In 1976 Blair qualified as a barrister, scoring the top exam mark in her year, before in 1995 being ... [+]
In the summer of 1979, while scrubbing the bathroom floor of their vacation home in Chianti, Italy, Cherie Blair - then Booth - unceremoniously agreed to marry her boyfriend. If she hadn’t, it’s anyone’s guess what she’d be best known for today. It almost certainly wouldn’t be her husband.
The proposal - if it can be referred to as such - was fittingly unconventional for a woman whose life had been anything but mundane up until that point.
Born to actor parents and raised in an underprivileged part of Liverpool, she was a feisty child and her academic ambition awarded her a first-class honors law degree from the London School of Economics, at a time when that calibre and field of academia were still overwhelmingly male-dominated.
In 1976 she qualified as a barrister, scoring the top exam mark in her year, before in 1995 being named a Queen's Counsel, one of the highest honors within the U.K. legal profession. Four years later she became a part-time judge.
Since then, Blair has set up her own law firm specializing in human rights, she’s been named the chancellor of a university, launched a foundation for female entrepreneurs, served as a patron for several charities, raised four children and stood beside the Prime Minister of Britain through some of the country’s most testing times.
In many ways she pioneered the figure of a self-actualized First Lady, conscious of - and tirelessly dedicated to - her duties as a statesman’s spouse, but also fiercely determined to define herself through more than just her husband’s work.
“Women’s economic empowerment is one of my great passions, and it always has been,” she explains, speaking via video call from a house in Oxford where she’s been hunkered down with close family since before the Covid-19 lockdown came into force. “Yes, I had a front row seat of history for ten years while Tony was in Downing Street, but in many ways, I feel much freer now. It’s empowering.”
Speaking For Herself
It’s quite apparent what Blair means.
In her 2008 memoir, Speaking For Myself, she details - painfully - her struggle dealing with the pressure to adhere to public expectations of what a First Lady should act like, look like, even think like.
When Tony Blair became Prime Minister in May 1997, she emerged as one of the most divisive leaders’ spouses the country had ever seen. In the media, some decried her as too confident and opinionated while others accused her of cashing in on her husband’s name .
Broadsheets feasted on her links to a convicted Australian conman. Even Margaret Thatcher, it seems, had not prepared the British public to fully embrace a woman who was politically involved (she competed as a candidate for the Labour Party in the U.K.’s 1983 General Election), highly academic, supremely ambitious, and a self-proclaimed feminist.
As the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee observed in 2005, albeit in a column criticizing Blair for pocketing a large sum of money for a speech she gave in her capacity as a QC: “She has suffered relentless ridicule and harassment by a Tory press printing the ugliest pictures and mocking her clothes, friends, legal career, religion and anything they can invent to turn her into a ditzy Lady Macbeth.”
Power Of ‘Sisterpreneurship’
Famously, though, Blair persisted. Today it’s clear that every challenge she’s faced - from having an alcoholic, womanizing, celebrity father, to being emotionally abused by prying journalists - somehow inspired her resolve to make the world fairer and kinder.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the work she does with the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women. Set up in 2008, it aims to empower female entrepreneurs to reach their full professional and personal potential through training and mentorship programs and by providing resources like financial expertise and access to technology. It celebrates what Blair describes as the “Sisterpreneurship” and has so far collaborated with a host of major corporations, including Bank of America, PayPal, United States Agency for International Development and the ExxonMobil Foundation.
To date the foundation has supported over 160,000 women entrepreneurs in low and middle income countries, helping communities to prosper, families to thrive and economies to expand. Over the coming years it has vowed to help 100,000 more.
Blair speaks with almost parental pride of Turkish entrepreneur, Ilgin Ozdemir Yazgan, who graduated from the foundation’s mentorship program after launching a maternity and nursing business wear brand. This year Yazgan spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
With every woman supported, the foundation is also chipping away at iron-clad gender stereotypes, but progress is bitterly slow and Blair acknowledges that achieving true gender parity, regardless of the metric, is not something that she - or even her own granddaughter - will likely witness in their lifetimes.
“The World Economic Forum’s latest gender gap report shows that in terms of economic participation and opportunity, we’re not set to reach gender parity for another 257 years which is a deterioration from the year before,” Blair explains. “Take that position and then add to the mix the impact to the economy and the impact on work life balance that the Covid-19 crisis has had....” she trails off. It certainly doesn’t look good.
It’s well documented that the coronavirus outbreak has had a disproportionately adverse impact on women. A female in a heterosexual couple has been far more likely to assume greater responsibility for homeschooling kids during lockdown and is therefore more likely to put her own professional duties on the backburner than her male partner is.
“Some women might even have chosen to leave the workforce because of this crisis, and you can’t blame them,” Blair says. “But it’s never been more important for us to appreciate the economic potential of gender equality.”
Research conducted last year by her foundation in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group found that if women had the same entrepreneurial opportunities as men, global GDP could rise by approximately 3% to 6%, boosting the world’s economy by $2.5 trillion to $5 trillion.
“Studies like this have been coming out for years and years, and yet somehow the message still isn’t quite getting through,” Blair says. “So it’s up to us to prove [what the economic potential] looks like.”
Political Hopefuls?
Blair may be a 65-year-old grandmother, but neither in her occupation as an international human rights lawyer nor in her work with the foundation, is she showing any signs of slowing down.
Earlier in June she joined Hillary Clinton - a close friend - and Dame Vivian Hunt, managing partner for the UK and Ireland at global consultancy McKinsey & Co, to speak at London’s Tech Week conference on the barriers women face when it comes to accessing technology, another topic that’s deeply engrained in her foundation’s mission.
When Covid-19 first started to spread, the foundation announced it was partnering with Cambridge Wireless, a network of companies involved in developing and applying wireless technologies, and King's College London to offer free, open-access online programs for business resilience training to female entrepreneurs around the world.
“Technology is a great enabler and can be a great democratizer if provided in the right way,” she says. “That’s why it’s been so central to all the work we do.”
In her private life, meanwhile, Blair remains a committed mother - her youngest son is in the process of finishing his degree at Oxford - as well as a devoted grandmother. Her daughter and daughter-in-law are both expecting to give birth in July. “Depending on timing we could have two new babies in the family in the same week,” she exclaims.
In addition to Hillary Clinton, she’s also still in regular contact with Laura Bush, with whom she struck up a warm friendship in the early days of George W. Bush’s presidency. Despite their ideological differences - Blair is a fierce opponent of capital punishment while President Bush famously supported the death penalty - she describes in her 2008 book how the couples enjoyed each other’s company, dined and watched movies together and met each other’s families.
But what about Blair’s own political ambitions? She’s dabbled before, she certainly knows what it takes, and as someone with so much ambition to effect change, might she one day consider following her dear friend Clinton’s lead and taking a shot as head of state?
“I think those days have probably passed,” she laughs. “But who knows. I may well one day be the mother of a prime minister. Or perhaps the grandmother,” she muses. “Let’s not rule anything out.”
