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The historian recounts her fight for liberation in a memoir that underlines her radical credentials and her refusal to forsake utopiaSheila Rowbotham, co-founder of the first Women’s Liberation conference in Oxford in 1970, dared to hope then that the revolution, if not nigh, was at least possible. By the end of the decade – a period of profound dislocation and dissent that included a miners’ strike, the three-day week, the Vietnam war, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the rise of gay liberation, a Labour government introducing deep welfare cuts, followed by the election of Margaret Thatcher and the arrival of neoliberalism – Rowbotham writes: “Socialist feminists like me did not give up on hope but the daring was diminished.”Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s records an exhausting life of activism, lecturing, pamphleteering, editing, book writing, journalism, travelling, speech-making, struggling with the emerging ideas and conflicts in the allegedly non-hierarchical sisterhood (“Who was to start a meeting when everyone was competing not to be leader?” ), motherhood and, as a sexual libertarian, a complicated love life with, at one point, three men on the go and a communal house in Hackney to maintain on a highly unreliable income. “A vision of us birthing a new politics of harmony” did not allow for much sleep. Continue reading...