Review | Reasons to Rebel

Colin Revolting reviews Sheila Rowbotham’s latest book which recounts her experiences as a socialist feminist activist in the 1980s.

It’s rare for socialists of any stripe to reflect honestly and write accounts of their activism. Socialist feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham has done so in 3 volumes covering the 1960s, when she was a young socialist who helped to form the women’s liberation movement, the 1970s, when she worked to organise night cleaners within the growing socialist feminist movement, and now the 1980s.   

The 1980s were a shock. The changes introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government battered left movements, painfully disrupted working-class peoples’ livelihoods and pressed down on many groups who faced discrimination. There was no shortage of reasons to rebel.  

As she illustrates, the 1980s were a particular challenge to the left. The unions’ strength had been weakened after the 1970s victories and defeats. The growing liberation movements of women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people had risen and fallen alongside this. The Tory Government took on groups of exploited and oppressed people one at a time. From the police repression which sparked the riots of the early 1980s to the year-long battle with miners. The decade ended with the legal repression of LGBTQ+ people in the form of Section 28.   

As the decade begins she states, 

It was becoming harder to make radical social changes, some feminists I knew were focusing on inner feelings; therapy groups, spirituality and diverse forms of cultural expression. Others were concentrating on bringing feminist perspectives into a wider left endeavour, to defend trade union gains at work and maintain collective alternatives in communities around childcare, health, the environment, legal defence, bookshops or literacy schemes. 

Rowbotham wished to avoid this divide, 

I argued that both wings were contesting prevailing values implicitly … It was vital that they did not become detached from each other so that the transformatory impulse which had characterised women’s liberation in the early 1970s could acquire new resonances.

However, this was not going to be easy, 

In 1979 and 1980 it had seemed that a new kind of nonaligned movement might emerge. Instead, by the end of 1981, the Beyond the Fragments conference had contributed to an extended left network with multitudinous offshoots. 

With the Tories in parliament, the Labour left won elections to run several local councils in the first half of the 1980s. The Greater London Council (GLC), under a left wing leadership including Ken Livingstone, ran the capital. Sheila Rowbotham had quit the Labour Party during the Vietnam war but rejoined along with many other leftists at the time. She took a job at the GLC recording and reporting on the council’s various new projects. Recognising how this fitted with her experiences of helping to organise marginalised workers and communities she threw herself into the role.   

With considerable funding the GLC aimed to improve the provision of education, public transport and housing across the metropolis. She brings to life the internal workings of the GLC through her role promoting the council’s innovations and achievements. The GLC became well known for its popular political cultural celebrations with large scale anti-racist concerts and festivals. These continued the radical traditions of Caribbean carnivals brought to Britain in the 1950s and 60s and are remembered as inspirational, similar to the Anti-Nazi League / Rock Against Racism festivals of the late 1970s. The smaller scale community projects of the GLC are well described in this book. Later in the book she talks about the eradication of alternative strategies and how ‘the GLC had been wiped from memory.’

Another strand to these memoirs is Sheila Rowbotham’s role as an historian of socialist, feminist and working class history of the 19th and 20th century and of the feminist women’s  movement of the 1960s onwards. She has written several groundbreaking books about the movement including Women, Resistance and Revolution; Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World; and Hidden from History. As Rowbotham summarises it, the topic of Women, Power and Consciousness sought ‘to break down concentrated forms of power’ and to ‘redistribute power amongst the powerless.’

She describes speaking at conferences and colleges around the world, making this vital history available to new generations working to develop and grow the movement.    

In the book leftists are portrayed from an insider’s perspective as hard working if inconsistent, informative and occasionally inspiring, flawed and sometimes fun-loving individuals. Together we make a larger left which is riven by division and disagreement with different sections involved in differing projects. Despite being close to the revolutionary left, Sheila Rowbotham sees her own approach as prefigurative, which to an extent the GLC allowed her to explore. 

I argued that the GLC had sought to develop through concrete examples of what was needed, the capacity for people to imagine how a whole society could be different.

Despite her refreshingly modest account, it’s clear Rowbotham has made a major contribution to building the feminist movement whilst influencing this with her socialist feminist politics. Since those days she has worked to keep alive this political tradition to new generations of activists.   

I rejected assumptions that women were somehow biologically wired for egalitarianism, co-operation and nurture, along with the opposite stereotype of mythic all-conquering Amazon, because I regarded both as restrictive dead ends. Simone de Beauvoir had warned of the dangers of enclosing ourselves in our ‘difference’ and her words had stayed with me.  

The book is pacy, personal and of course extremely political. Sheila Rowbotham writes in a self-effacing, honest, thoughtful and reflective way. By capturing the highs, lows and in-betweens of real life she presents a very readable, completely believable and often insightful account for fellow socialist feminists.  

For many of us, our activism is largely our involvement in protest movements, local campaigns and through organising at work. Reasons to Revolt does not focus on these activities as much as I believe the preceding volumes do, so I will be seeking those out next.

Reasons to rebel: my memories of the 1980s is published by Merlin books. The other two books referred to in this review are: Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (Verso, 2000) and Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s (Verso, 2021)