Cold War Biographies | Margaret Thatcher Biography

Born October 13, 1925
Grantham, Lincolnshire, England

British prime minister

It was in May 1979 that Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister. She would be reelected in 1983 and again in 1987 to become the first British prime minister of the twentieth century to win three consecutive general elections. Thatcher served for eleven-and-a-half years until her resignation in November 1990. Her Conservative Party victory in 1979 was a major triumph over the Labor Party, which had held power for much of the previous fifty years.

The perceived threat of the communist Soviet Union had come to be a dominant concern of the Western world at the time. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance of Western-styled democracies, was founded in 1949 at the key instigation of Great Britain. It was a response to the growing efforts by the Soviets to...