Flowers surround a portrait of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher outside her home in Belgravia, London. Thatcher, the combative “Iron Lady” who infuriated European allies, found a fellow believer in Ronald Reagan and transformed her country by a ruthless dedication to free markets in 11 bruising years as prime minister, died Monday. She was 87 years old.

LONDON — She was Britain’s first female leader, a strong woman who battled her way to the top of a male-dominated political system — but don’t call Margaret Thatcher a feminist.

The former prime minister, who died Monday at the age of 87, rejected the label — “I owe nothing to women’s lib,” she once said — and she leaves a contested legacy for women. For some, she was an inspiration who showed that anything was possible. For others, she was an individualist who got to the top and pulled the ladder up behind her.

Meryl Streep, who won an Academy Award last year for playing Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” said that although some of Thatcher’s ideas could be seen as “wrongheaded or misguided,” her legacy for women was huge.

“To have given women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation; this was groundbreaking and admirable,” Streep said.

But Wendy Webster, professor of modern cultural history at the University of Huddersfield, said Thatcher regarded herself as a one-off who owed nothing to feminism.

“She didn’t see her career as having grown out of any kind of movements,” said Webster, author of a feminist analysis of the British leader, “Margaret Thatcher: Not a Man to Match Her.”

“She saw herself as a unique individual who had made it through her own talent and her own determination.”

Few would downplay the hurdles Thatcher overcame as a grocer’s daughter from a provincial town making her way in Britain’s macho, patrician Conservative Party. Though she was a graduate of Oxford University — in chemistry, then an unusual field for a woman — she had to fight to be selected as a parliamentary candidate, and her victory in a Conservative Party leadership contest in 1975 was a shock.

She wasn’t the first woman to head a modern government, but she was one of the first who was not the daughter or widow of a male leader.

“We should never forget that the odds were stacked against her,” Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday. “She was the shopkeeper’s daughter from Grantham who made it all the way to the highest office in the land.”

She was, however, aware that being a woman meant she was treated differently in politics. Her hair, her clothes, her ever-present handbag all came in for intense scrutiny. In a concession to image politics, Thatcher worked on softening her hairdo and lowering her voice to appear more approachable and authoritative.

She was tough as nails in driving through her policies but sometimes faced condescension from male politicians.

Those on the political left argue that Thatcher’s social policies harmed women and families. As education minister in the 1970s she became known as “Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher” for removing free milk from schoolchildren.

Her policies revitalized Britain’s economy, but threw thousands of people out of work, and she tried to cut spending on child care and other forms of social welfare, which she considered an unhealthy crutch.