Kirjahaku

First published in 1992, this book is an historical introduction to a wide range of women’s movements from the late eighteenth-century to the date of its publication. It describes economic, social and political ideas which have inspired women to organize, not only in Europe and North America, but also in the Third World. Sheila Rowbotham outlines a long history of women’s challenges to the gender bias in political and economical concepts. She shows women laying claim to rights and citizenship, while contesting male definitions of their scope, and seeking to enlarge the meaning of economy through action around consumption and production, environmental protests and welfare projects.

First published in 1992, this book is an historical introduction to a wide range of women’s movements from the late eighteenth-century to the date of its publication. It describes economic, social and political ideas which have inspired women to organize, not only in Europe and North America, but also in the Third World. Sheila Rowbotham outlines a long history of women’s challenges to the gender bias in political and economical concepts. She shows women laying claim to rights and citizenship, while contesting male definitions of their scope, and seeking to enlarge the meaning of economy through action around consumption and production, environmental protests and welfare projects.

This play re-enacts the 1917 trial and imprisonment of Alice Wheeldon, the renowned suffragist, for her alleged role in plotting to assassinate the Prime Minister Lloyd George. It is prefaced by an extended essay 'Rebel Networks in the First World War'. With claustrophobia and anger, the play recounts how Wheeldon's involvement in socialism, suffragism and the anti-war movement did not endear her to the establishment, and in times of growing class antagonism and war how the government needed to create a traitor. The controversial trial became something of a cause celebre - a show trial at the height of the First World War - based on fabricated evidence from the criminally insane fantasist 'Alex Gordon'. It was a travesty of justice. First published nearly thirty years ago, this edition points readers to subsequent research into the case and the ongoing campaign to clear the name of Alice Wheeldon.

A generation ago we wrote Beyond the Fragments. Inspired by the activism of the 1970s, and facing the imminent triumph of the right under Margaret Thatcher, we sought to apply our experiences as feminists to creating stronger bonds of solidarity in a new kind of left movement. Since then the obstacles facing us have grown formidably; deepening recession, environmental pollution, falling real wages and savage welfare cuts. New forms of resistance have appeared, but how are they to coalesce? In our three new essays to this new edition we return to the fraught question of how to consolidate diverse upsurges of rebellion into effective, open democratic left coalitions.

Following on from Daring to Hope, 9781839763892; Promise of a Dream 9781788734806 , "Rowbotham has wisdom - and wit." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/29/daring-to-hope-by-sheila-rowbotham-review-on-the-frontline-of-70s-feminism The 1980s were a shock. Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government battered left movements, painfully disrupted working-class peoples' livelihoods and pressed down on many groups who faced discrimination. There was no shortage of reasons to rebel. Along with thousands upon thousands of others I opposed not just the repressive laws, but the fundamental tenets of the new right. Hanging on to visions of creative utopias, we strove for new ways of organizing and relating to others and we sought to connect a liberatory sexual politics with rebellions against many kinds of inequality. We argued wrote, campaigned, demonstrated, picketed. We established alternative cooperative projects, secured reforms through local government and made direct international links. Resourceful resistance slowed down the onslaught but we were contending not simply with the doctrinal resolve of a right-wing government. We faced something larger, something that could not be voted out - a more ruthless global capitalism, geared to profits which was prepared to dump hard-won social provision and neglect to conserve even basic infrastructure.

In this classic study of women in Britain from the Puritan revolution of the mid-seventeenth century to the 1930s, Sheila Rowbotham shows how class and sex, work and the family, personal life and social pressures have shaped and hindered women’s struggles for equality. She explores the different effects that changes in the process of production have on middle-class and working-class women; why birth control and the organisation of working women have been perceived as threatening to traditional male control of the family; how paid work and work in the home are intricately related and determine the social valuation of women – and why these and many other issues have continued to arise in different form throughout modern history.

This classic book provides a historical overview of feminist strands among the modern revolutionary movements of Russia, China and the Third World. Sheila Rowbotham shows how women rose against the dual challenges of an unjust state system and social-sexual prejudice. Women, Resistance and Revolution is an invaluable historical study, as well as a trove of anecdote and example fit to inspire today's generation of feminist thinkers and activists.

A groundbreaking contribution to debates on women's oppression and consciousness, and the connections between socialism and feminism. Examining feminist consciousness from various vantage points - social, sexual, cultural and economic - Sheila Rowbotham identifies the social conditions under which it developed, showing how the roles women take on within the capitalist economy have shaped ideas about family and sexuality.

