Sheila Rowbotham
[4] Rowbotham was born on 27 February 1943 in Leeds (in present-day West Yorkshire), the daughter of a salesman for an engineering company and an office clerk.
[9] She was also one of the organisers of the National Women's Liberation Conference in 1970, which set out demands in relation to issues such as equal pay, education and free contraception.
[6] Since then, Rowbotham has produced numerous studies and articles expanding upon her theory, which argues that as women's oppression is a result of both economic and cultural forces then a dualist perspective (socialist feminism) that examines both the public and private sphere is required to work towards liberation.
[12] She has criticised Soviet policies starting with the First five-year plan of 1928–33 for not only expecting women to work full-time, but also to take on the burdens of housework and child-raising while at the same time banning abortion and birth control.
[12] Rowbotham argued that the Stalinist era marked the beginning of a retrogression for Soviet women, as Stalin to a certain extent brought about a return to traditional Russian values, most notably via a lavish personality cult that incorporated Tsarist imagery and iconography.
[14] Rowbotham was one of the first to draw attention in the West to the fact that since spraying of the South Vietnamese countryside with Agent Orange herbicide stated in 1961, "an abnormally high percentage of miscarriages, stillbirths, and deformed children" had been born.
[14] She maintains that capitalism and sexism/patriarchy are so closely linked that the only way to destroy both is a radical change in the "cultural conditioning of men and women, upbringing of children, shape of the places we live in, legal structure of society, sexuality and the very nature of work".
[9] In Rowbotham's view, raising children, sexuality, and the need for human relationships means that the family can rarely be reduced down to a service commodity.
[11] In Women's Consciousness, Men's World, Rowbotham presented her analysis of contemporary social conditions in Britain from a Marxist-feminist perspective.
[15] The historian Susan Cook praised Rowbotham for tracing a "female consciousness" in Britain from the 17th century onward through "complex webs" of economic and political change.
[9] In her 1977 book Dutiful Daughters, co-written with Jean McCrindle, Rowbotham interviewed fourteen women of lower-middle-class and working-class origin.
[16] As part of relating the personal to the political, Rowbotham has examined the sexual and political beliefs of such late 19th- to early 20th-century radicals as the gay rights activist Edward Carpenter, who saw socialism as way for humanity's spiritual rebirth, and the feminist Stella Browne who fought for the legalisation of birth control and argued for the importance of sexual pleasure for women.
[16] In her book Beyond the Fragments, co-written with Hilary Wainwright and Lynne Segal, Rowbotham called for the various fractions of the British left to unite, and work for a socialist Britain through grassroots activism.
[17] Placing Rowbotham as one (of three women) in her 2000 collection of Fifty Key Thinkers on History, Hughes-Warrington describes Rowbotham as a researcher who "draws upon a wide variety of sources including songs, novels, governmental and organisational records, pamphlets, other historical works and her own experiences" [16] Hughes-Warrington noting her audience of ordinary men and women (and their history), considered it unsurprising that "she rejects much of the current literature of gender studies, Marxist theory and historiography.
[21] Rowbotham was the Eccles Centre Writer in Residence for 2012 at the British Library, where her research enabled completion of Rebel Crossings.
Reviewing Rowbotham's 2021 memoir, Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s, Yvonne Roberts wrote in The Guardian that the book "records an exhausting life of activism, lecturing, pamphleteering, editing, book writing, journalism, travelling, speech-making, struggling with the emerging ideas and conflicts....Rowbotham has wisdom – and wit.
