Overview

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.

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9781836742531

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Reviews

Groundbreaking . One of feminism's great chroniclers, an accessible writer about complex social movements and significant moments of social and economic transformation -- Melissa Benn * Guardian * The implications are vital, and its case unanswerable. An important and very readable book * Bookseller * A classic socialist feminist text . compelling . moving dialectically between theory and practice and between everyday acts of resistance and collective uprisings. The red thread of the book is quite simply the immanence of women's struggle -- Kate Hardy * Feminist Review * Sheila's early writing paved the way for feminist thought and scholarship in Britain -- Lynne Segal Rowbotham's survey of feminist struggles from Puritan times onwards and in particular their role in the revolutions of Russia, Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam is informative and convincing -- Jennifer Ward * Sunday Times * Rowbotham has a marvellous gift for explication and an eye for the illuminating quotation. -- Elaine Showalter * Telegraph (for Dreamers of a New Day) * For Rowbotham, women's liberation was bound up with the dismantling of capitalism. But it also required - and here they departed from the Old Guard left - a rethinking of everyday patterns of life, relating to sex, love, housework, child rearing -- Amia Srinivasan * New Yorker *

Author Information

Sheila Rowbotham, who helped start the women’s liberation movement in Britain, is known internationally as an historian of feminism and radical social movements. She is the author of Hidden from History and Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World. Her later works include Dreamers of a New Day and Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Biography, as well as three volumes of memoir, Promise of a Dream, Daring to Hope and Reasons to Rebel.

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