Sheila Rowbotham The personal and the political in 1968

Sheila Rowbotham will talk about the way events in 1968 shaped her work and philosophy and influenced the developing Women's Movement at the end of the 1960s.

Sheila Rowbotham is a British socialist feminist theorist and writer.
Rowbotham attended St Hilda’s College at Oxford and then the University of London. She began her working life as a teacher in comprehensive schools and institutes of higher or Adult education.

Her political activism began with her involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the British Labour Party’s youth wing, the Young Socialists. Disenchanted with the direction of party politics she immersed herself in a variety of left-wing campaigns, including writing for the radical political newspaper Black Dwarf.

Towards the end of the 1960s she had become involved in the growing Women’s Liberation Movement (also known as Second-wave feminism) and, in 1969, published her influential pamphlet ‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics' which argued that Socialist theory needed to consider the oppression of women in cultural as well as economic terms. She was heavily involved in the conference and book called Beyond the Fragments, which attempted to draw together democratic socialist and socialist feminist currents in the UK.

Since then, Rowbotham has produced numerous books 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), which examines both the public and private sphere, is required to work towards liberation.

In 2004, Rowbotham was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is currently Professor of Gender and Labour History, Sociology at the University of Manchester, England.