In a feat of extraordinary archival research Sheila Rowbotham uncovers six little-known women and men whose lives were both dramatic and startlingly radical. Rowbotham tells a story that moves from Bristol, Belfast and Edinburgh to Massachusetts and the wildernesses of California, showing how rebellious ideas were formed and travelled across the Atlantic.Rebel Crossings offers fascinating perspectives on the historical interaction of feminism, socialism, anarchism and on the incipient consciousness of a new sense of self, so vital for women seeking emancipation. Their influences ranged from Unitarianism, High Church Anglicanism, and esoteric spirituality through to Walt Whitman, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Eleanor Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Benjamin Tucker, and Max Stirner. In differing ways they sought to combine the creation of a co-operative society with personal freedom, enhanced perception and loving friendships, experimenting with free love, rational dress, health diets and deep breathing.A work of significant originality in terms of historical scholarship, this book also speaks to the dilemmas of our own times.

At the beginning of the decade renowned historian Sheila Rowbotham was a rebellious sixteen-year-old at a Methodist boarding school in the north-east of England, reading Sartre and dreaming of Paris. By the end of the sixties she was a seasoned political activist, planning Britain's first-ever women's liberation conference, and beginning to find her voice as a writer.Her story of the intervening years moves from coffee bars in Leeds to the Sorbonne and Oxford University, where she arrives wearing frayed Levis and clutching a volume of Rimbaud. A participant in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, she was also a member of the editorial board of the notorious revolutionary newspaper Black Dwarf.While faithful to the exhilaration and enthusiasm of the sixties, Rowbotham is also wryly amusing about her younger self. When Jean-Luc Godard wanted to film her in the nude, she dithered between principle and vanity. Wearing the shortest of mini skirts she argued passionately for women's liberation.Promise of a Dream is a moving, witty and poignant recollection of a time when young women were breaking all the rules about sex, politics and their place in the world. Sheila Rowbotham was, and remains, one of their most effective and endearing voices.

In this classic text, Sheila Rowbotham explores four centuries of feminist struggle and revolutionary politics. She shows how women rose against the dual challenges of an unjust state system and social-sexual prejudice. First published in 1972, Women, Resistance and Revolution is a major statement of second-wave feminism on the imperative for revolution within the revolution. It is also a rich and highly readable history of the growth of a radical consciousness from the beginnings of feminist possibility in the early-modern world.Rowbotham charts the acceleration of feminist activity and theory after the French Revolution, despite the ambiguities of "liberty, equality, fraternity" for women. From Wollstonecraft's Vindication to Flora Tristan's Worker's Union and Engels's Origin of the Family, she describes how women's liberation became a live and explosive issue in emerging socialist movements. She traces feminist strands in modern revolutionary movements in Russia and China, including fascinating creative experiments during the early period of Bolshevik rule. The book also considers the situation of women in anticolonial struggles in Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam. Women, Resistance and Revolution is an invaluable historical study, as well as a trove of anecdote and example.

In this powerful memoir Sheila Rowbotham looks back at her life as a participant in the women's liberation movement, left politics and the creative radical culture of a decade in which freedom and equality seemed possible. She reveals the tremendous efforts that were made to transform attitudes and feelings, as well as daily life.After addressing the first British Women's Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970, she went on to encourage night cleaners to unionise, to campaign for nurseries and abortion rights. She played an influential role in discussions of socialist feminist ideas and her books and journalism attracted an international readership.Written with generosity and humour Daring to Hope recreates grassroots networks, communal houses and squats, bringing alive a shared impetus to organise collectively and to love without jealousy or domination. It conveys the shifts occurring in politics and society through kernels of personal experience. The result is a book about liberation in the widest sense.

The gay socialist writer Edward Carpenter had an extraordinary impact on the cultural and political landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A mystic advocate of, among other causes, free love, recycling, nudism, women's suffrage and prison reform, his work anticipated the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Sheila Rowbotham's highly acclaimed biography situates Carpenter's life and thought in relation to the social, aesthetic and intellectual movements of his day, and explores his friendships with figures such as Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Isadora Duncan and Emma Goldman. Edward Carpenter is a compelling portrait of a man described by contemporaries as a 'weather-vane' for his times.

From the 1880s to the 1920s, a profound social awakening among women extended the possibilities of change far beyond the struggle for the vote. Amid the growth of globalized trade, mass production, immigration and urban slums, American and British women broke with custom and prejudice. Taking off corsets, forming free unions, living communally, buying ethically, joining trade unions, doing social work in settlements, these "dreamers of a new day" challenged ideas about sexuality, mothering, housework, the economy and citizenship. Drawing on a wealth of research, Sheila Rowbotham has written a groundbreaking new history that shows how women created much of the fabric of modern life. These innovative dreamers raised questions that remain at the forefront of our twenty-first-century lives.