Thatcher's exit means that women can be themselves

"Rejoice, rejoice"? Oh yes. The poor, the trade unions and the left are rejoicing as Margaret Thatcher is forcibly retired. Yes, undoubtedly Iain Duncan Smith and his band are privately rejoicing too. No more will their carefully crafted veneer of moderation be shattered by those hectoring tones. But what of Britain's women? Surely they regret the silencing of Britain's first and only female prime minister? As Mary-Anne Stephenson of the Fawcett Society remarked: "A lot of younger Labour women have said they were inspired to get into politics because of Margaret Thatcher - she made them think a woman could do it." She was indeed a dominant, room-dividing, row-provoking politician. She was modern Britain's greatest alpha female; and yet, I believe, she ultimately had a destructive effect on all other women wanting a public role.

Lady Thatcher herself was always ambiguous about her gender, from her early, often wryly quoted remark that she'd never become prime minister because Britain wouldn't have a woman, to her later poses between the tank turrets, declaring she was "more of a man than the rest of them". Then there was her private sexual flirtatiousness. Mitterrand's famous description of her - "the eyes of Caligula but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe" - was vivid shorthand for the enigma. In her final public years she became, let's face it, a terrible drama queen.

The problem for other women was that she was such a dominant, challenging role model that there seemed no alternative for female politicians. Who'd want to become another Thatcher? Who'd be prepared to have another Thatcher? She smashed through the glass ceiling OK, but then patched it up and danced around on it, bossing the rest of us about.

Before her there was a range of successful female politicians, not many, but a variety: the dishevelled, academic-sounding Shirley Williams; the fiery fighters such as Barbara Castle and Bessie Braddock; the upcoming 1970s feminists Harriet Harman, Helene Hayman and Patricia Hewitt.

Abroad there was no shortage of women leaders either: Indira Gandhi in India, Golda Meir in Israel, Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka and Gro Harlem Brundtland in Norway. There was a sense, at least, that women in power could be different.

Thatcher changed all that. The first time she broke upon the world was with that disturbingly unfemale playground tag "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher", an early version of the later "iron lady". Here was a woman who had succeeded by discarding most of what we had thought of as female, who turned the homely handbag into a weapon of war, whose shoulderpads seemed steel-edged, whose hairdo increasingly resembled a Star Wars helmet. Nor was it symbolism only; she pursued strategies of confrontation and aggression, from the Falklands to the miners' strike to those famous Euro-battles at home and over there.

And this all happened at a time when women were breaking through publicly, thanks to the postwar education revolution, the feminist revolution, the pill and abortion and changes in the workforce. This was our moment, our dawn. Then she came, mocking us, from the wrong side of the political tracks, a triumphant creature who had never fought for women's rights at all. We didn't know whether to cheer or jeer.

Men have never experienced this kind of problem. There has never been only one acceptable male role model. No one ever said the problem with Jim Callaghan was that too many young Labour men would take to pig-farming and kipper ties, or that John Major created a negative role model. There was always a broad variety of male behaviour. But there was at the time only one top-table, dominant-female place available in this small country and Thatcher had it. It is no coincidence that during her heyday there were no other senior female politicians, in any of the main parties.

Since her exit from office, we have returned to something a little more traditional, a modest number of female power types, each of them questioned and mocked, but more or less accepted. There is the earthy, direct, battling model, usually coming with the tag "indomitable" - Ann Widdecombe, Gwyneth Dunwoody, Mo Mowlam. Here the female politician is valued for her connection to commonsense, day-to-day experience.

Then there's the brisk, business-suited female type, a style partly copied from the City and the law, where a few driven women have succeeded by being more organised, more focused and sometimes more ruthless than the men around them. Watch out for Patricia Hewitt, Ruth Kelly and from benches behind them, Helen Jones and Fiona Mactaggart. These women, overwhelmingly New Labour, are brisk, tough, efficient and popping up more and more.

There are, undoubtedly, a few babe-politicians, but only a very few. Politics is not only a famously rough old trade, but a jealous one where you rely on your friends; in general, it seems that women who hope to get on by being flirty are pulled down early by other women, in the constituencies or at Westminster.

During the Thatcher era, these trends were either hidden or simply suppressed as far as public comment was concerned; the "women in politics" debate seemed to begin and end with the Lady herself. She'd broken through, so what was the problem? If she could do it, so could everyone else. The fact that she was financially supported and prided herself on being more male than most Tory men - more confrontational, harder, even more of a whisky-drinker - hardly came into it.

But what is starting to happen now, just starting, and is the real cause of the springlike feeling I have at the proper end of the Thatcher era, is that the "women in politics" debate itself is beginning to dissolve. We are still grossly under- represented in the Commons and in local government. Women politicians are still patronised by male sketch-writers and underrated by male columnists. But we have now got enough of a range of them, from Margaret Beckett to Julie Kirkbride, from Clare Short to Yvette Cooper, that the very idea of a female role-model is starting to seem redundant. If you are a woman and you want to go into politics, you can be this, or that, or the other - but most of all you can start to be yourself.

And that is new since Thatcher went. It wasn't the case when that singular and extraordinary woman dominated public life in this country. She did cramp female political styles, just as she cramped the politics of the right. At a personal level, I hope she has a tranquil, secure - and, above all, private - old age. But as a woman and an observer of politics, I am just so very glad to wave her goodbye. Her final gift to political women is that now she's gone, we can start to be normal again.