An interview with Sheila Rowbotham

by Sarah Cundy

Our co-editor Sarah spoke to historian and activist Sheila Rowbotham about the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) and the movement for women’s history.

SC: Recently, I came across your article, ‘women: the struggle for freedom’, from a 1969 edition of Black Dwarf, where you write that women’s issues were a ‘smouldering bewildered consciousness, with no shape - muttered dissatisfaction which suddenly shoots to the surface and explodes’. So, I’ve been wondering, why do you think that women’s issues exploded in the late sixties and early seventies?

SR: I don’t know! It’s interesting to try and work out why things happen at certain times and not others. Even when I was at school in the 1950s there were women who I had been friends with who were certainly thinking about and questioning their position as women and particularly the double standard of sexual morality- which was on the decline but still very lodged in people’s brains. The same too, when I went to university (I was seen as very odd for going on to university as there were still very few women who did, even from middle-class backgrounds), but it seemed totally a conversation between individual friends, and it wasn’t something that we thought could also be out in society.

SC: Do you think that the increase in women going to university had an influence on the beginnings of the Women’s’ Liberation Movement?

SR: That definitely played a role, but I think partly ideas spread so widely because of the newspapers’ caricatures of us [as university educated] and that had the opposite effect they intended because women got so fed up with the hostile way in which we were being depicted. But it was a wide coalition, trade union women related to women’s liberation as they saw it as a general defiance of the way that women were treated. Another element was the fact that so many women were going out to work whilst also being responsible for housework and childcare. There was a parallel campaign which emerged at a similar time for equal pay or, at least, the right to be graded the same way men were for comparable or the same work. At the Ford factory, there were large demonstrations of trade union women striking for equal pay and then ideas were also coming in from the Black Women’s movement in the USA which stressed centring yourself in relation to a group and we were more explicitly doing that than the older socialist tradition of trade union politics.

Thinking again about how or why things happen at certain times, you can find lots of ways to describe these big shifts, like, ‘there were more young women going into higher education’, or, ‘there were more jobs available to women’, or, ‘with welfare developments in capitalism women were tak- ing on more social work and administrative roles’, you can have all these descriptions, but they don’t quite touch why it is that an individual suddenly sees themself in a different way.

SC: And how did history fit in? Particularly, I’m thinking of the first Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College in 1970, organised by the History Workshop which brought together women’s history and women’s issues.

SR: Yes, it’s interesting, I found recently that the term workshop was originally used by avant-garde artists who wanted to have a cooperative approach in the sort of mid-60s and somehow Raphael Samuel got hold of that idea when he started the history workshop meetings at Ruskin. I think that was because he wanted to bring everyone in on the same basis: the working-class students at Ruskin who came from their unions would give talks but also they would have Christopher Hill or E. P. Thompson to come and talk as well. The university students and people who came mixed with the trade union students. It was an idea of everybody having the right to their own access to history and I think that idea just became a sort of common sense. The history workshops attracted lots of younger people my age or younger including Sally Alexander who was a student at Ruskin and Anna Davin who played an important part in the history workshop and another student who sadly died called Arielle Aberson, who understood a lot about French historical approaches of which I only had a very hazy idea- although I had been taught by Richard Cobb who, with people like [Albert] Soboul, studied France with a ‘History from Below’ approach.

SC: Historiography of France had quite an influence then on you personally I recall- particularly the work of Edith Thomas?

SR: Yes, I had read a book she wrote on the Paris Commune and then I discovered that she’d also written about the women of the 1848 Revolution. When I was writing Women, Resistance and Revolution I realised that many of these women’s journals were in London. Many years later, I found out that this was because one of the women involved in the 1848 Revolution, Jeanne Deroin, had come to Britain and been in contact with the Socialist League, I think William Morris spoke at her funeral, it’s so interesting that those connections were there…

The full interview- including continued discussion of WLM in the 1970s and after the election of Thatcher, and Sheila’s thoughts on women’s history and the teaching of history- is available on our website. Sheila’s memoir of the 1970s, Daring to Hope is available in the Main Library.