Daring to Hope

In this powerful memoir Sheila Rowbotham looks back at the women's 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 Women's 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 Woman's Consciousness, Man's 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.