Sheila Rowbotham

In Women, Resistance and Revolution, Sheila Rowbotham traces four centuries of feminist struggle and revolutionary politics. She reveals how women have confronted the dual challenges of an unjust state system and patriarchal social prejudice. First published in 1972, Women, Resistance and Revolution is a major statement of second-wave feminism on the need for revolution within the revolution. It is also a rich and expansive history of radical consciousness.

Rowbotham charts the acceleration of feminist activity and theory after the French Revolution, despite the ambiguities of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ for women. She examines pivotal works such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Flora Tristan’s Workers’ Union and Engels’s Origin of the Family, showing how women’s liberation became a live and often explosive issue in emerging socialist movements. Her narrative spans feminist currents in revolutionary Russia and China, exploring fascinating creative experiments during early Bolshevik rule, and extends to women’s roles in anti-colonial struggles in Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam.

This classic work remains as urgent, vivid and inspiring as ever.