I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the women who modelled strong, effective leadership to me.
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