Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties

by Sheila Rowbotham

Sheila Rowbotham is best known as an historian. Her books such as A Century of Women , Threads Through Time and Hidden From History have been widely celebrated. Now, in Promise of a Dream , she turns her hand to memoir. The result is a sparkling portrait of that most exuberant of times, the 1960s.

At the beginning of the decade 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.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, History, Memoir, Biography, Politics, Autobiography

Hardcover

First published July 17, 2000

About the author

Sheila Rowbotham is a British socialist feminist theorist and writer.

Rowbotham was born in Leeds (in present-day West Yorkshire), the daughter of a salesman for an engineering company and an office clerk. From an early age, she was deeply interested in history. She has written that traditional political history "left her cold", but she credited Olga Wilkinson, one of her teachers, with encouraging her interest in social history by showing that history "belonged to the present, not to the history textbooks".

Rowbotham attended St Hilda's College at Oxford and then the University of London. She began her working life as a teacher in comprehensive schools and institutes of higher or Adult education. While attending St. Hilda's College, Rowbotham found her syllabus with its heavy focus on political history to be of no interest to her. Through her involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and various socialist circles including the Labour Party's youth wing, the Young Socialists, Rowbotham was introduced to Karl Marx's ideas. Already on the left, Rowbotham was converted to Marxism. Soon disenchanted with the direction of party politics she immersed herself in a variety of left-wing campaigns, including writing for the radical political newspaper Black Dwarf. In the 1960s, Rowbotham was one of the founders and leaders of the History Workshop movement associated with Ruskin College.

Towards the end of the 1960s she had become involved in the growing Women’s Liberation Movement (also known as Second-wave feminism) and, in 1969, published her influential pamphlet "Women's Liberation and the New Politics", which argued that Socialist theory needed to consider the oppression of women in cultural as well as economic terms. She was heavily involved in the conference Beyond the Fragments (eventually a book), which attempted to draw together democratic socialist and socialist feminist currents in Britain. Between 1983 and 1986, Rowbotham served as the editor of Jobs for Change, the newspaper of the Greater London Council.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Francesca · Rating 5 out of 5]

up the north and our ‘burly ingrained class-consciousness’ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

[Demi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great insight into the 1960s from the perspective of Rowbotham. Highlights the ever changing political spheres within the time period well.

[Hilary Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sheila Rowbotham's memoir of living through the 60s as a young woman - an interesting look at how political and social movements developed and led on to the 70' s and how she was instrumental in the start of the Women's movement in England.

[J.E.]

"An American woman who was a member of the International Marxist Group stood up and talked about the importance of women controlling their own bodies--an idea which had persisted from the feminist-influenced socialism of the twenties. Of course I knew she meant contraception and abortion, which was still illegal, but thought mischievously to myself that what I wanted was more chance for my body to be out of control.
...
"I knew that I could simply want sex physically and not emotionally, but this was more or less impossible to assert publicly in 1967."

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost finished this book, review later.