Sheila Rowbotham

Sheila Rowbotham (born 27 February 1943) is an English socialist feminist theorist and historian. She is the author of many notable books in the field of women's studies, including Hidden from History, Beyond the Fragments (1979), A Century of Women (1997) and Threads Through Time (1999), as well as the 2021 memoir Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s. She has lived in Bristol since 2010.

Early life Rowbotham was born on 27 February 1943 in Leeds (in present-day West Yorkshire), the daughter of a salesman for an engineering company and an office clerk. From an early age, she was deeply interested in history. She has written that traditional political history "left her cold", but she credited Olga Wilkinson, one of her teachers, with encouraging her interest in social history by showing that history "belonged to the present, not to the history textbooks".

Rowbotham attended St Hilda's College at Oxford University and then the University of London. She began her working life as a teacher in comprehensive schools and institutes of higher or adult education. While attending St Hilda's College, Rowbotham found the syllabus with its heavy focus on political history to be of no interest to her. She has described herself at the time she started her studies at St Hilda's as "not at all left-wing" and a "mystical beatnik hippie-type", although she soon started to make contact with leftists, including fellow Oxford student Gareth Stedman Jones, who became a professional historian. Rowbotham also met E. P. Thompson and Dorothy Thompson at this time, after a tutor recommended that she should visit them due to their interest in Chartism and the history of working-class movements: Rowbotham read the proofs of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, which she has described as "like no other history book I'd read". Through her involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and various socialist circles, among them the Labour Party's youth wing, the Young Socialists, Rowbotham was introduced to Karl Marx's ideas. Soon disenchanted with the direction of party politics, she immersed herself in a variety of left-wing campaigns, including writing for the radical political newspaper Black Dwarf, whose editorial board she also joined.

Between 1983 and 1986, Rowbotham served as the editor of Jobs for Change, the newspaper of the Greater London Council (GLC). At this time she was also involved in the GLC's Popular Planning Unit alongside Hilary Wainwright, which was involved in developing democratic approaches to economic planning. Hughes-Warrington concurs with the need to have a clear idea as to what patriarchy is in order to struggle against it and quotes Rowbotham's definition in full. She finds fault with those feminists who deny men a role in the battle against sexism. In her opinion, women and men should stand equally against both capitalism and sexism to achieve radical social reorganisation. In a 2011 interview, Rowbotham criticised Communism, claiming that Leninism "narrow the struggle of women's emancipation", and sees "libertarian socialism", "ethical socialism" and anarchism as providing a more vital understanding of women's needs.

Recent professional life In 2004, Rowbotham was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was Professor of Gender and Labour History, Sociology at the University of Manchester, England, until her involuntary retirement in 2008.

Rowbotham's involuntary retirement from the University of Manchester caused protest from students. The Facebook group Save Sheila Rowbotham was established to campaign for her continuation as a Lecturer. The same year she published the first-ever biography of Edward Carpenter, entitled Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love and did continue to teach within the Sociology department at Manchester. In Autumn 2008, her request to stay on after the age of 65 to a third of her job was refused. However, after protests from students, academics and others internationally the university offered Rowbotham a third of research professorship. She is currently a Simon Professor.

Rowbotham's 2009 biography of Edward Carpenter was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Rowbotham was the Eccles Centre Writer in Residence for 2012 at the British Library, where her research enabled completion of Rebel Crossings.

She was portrayed by the actor Jo Herbert in the British film Misbehaviour (2020) about the 1970 Miss World protests.

Reviewing Rowbotham's 2021 memoir, Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s, Yvonne Roberts wrote in The Guardian that the book "records an exhausting life of activism, lecturing, pamphleteering, editing, book writing, journalism, travelling, speech-making, struggling with the emerging ideas and conflicts....Rowbotham has wisdom – and wit."

In recognition of her achievements, Rowbotham was awarded an honorary degree (Doctor of Laws) by the University of Bristol in 2022.

Archives Papers of Sheila Rowbotham are held at the Women's Library at the Library of the London School of Economics