Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s

(Hardback)

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In this powerful memoir Sheila Rowbotham looks back at the womens liberation movement, left politics and the vibrant, creative culture of a decade in which freedom and equality seemed possible. It is a riveting personal history of second wave feminism from the front line. After addressing the first Womens Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1970, she went on to encourage night cleaners to unionize, immortalised in the film Nghtcleaners, to campaign for nurseries and abortion rights and to play an influential role in discussions of socialist feminist ideas. It is also an account of her attempt to liver her politics: bringing to life meetings, magazines, child care networks, grass roots movements, along with communal houses and squats, bringing alive a shared impetus to organize collectively and to love without jealousy or domination. By the middle of the decade her prolific writing - journalism and poetry as well as social history had attracted a wide international readership. She describes the publication of Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972) and Hidden from History and Womans Consciousness, Mans World (1973), seminal works that were translated into many languages and remain in print half a century later. Through this whole decade she charts the women's liberation movement and its place within a larger politics, including the decline of the Labour Party. As the decade ends, with Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street, the movement has started to fracture. Alongside others she tried to hold together the socialist feminist hopes with Beyond the Fragments.

Reviews

Rowbotham is one of Britain's most important, if unshowy, feminist thinkers, and a key figure of the second wave. -- Melissa Benn
Rowbotham is a leading feminist historian, and an unapologetic utopian -- Barbara Taylor * Guardian *
Rowbotham has a marvelous gift for explication and an eye for the illuminating quotation. -- Elaine Showalter * Daily Telegraph *
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 *
Frank, powerful and vibrant. -- Rachel Collett * Tribune *
Daring to Hope captures [Rowbotham's] youthful Utopian spirit. In it, she looks back at a decade of social change and recounts her experiences on the frontline of feminism. -- Rosa Silverman * Telegraph *
Thoroughly engaging...I felt aligned with the frank and personal account of a young woman's life changing throughout the decade. -- Cathy Crabb * Northern Soul *
A deeply compelling story about the making of our own times ... Rowbotham's humanity and craft shines through. -- Rana Mitter * BBC History Magazines Books of the Year 2021 *
Rowbotham has wisdom - and wit. -- Yvonne Roberts * Observer *
Rewarding. -- Clare Griffiths * Times Literary Supplement *
[Daring to Hope] shows us what is possible, but that it is our job to go out and do it. -- Lydia Hughes * Red Pepper *
A very enjoyable read, chronicling the ways in which the author engaged with the increasing challenges of the 1970s, while maintaining her hopes for an alternative future -- Marjorie Mayo * Morning Star Online *
Exciting ... I read it over a weekend. -- Ross Bradshaw * The Spokesman Journal *
Beautifully-measured account of a radical decade ... [Rowbotham] meets and makes friends with suffragettes, old communists and an ageless Dora Russell. This book is a valuable bridge between today's feminism and that of our forebears. -- Erica Smith * Peace News *

Author Bio

Sheila Rowbotham, who helped start the womens 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; Womans Consciousness, Mans World; and Hidden from History.