Margaret Bondfield By 1973, Christmas reported, only 93 women had sat in parliament; their contributions had overall "not been stunning". Their best numerical representation at that point had been in the 1966 general election, when 29 women (out of 630 MPs) had been elected. The 1979 election saw this number fall to 19, but also saw Margaret Thatcher become Britain's first woman prime minister. Cox and Hobley draw attention to Thatcher's early life as a shopkeeper's daughter, and contrast her account of those days with Bondfield's experiences half a century earlier. Thatcher believed that the concept of service to the customer was
Denis Thatcher Denis Thatcher Sir Denis Thatcher, 1st Baronet, (10 May 1915 – 26 June 2003) was a British businessman and the husband of Margaret Thatcher, who was the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The first man married to a British prime minister, he is the last person outside the British royal family to have been awarded a hereditary title, which he was granted in 1990. Thatcher was born in Lewisham, London, as the first-born child of a New Zealand-born British businessman, Thomas Herbert "Jack" Thatcher. At age eight he entered a preparatory school as a boarder in Bognor