Giant of Women's Liberation in Bristol

Sheila Rowbotham was in our home city of Bristol on Tuesday 9th November as the guest of the art and politics project the People's Republic of Stokes Croft. Sheila was intimately involved in the Women's Liberation Movement of the early seventies, which ran in parallel with the Gay Liberation, and with which there was a significant amount of crossover. Rowbotham came to reject separatist feminism however, and instead developed her ideas out of Marxism, arguing that the working class was the seat of political power and that men had an important role to play in liberating women. Sheila's new book, “Daring to Hope” is her memoirs of the heady seventies, a time of action groups, protests, squatted housing and a vibrant counterculture which educated many activists and helped people envisage a world free of all forms of domination and coercion, including that of heterosexual and cisgender tyranny. The book is available from all good booksellers. Why not order your copy from an independent bookstore rather than a large corporate one: that would be a fitting way of marking the legacy of the tumultuous nineteen seventies.