ATTILA the Hen, The Great She Elephant, She Who Must Be Obeyed.

By the nicknames given to her, later generations might think Margaret Thatcher was a cartoon villain to best the wickedest of queens rather than a political pioneer.

As Britain's first woman prime minister, she was the first to plant a pink flag on a political Everest. But was she a feminist heroine?

It is a question that followed Mrs Thatcher all the way from Grantham to Downing Street, though it was not one that seemed to bother her. By the time she was elected MP for Finchley in 1959, the grocer's daughter had confounded the expectations imposed by her class and sex by going to Oxford, becoming a scientist, then a barrister.

Having reduced the glass ceilings in science and law to shards, it was on to politics. After a stint as Education Minister (the "Milk Snatcher" years), she challenged Edward Heath for the Tory leadership, and won the first of three general elections in 1979. Before she left Downing Street in 1990, tears in her eyes, she had fought a war, defeated the miners, taken a hammer, with Ronald Reagan, to the Berlin Wall and the rest of the Soviet empire, and transformed Britain's economy and society, for good or ill depending on your experience. All that and she never complained about her work-life balance.

But Mrs Thatcher was a working mother like few others. Having married a wealthy man and had her children early on (twins: very efficient), she had the time and money to embark full throttle on a political career.

It was in politics alone that Mrs Thatcher advanced the cause of women, and she did so by simple example. She wasn't the first through the door marked "leader" – those honours went to India's Indira Gandhi, Israel's Golda Meir, and arguably every queen who ever ruled – but she opened it wider than ever before.

Even here, her legacy is questionable, with domestic factors playing a far greater part in bringing to power the likes of Angela Merkel (Germany), Julia Gillard (Australia), Helen Clark (New Zealand), Mary Robinson (Ireland) and other women.

One way to judge how much of an impact Mrs Thatcher had is the number of women who entered the Commons after her. When she became prime minister there were 19 women MPs. Today, there are 143. But that leap is due more to the Labour Party's policy of all-women shortlists than Thatcher's example and the number of women MPs remains under 25%.

Women earn 15.5% less an hour than men. The number of women executive directors in FTSE-100 companies has inched up from 2% in 1999 to 5.5%. A woman might have run the country, but they still frighten the average boardroom.

According to the numbers women have advanced, but not by much, since she planted that flag. Perhaps, though, Mrs Thatcher's impact was more abstract than statistics can ever show.

Her greatest achievement, as far as women are concerned, is that by being so prominent for so long she made being a woman in authority seem natural.

And she was, unmistakably, a woman, one of us. Despite Spitting Image putting her in a pinstripe suit, Mrs Thatcher was the most feminine, if not the most feminist, of women.

Always in a skirt or dress toting that famous handbag, hair done, lipstick on, she was more like an advert for 1950s Britain than modern UK. She used her femininity, too. Alan Clark was not the only Tory MP to find her attractive. Francois Mitterrand, the French former president, memorably said she had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.

So, feminist heroine or hoaxer? What cannot be denied is that Mrs Thatcher was forever her own woman, always believing in herself and her right to hold the views she did, even when that iron determination was to cost her the office she held so dear.