Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, 2000 ✓

By writing my own story of the sixties, I want to evoke what it felt like at the time, situate responses and relate my subjective take on events to a wider social picture.

Sixties radicalism has become retrospectively incomprehensible because the framework of assumption has been so thoroughly eclipsed and because the record has been so often filtered through sneers or a bluff historical patronage. These derisory stances cannot adequately explain why thousands of us marched in protest against nuclear weapons or the American government’s bombing in Vietnam. They have been unable to either comprehend our motives or communicate what we feared or opposed.

Many obvious questions about the left in the sixties have simply never been asked and many areas of political and social experience have been curiously ignored. For example, amidst all the words expended on the sixties, women make very limited entrances, usually as legs in miniskirts. Radical young women suddenly arrive in the record during the seventies as the Women’s Liberation movement emerges. But what of us in the sixties? Where did all those ideas about reinventing ourselves come from after all?

My generation in the sixties was living through big social changes: the expansion of higher education, the opening of new employment opportunities, the increase in consumption and the growth of the media. These were combining to alter the boundaries between public and personal aspects of life. In a general sense it is not difficult to see that such large-scale structural transformations were likely to have an effect upon women’s identity. However, it is much harder to pin down their effect upon specific individuals.

Reflecting from three decades on, it is apparent too that the radical ideas associated with the sixties go back much further than the arbitrary boundary stone of 1960. The decade tends to be treated as intact, but the people who inspired me and many others — Brecht, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Gramsci — had been writing much earlier. We were assimilating the ideas of a great crowd of left-wing thinkers from the past at high speed — philosophy, psychology, politics, aesthetics.

[…] visiting art galleries or laughing to myself at the Ionesco one-act plays in the tiny Théatre de la Huchette. Monsieur at the reception desk was all insinuating smiles as I came and went. However, Madame regarded me with stony disapproval.

Early in 1968 the Vietnamese National Liberation Front were advancing through the south. I heard about the Tet offensive […]. We watched the flickering television with incredulity and then began cheering. […] TThe commentator was showing how much territory the NLF had taken; the victims were turning into victors. A small group in Saigon had raised the red, blue and yellow flag of the NLF over the American Embassy. Though the embassy was later recaptured, nonetheless it was a decisive turning point and the first indication that we had entered an extraordinary year.

One of the fatal reflexes of left politics is surely the celebration of noble defeats, and since becoming a socialist I had conditioned myself to supporting lost causes. The NLF winning broke through this habitual pessimism. There is nothing as powerful as example and the Vietnamese resistance sent a sense of possibility flashing out over the airwaves all around the globe. If the Vietnamese could take on the mightiest power in the world, what about us?

Though exasperated frequently by men’s behaviour and attitudes, I certainly did not see them as universally predatory, which is the retrospective caricature of the sixties. […]

I was already troubled by two questions which were to cause many an anxious debate in the seventies, asking my diary,

• first, whether the prevailing culture of masculinity was only a consequence of capitalism or was there some underlying structure which we were to call ‘patriarchy’?
• Second, I wanted to know whether we should concentrate on changing the attitudes and behaviour of the revolutionary left or try ‘to reach women in general’.

In my case, wondering what had happened before to women led me to rethink the history I had learned. An important early influence was to be a Swiss student at Ruskin College called Arielle Aberson, who was writing a thesis on the consciousness of the French student movement of the 1860s which preceded the Commune.

Arielle encouraged me to write first the pamphlet ‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics’ and then the books which grew out of it, Women, Resistance and Revolution and Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World.

From my reading of Gramsci came the word ‘hegemony’, which I adapted into ‘male hegemony’, finding parallels with the writing of Frantz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael. Black Power provided a crucial language of cultural domination, because it gave voice to a subjectivity obliterated in Marxist versions of socialism and thus suggested a connection between individual experience and political resistance.

The London groups were growing and a newsletter, which was initially called Bird, then Harpies Bizarre, had been started. This soon became Shrew and the name stuck.

