Did Margaret Thatcher say: “Being strong is like being a lady.” If you have to talk about it, that means you’re not like that”?

A popular statement on the Internet attributed to the British ex-prime minister is that strength, like nobility, should be obvious to others without words. We decided to check if she said anything like that.

The phrase often appears in articles about Thatcher in the media (for example, it was published “Kommersant", "Gazeta.ru", "Komsomolskaya Pravda", The Voice, Tatler etc.), as well as websites with selections quotes And aphorisms. Social media users share the statement (“VKontakte", X, Facebook, Instagram) and blogging platforms (“Zen", LiveJournal). Several formulations of this statement are common on the Internet: “to be powerful”, “to be a leader”, “to be a leader” - but its meaning does not change. 

Margaret Thatcher - the first woman prime minister of Great Britain and, in general, one of the first women leaders of Western countries. Under her leadership, the Conservative Party won elections to the British Parliament three times (in 1979, 1983 and 1987), and Thatcher herself served as prime minister for 11 years (a record in the 20th century!). Thatcher was nicknamed the Iron Lady for her tough and uncompromising policies, so it is quite possible that she might have expressed a similar thought.

Despite the fact that in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet there are many versions of the statement attributed to Thatcher (which is not surprising for a translated quote), there are no discrepancies in the wording in English: “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't." Almost all versions of the translation into Russian are in one way or another quite close in meaning to the original. As in the Russian-language segment of the Internet, in English-speaking phrase often attributed to Thatcher. 

However, not a single “Verified” publication found - either on social networks or in the media - indicates when, where and under what circumstances the Iron Lady uttered such words. We couldn’t find anything similar to the popular quote on the website either. Margaret Thatcher Foundation, where all the famous speeches of the politician are collected (in total more than 8,000 texts of speeches, interviews and other statements).

Quote authentication portal Quote Investigator also could not confirm that Thatcher said anything similar. The portal's experts discovered that, apparently, the phrase was first attributed to the British prime minister in 1984, a year after her re-election to a second term - in collection quotes The Official MBA Handbook of Great Business Quotations. However, the compilers did not insist on Thatcher’s authorship - the collection indicated that the statement was only attributed to her.

Quote Investigator found earlier cases of the use of this phrase, but with attribution to a completely different person - Jesse Karroo, leader of the Alaska Teamsters union. According to the portal, for the first time the statement was published in October 1975 in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, published in the same state. These were not Carr's direct words, but journalists quote one of his friends who claimed that the union leader often used this phrase. A year later, in September 1976, Newsweek magazine published an article about Carr, where the statement was already presented as direct speech from the hero of the publication. Undoubtedly, Margaret Thatcher is a much more famous person than trade union leader Carr, and the phrase about a lady from her lips would sound more organic than from a truck driver. Therefore, it is not surprising that over time the real authorship was forgotten and the quote began to be attributed to the British prime minister.

Thus, there is no evidence that Thatcher has anything to do with the phrase in question. It was not possible to find anything like this in the archives of her statements. In the media, the phrase appeared with an indication of the authorship of a completely different person almost ten years before it was first attributed to Thatcher in one of the collections of motivational quotes. 

Cover photo: Allan House, OGL v1.0OGL v1.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Incorrect quote attribution

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Quote Investigator. Quote Origin: Being Powerful Is Like Being a Lady. If You Have To Tell People You Are, You Aren't
2. Did Thatcher say: “Never give up and you will see others give up”?
3. Did Marilyn Monroe say, “Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world”?