Autorentext

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 the ground-breaking books Women, Resistance and Revolution; Woman's Consciousness, Man's World; and Hidden from History. Her other works include Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century; the biography 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, and Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States. Verso have also reissued her memoir Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties, as part of the Feminist Classic series. Her latest book is Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s. Her poetry and two plays have been published and she has written for newspapers and journals in Britain, the US, Italy, Brazil, Turkey, Sweden and Sri Lanka. She lives in Bristol.

Klappentext

In Women, Resistance and Revolution, Sheila Rowbotham traces four centuries of feminist struggle and revolutionary politics. She reveals how women have confronted the dual challenges of an unjust state system and patriarchal social prejudice. First published in 1972, Women, Resistance and Revolution is a major statement of second-wave feminism on the need for revolution within the revolution. It is also a rich and expansive history of radical consciousness.

Rowbotham charts the acceleration of feminist activity and theory after the French Revolution, despite the ambiguities of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ for women. She examines pivotal works such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Flora Tristan’s Workers’ Union and Engels’s Origin of the Family, showing how women’s liberation became a live and often explosive issue in emerging socialist movements. Her narrative spans feminist currents in revolutionary Russia and China, exploring fascinating creative experiments during early Bolshevik rule, and extends to women’s roles in anti-colonial struggles in Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam.

This classic work remains as urgent, vivid and inspiring as ever.