[…] the editorial meetings at Black Dwarf, where John Hoyland, Adrian Mitchell and Vinay Chand were becoming more and more on edge because of Tariq’s tendency to slip in International Marxist Group propaganda. The paper was beginning to turn into an organ of the Trotskyist Fourth International; only Tariq’s irrepressible delight in mischief and flair as a communicator made it readable. I knew trouble was imminent.

You could hardly move for acrimony that autumn. Black Dwarf criticized the leading figure in the International Socialist group, Chris Harman, for attacking Ho Chi Minh at the memorial meeting marking the death of the Vietnamese leader. It was true that some Trotskyists had been killed in the forties in Vietnam, though the International Socialists had not stressed the point while increasing their numbers through the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. A memorial meeting for the dead Ho Chi Minh seemed to me a divisive time to raise the issue.

On 19 October shop stewards from Ford, Chrysler, Vauxhall and British Leyland held a historic conference in Coventry. They met to compare wage rates, because they had resolved to demand ‘parity’. […]

Sid Harraway, a Communist, had been active at Ford since the forties. […] Despite my ignorance of the car industry, I could sense the tremendous significance of two telegrams he held out to show me. They were from workers at Alfa Romeo in Italy and Ford in Belgium. What I was seeing in Sid’s hand that day was a new kind of working-class internationalism which was to grow up alongside the official international trade union structures and was, in some instances, to challenge the bureaucratic remoteness of the unions.

[…] war had broken out at Black Dwarf.

The clash came over an article Tariq put in without the rest of us on the editorial board seeing it. Headed ‘Southern Africa Betrayed’, it accused the African National Congress of corruption and deliberately sending rebellious members to their deaths. Vinay [Chand] discovered similar material was being circulated by the South African police to discredit the ANC. It was bad enough that we were publishing an unbalanced sectarian piece of hatred without any reference to the ANC’s viewpoint. Even worse, it seemed we were also unwittingly helping the South African apartheid regime.

That weekend, the consequences of our sectarian divisions in London struck home with a devastating personal force as, troubled and miserable, I began to envisage what people imprisoned by the apartheid regime might feel on hearing that a socialist newspaper far away was attacking them.

The rapid sprouting of groups in different parts of London was making the original general meeting unwieldy. We agreed we would send representatives and that each group would produce Shrew in turn so that no centralized single perspective would dominate. These approaches to organizing were in marked contrast to both the Labour Party and the Leninist groups. At the time, it seemed to me that the North American women just created this differing vision of how to organize which somehow made complete sense. Only when I read more about the history of Civil Rights, the New Left and the US student movement was I to realize that our Women’s Liberation approach to politics was rooted in the ideas and assumptions of these movements. Over time people forgot their origins and they were called in a political shorthand simply the ‘feminist’ way of organizing.

I proposed a History Workshop on women but a North American, Barbara Winslow, who was more aware of developments in the United States, pointed out that we had not had any general conference on women. And so, out of Ruskin History Workshop, was to come the first Women’s Liberation conference, held at Ruskin the following February.

For once the prognostication of a left paper had been vindicated by history; 1969 really had been the ‘Year of the Militant Woman’. While staying in Oxford, I was finishing an article for Black Dwarf summing up the year. In ‘Cinderella Organizes Buttons’, | noted the militancy of nurses, lavatory attendants, factory workers and teachers, mentioning the National Joint Action Committee for Women’s Equal Rights, the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation meeting, the appearance of the magazines Socialist Woman and Shrew. I added that discontent was coming from many sources, criticizing the tendency to try and ‘zone off’ the economic from other aspects of women’s subordination. I believed that differing aspects of experience overlapped, the stories and myths of childhood being part of our consciousness as well as the sociology of work and daily life. I ended the article with a tribute to Lil Bilocca, from the Hull trawler campaign; Rose Boland, from Ford; the bus worker Kath Fincham; the post office worker Daisy Nolan; and ‘all the women you never hear about’ — a preoccupation with silence and invisibility I was to take into my interest in the women ‘hidden from history’.