"Compelling … a classic socialist feminist text." Kate Hardy, Feminist Review
"Ground-breaking exploration of the connection between social revolution and women's liberation from “a key figure of the second wave." Melissa Benn, Guardian.
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.
About the Author
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.
What People Are Saying
"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
"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