31 Facts About Sheila Rowbotham

Sheila Rowbotham was born on 27 February 1943 and is an English socialist feminist theorist and historian.

Sheila Rowbotham is the author of many notable books in the field of women's studies, including Hidden from History, Beyond the Fragments, A Century of Women and Threads Through Time, as well as the 2021 memoir Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s.

Sheila Rowbotham has written that traditional political history "left her cold", but she credited Olga Wilkinson, one of her teachers, with encouraging her interest in social history by showing that history "belonged to the present, not to the history textbooks".

Sheila Rowbotham attended St Hilda's College at Oxford University and then the University of London.

Sheila Rowbotham began her working life as a teacher in comprehensive schools and institutes of higher or adult education.

Sheila Rowbotham has described herself at the time she started her studies at St Hilda's as "not at all left-wing" and a "mystical beatnik hippie-type", although she soon started to make contact with leftists, including fellow Oxford student Gareth Stedman Jones, who became a professional historian.

Towards the end of the 1960s Sheila Rowbotham became involved in the growing women's liberation movement ; in 1969, she published her 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.

Sheila Rowbotham was heavily involved in the conference Beyond the Fragments, which attempted to draw together democratic socialist and socialist feminist currents in Britain.

Sheila Rowbotham was 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.

Between 1983 and 1986, Sheila Rowbotham served as the editor of Jobs for Change, the newspaper of the Greater London Council.

Since then, Sheila 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 that examines both the public and private sphere is required to work towards liberation.

Sheila Rowbotham has argued that those Marxist historians who see women's history as a "distraction" from the main theme of the class struggle are presenting a misleading version of history.

Sheila Rowbotham has argued that though male revolutionaries are willing to accept women as partners as long as the revolution lasts, once the revolution is over, women are expected to return to their traditional roles.

Sheila Rowbotham has praised Vladimir Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders in Women, Resistance and Revolution for legalising abortion, divorce, and contraception plus founding the Zhenotdel together with socialised restaurants, health care and laundries.

Sheila 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.

Sheila 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.

Sheila Rowbotham's books were, and are still well received in feminist circles, and their accessibility has allowed them to remain popular.

However, she claimed that the human family was not just an instrument for disciplining and subjecting women to capitalism, but was a place where potentially humans could take refuge from what Sheila Rowbotham sees as the commodification of human relationships under capitalism.

In Women's Consciousness, Men's World, Sheila Rowbotham presented her analysis of contemporary social conditions in Britain from a Marxist-feminist perspective.

Sheila Rowbotham contends that as in feudalism serfs were obliged to serve their masters, wives are likewise contracted to serve their husbands.

The clarity of Sheila Rowbotham's writing together with her picture of what Cook called the "potential contradictory nature of women's desires and needs" ensured that Women's Consciousness, Men's World reached a broad audience.

Sheila Rowbotham argued that the political beliefs of Carpenter and Browne were closely tied to their personal lives.

Besides her work as a historian, Sheila Rowbotham has been active in left-wing causes.

Sheila Rowbotham has great faith in activist social movements working from the bottom up to change society, and feels that historians have a duty to contribute to social change by writing books that expose what she sees as the evils of society.

In 2004, Sheila Rowbotham was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Sheila Rowbotham was Professor of Gender and Labour History, Sociology at the University of Manchester, England, until her involuntary retirement in 2008.

The Facebook group Save Sheila Rowbotham was established to campaign for her continuation as a Lecturer.

Sheila Rowbotham was the Eccles Centre Writer in Residence for 2012 at the British Library, where her research enabled completion of Rebel Crossings.

Sheila Rowbotham was portrayed by the actor Jo Herbert in the British film Misbehaviour about the 1970 Miss World protests.

In recognition of her achievements, Sheila Rowbotham was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Bristol in 2022.

Papers of Sheila Rowbotham are held at the Women's Library at the Library of the London School of Economics.