Rowing together

`The so-called women's question is a whole people question." This inclusive feminist argument is no longer new, but it is still fresh and relevant, particularly to those of us who are weary with the cul-de-sac arguments of separatist feminists. It was written 30 years ago by Leeds-born Sheila Rowbotham, when feminist writers were thin on the ground and the idea of the women's liberation movement was still a hidden cocoon, waiting to make itself visible. It is the first sentence in her ground-breaking pamphlet, "Women's Liberation and the New Politics", first published by the socialist grouping, May Day Manifesto. It continues: "The conception of change is beyond the oppressed. They are confined within the limits of their imagination of the possible."

The year was 1969 and Rowbotham was 26 years old. Now 55, she is a highly respected socialist feminist historian with a fellowship in the Sociology Dept at Manchester University, and some of the 15 books she has produced (or edited) are on university syllabi, including Women: Resistance and Revolution.

"First there is the paralysis," she writes in "Women's Liberation and the New Politics", describing the crippling silence out of which feminists of her generation began to speak. "Their words stick in your throat, their setting causes you to flounder. This is of course not peculiar to women. It is part of the common condition of the subordinated. In the 1848 revolution in France, the people stormed the Assembly. A fireman adjusted his helmet and leapt onto the rostrum as if it were a roof. The people cheered him and told him to speak. But he stood there dumb, unable to cope with the constructions of those who had been his masters for so long. He was dragged down in shame and disgrace."

Feminism has moved so far from that sense of voicelessness that we now have summer schools devoted to women and the multifarious issues that affect their lives. Sheila Rowbotham is coming to lecture at "The Power of Women: Negotiating Our Identities", the second annual Women's Studies Summer School at TCD, which starts next Monday at 7 p.m. with a launch by Mary Banotti MEP and Rowbotham's keynote speech. Rowbotham's topic - "A Century of Women" - is also the title of her recent book, a 750-page guide to the doings of women, both famous and ordinary, during this century. "It is a popular book which I hope people will pick up and read," she says simply. "It includes the everyday life of women as well as biographies of the achievers, like the Pankhursts, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Marilyn Monroe." The women are all from the US and England, but "I squashed in some Irish people, like Constance Markievicz, Maud Gonne and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. There's a section on the Easter Rising and the relationship between the nationalist and suffragist movements in Ireland." She also includes extracts from sources as various as comics and diets: "Putting it together took four years of intensive work".

She was fascinated to discover that during the 1930s, women's magazines were already talking about "the individual problem of how to be a woman. They had been influenced by the early feminism, and were trying to have a family, a relationship and a job. It was remarkably similar to the things women are bothered about today."

On the other hand, as late as 1970, secretaries were being told "the ideal secretary should not turn her back on her boss. Instead she should reverse out of the room." Rowbotham laughs: "Isn't it ridiculous? By 1970 we had been educated to believe we were all equal."

Rowbotham has been to Ireland before: she came in 1992 to take part in readings (in Belfast, Dublin and Derry) with Fiona Shaw and Francesca Annis to mark the bicentenary of the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women. She was also in Dublin during the 1980s with her son Will: "He said it was his best city. People were incredibly kind to him."

Rowbotham went to St Hilda's College for women in Oxford in the 1960s: "There were portraits of two of the founders of St Hilda's up on the walls - Miss Buss and Miss Beale - but although I benefited from what they'd done, I didn't identify with them, or with the suffragist movement. Nor did my friends. We were confident and bouncy. We were sure we could solve the issue of how to be a woman in a different way, without any role models."

Her history studies were mostly confined to "cabinets and kings", but after meeting with the historian E.P. Thompson, then working on his seminal book, The Making of the English Working Class, "I realised there was a different kind of history". She didn't finish her PhD thesis on adult education: "It was all about men. I decided it wasn't relevant to the 1968 explosion that was obviously going to occur any minute."

Although her focus on socialism meant that she wanted to look at "developing our politics in a wider sense", she enjoyed the "collective experience of going through the women's liberation movement. It made me feel less alone. When I was growing up there was the sense that a few individual women could batter their way through to an independent life, but most women were very much marginalised. The vast mass of mothers had no appearance in the public world and were only important in the intimate domestic sphere. It must have been frustrating for them, because I'm sure they had known a different life in the 1940s, during the war, when a lot of them had done all sorts of things."

During the mid-1980s, Rowbotham worked for the Greater London Council as a consultant in development, setting up training courses for women and a drop-in centre for officer workers, founding community childcare groups and funding a community laundry (where she organised the devising of a dryer that could be run cheaply because it used the heat from the washing machines). In 1986 she went to the World Institute for Development Economic Research, a UN Institute in Helsinki, where she co-edited a book with Swasti Mitter entitled Dignity and Daily Bread, on "ways of organising that worked among poor women, mainly in the Third World". The title of the book was taken from a slogan carried by women vendors in India.

While Rowbotham was working in practical ways for the women's movement ("I'm only interested in theories in so far as they relate to what's happening to women in society"), feminism was fragmenting all around her: "By the late 1980s there was a lack of coherence in the feminist movement, young women were asking why do you only want to talk about women? The political differences in the movement became so great that tension began to mount."

Meanwhile Rowbotham was struggling to bring up her son after the breakdown of her relationship: "We were very poor because neither of us had full-time jobs and we were both looking after Will. The strain of it all contributed to our break-up." She has never taken the stereotypical feminist line of demonising men: "There is a danger now that the definition of feminism becomes again confined simply as hostility towards men. It is one thing to be hostile to the actions and words of specific men, another to condemn men as a group as inherently oppressive and thus define all thoughts, words and deeds of men as part of domination."

What does she think of feminism in the 1990s? "There is the intellectual feminism of the Academy, and women journalists in the media." She continues to be more interested in "the conditions of ordinary people's lives". She regrets that socialist feminists haven't got "a more coherent presence", but "feminism in general is not very lively at the moment".

She is not impressed by the number of women in New Labour: "The effort that went into getting that number of women into power hasn't necessarily made any difference. Nothing is being done to improve the lives of poor women.

"It has had a cultural impact on the House of Commons, in that it can no longer be seen as an exclusive male club. And of course, having Labour in power is much better than when we had the Tories. At least now there is more of an expectation that things will change." Can she assess the main impact of the last 30 years of debate and upheaval, during which she has been so active and vocal? "I see a worrying lack of change for women who aren't well off. In Britain the gap between low paid workers (most of whom are women) and the rest has widened during those decades. I think it is harder for poor women to cope now than before." Among the middle class, which is her own background, there have been many positive changes: "Young middle-class women can have vastly different assumptions about what they can take for granted than when I grew up in the 1950s. We had to wear white gloves when we went into town on the bus."

For more details on "The Power of Women" at TCD, phone 01 6609011

A Century of Women by Sheila Rowbotham (Penguin, £10.99 in UK) will appear in paperback next February