Daring to Hope: Liberating Women!

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Historian and author, Sheila Rowbotham talks of her life and work helping women to shape their own futures.

Neil Koenig, Radio and TV producer and journalist, interviews Sheila Rowbotham, author and historian of feminism and radical social movements. In this interview, Sheila looks back at the early days of the women’s liberation movement in Britain, in which she was a key participant. She recalls the thrill of taking part in Britain’s first women’s liberation conference, held in Oxford in 1970. She remembers the growing excitement as the movement gathered steam, at a time when everything seemed possible; the highs and lows of campaigning on issues such as nurseries, contraception, and better conditions for night cleaners; and the challenges of balancing one’s personal and political life. And she shares her hopes, dreams and fears for the future.

Sheila Rowbotham is the author of many books, including her memoirs of the 1970s, Daring to Hope, which will be published soon by Verso Books. Other titles include: Women, Resistance and Revolution; Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World; and Hidden from History. Her later works include Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties; Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century; and the biography Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Biography. Sheila Rowbotham is the author of many books, including her memoirs of the 1970s, Daring to Hope, which will be published soon by Verso Books.

Other titles include: Women, Resistance and Revolution; Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World; and Hidden from History. Her later works include Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties; Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century; and the biography Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Biography. Her poetry and two plays have been published and she has written for newspapers and journals in Britain, the US, Italy, Brazil, Turkey, Sweden and Sri Lanka. She lives in Bristol.

SHEILA ROWBOTHAM LINKS

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3863-daring-to-hope

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003tbv

https://www.bl.uk/people/sheila-rowbotham

Film about the Women’s Liberation Conference, Oxford, March 1970, made by Liberation Films:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlJ5IO7QbLU

https://lcva.gold.ac.uk/videos/594bba5c1c423d243c1b14a7

PHOTO CREDITS Sheila Rowbotham at Women’s Liberation Conference, Oxford, March 1970 ( Liberation Films ‘A Woman’s Place’) Sheila Rowbotham – credit James Swinson.

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