Daring to Hope and Daring to Disrupt: Rowbotham Revisits the 1970s

When several hundred women gathered at Ruskin College, Oxford, on a chilly February day in 1970, they did so in clothes familiar to the era: ‘scraggy fur coats’, ‘maxi-length coats... acquired in Army and Navy surplus stores’, and ‘long flowing sixties scarves and hair too’ (17-18). What the women came to discuss and challenge was less familiar, however. Talks were given on women’s relationship to work, class, capitalism, and the home and family. Both the factory floor and the kitchen sink were discussed as sites where politics was enacted: at this first Women’s Liberation Conference, a ‘new politics was being expressed through women’s daily experiences’ (20). Sheila Rowbotham was one of those who spoke at the conference, drawing upon the research she had been doing for her book Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972) to talk on ‘The Myth of Inactivity’. No one could accuse Rowbotham of being inactive. A key member of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Rowbotham is an important scholar of women’s history as well as a crucial voice on the movement itself. This, her most recent book, builds upon her earlier memoir Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (2000). Progressing chronologically, Daring to Hope maps a personal journey through the 1970s. Daring to Hope starts in January 1970, picking up not with an analysis of the state of feminism but with a new and romantic connection with David Widgery, a member of the International Socialism group. It threads the intimate and personal – the loves, the betrayals, the friendships, motherhood – with the labour of working for social change across the 1970s. This work took a variety of forms: conferences, meetings (lots of meetings), Sheila Rowbotham, Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s, London and New York, Verso, 2021, ISBN 978-1-83976-389-2