Lady

In the sobriquet Iron Lady, isn’t lady too deferential for a mocking nickname? Its author, Yuri Gavrilov, hardly knew that in current English, lady is a genteelism when used by those who fear that if they say woman it will be taken as an accusation that someone is no lady. This has had the perverse effect that those who normally call women women still call the cleaning woman the cleaning lady.

It was in the Red Star newspaper dated 24 January 1976 that Margaret Thatcher, when leader of the opposition, was called zheleznaya dama, ‘iron lady’. The iron part had parallels in the Iron Chancellor Bismarck or the Iron Duke of Wellington. (In Wellington’s case, the phrase was at first used ironically, mostly after his death in 1852, although Punch had called him the ‘Wrought-Iron Duke’ as early as 1842.) In 1981 a film directed by Andrzej Wajda came out, Man of Iron, or in Polish, Czlowiek z zelaza. One can see the resemblance of the words for ‘iron’ (noun and adjective) in the two Slavonic languages. But what of the lady? The Russian dama is a loan word deriving from Latin domina, just as the English dame does. Russian connotations of social status were much disrupted by the revolution, but dama is not the plain word for ‘woman’. Among other things it is the name for a queen in a pack of cards, as in Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’.

The Sunday Times drew attention to the Russian newspaper report in its issue of 25 January 1976, and on 31 January Mrs Thatcher made a speech at Southgate beginning: ‘I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western world.