Women, Resistance & Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World

by Sheila Rowbotham

Records one woman's view of the feminist movement and its important role in effecting social change

Genres: Feminism, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Gender, Womens, Sociology

287 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1972

About the author

Sheila Rowbotham is a British socialist feminist theorist and writer.

Rowbotham was born 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 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 her syllabus with its heavy focus on political history to be of no interest to her. Through her involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and various socialist circles including the Labour Party's youth wing, the Young Socialists, Rowbotham was introduced to Karl Marx's ideas. Already on the left, Rowbotham was converted to Marxism. 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. In the 1960s, Rowbotham was one of the founders and leaders of the History Workshop movement associated with Ruskin College.

Towards the end of the 1960s she had become involved in the growing Women’s Liberation Movement (also known as Second-wave feminism) and, in 1969, published her influential pamphlet "Women's Liberation and the New Politics", which argued that Socialist theory needed to consider the oppression of women in cultural as well as economic terms. She was heavily involved in the conference Beyond the Fragments (eventually a book), which attempted to draw together democratic socialist and socialist feminist currents in Britain. Between 1983 and 1986, Rowbotham served as the editor of Jobs for Change, the newspaper of the Greater London Council.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Adrian Colesberry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Women revolutionaries are kind of double-subversive in that they are revolting against the primary injustice and then also revolting against the social assumption that men should be doing the revolting.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheila Rowbotham did a lot to initiate the early engagement between 1970s Women’s Liberation and the socialist feminist tradition in this sweeping history of, well, women in resistance and revolutionary movements in the modern world. In this history, she finds many patterns and problems that would emerge in the Women’s Liberation movement and continue to be with us to this day.

The primary example of this is the difficult rhetorical and organizational balancing act between emphasizing women’s special oppression and attacking the oppressive social systems, such as capitalism, racism, imperialism, etc. in which patriarchy is embedded. Routinely, socialist movements, in and out of power, paid lip service, if that, to women’s oppression and little more. Just as frequently, emphasis on attacking sexism apart from the larger context of oppression leads to the dead end of bourgeois feminism. It is tricky. In tracing this dynamic as it played out in the beginnings of the revolutionary period, in the 19th century socialist and suffragette movements, and in the Soviet Union and other revolutionary regimes, Rowbotham demonstrates that the issues surrounding women’s liberation are one of the fundamental dynamics of modern politics, alongside the other perennial quandaries that many of Rowbotham’s peers among the midcentury leftist historians identified.

This is the sort of book I don’t have a ton to say about- it’s informative, well-written, useful both for all of the historical examples it brings together and for its analysis. It’s poignant in a lot of places too, not least in its depictions of women in third world liberation struggles, written in the period of high hopes for the global transformative potential of those movements. Another poignant testimony is that whenever I read a feminist writer from the second wave that I get a lot out of, I find myself crossing my fingers and hoping to hell she got through the bad decades that have followed, and also avoided becoming a TERF. Rowbotham is still with us and writing, and Google doesn’t say anything about Rowbotham having gone down that fell road... fingers crossed, I guess. *****

https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...

[Jenia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really fantastic. Not always an easy read, not always everything I agree with politically, sometimes uses language to describe ideas that we'd describe in a different way now. But they're the same ideas; it's very very good. I really recommend it to anybody interested in the history of feminism, as examined from a revolutionary perspective. Things we're arguing about now are things that were relevant in the 1970s when Rowbotham wrote it, and were relevant in the 17th century which this book starts with.

I have no idea how "true" this book is for women in the various countries Rowbotham describes, but at the very least her chapter on the USSR/Russia rings true to *my* experiences. Things I've been sure of for a while now. It's nice to see my own personal thoughts confirmed on a larger scale, and it's nice to remember our generation doesn't have to start from scratch, that we should be and are building on the ideas of myriad revolutionary women before us.

[Aysu · Rating 4 out of 5]

devrimci* erkeklerin kadınları sürekli yarı yolda bırakması gebertiyo babasının malı* sanki dewrim

[Leonor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is overall a great book spanning many years of the women's liberation movement and of female involvement in the most important revolutions of the 20th century. Rowbotham is a Marxist second generation feminism and it is palpable in the book, so one must approach it with this in mind, for better and for worse. The weakest points, which almost tempted me to a three star review, are the points where the author very clearly overpraises certain groups and glosses over severe flaws in some of the systems presented, in particular in the China chapter. She's also unable to escape the otherization of the peoples she describes and at some points the eurocentrism in her view is very glaring.

[Rachel Siska · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book. It looked at feminism in a way that I have not seen before. She covered countries and groups of women I have never studied before. Unfortunately, I felt she occasionally dragged some topics on for too long. Also, it is important to remember this book was published in 1973, so it does not cover anything from the past four decades.

[Selen Sarul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uzun zamandır kitaplığımda duran ve bir türlü başlayamadığım bir kitaptı, okuduktan sonra keşke daha önce başlasaymışım. Yazarın bakış açısı, sunduğu örnekler ve kitabın akışı inanılmaz güzeldi. Tarih boyunca dünyanın farklı yerlerindeki kadınların direnişinin bir kısmını okumuş olmak şu an yaşadığımız şartlarda mücadeleye devam edebilmek için güç verdi gerçekten.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of the women's rights movement.

[Uğur · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a political sense, Rowbotham re-discusses the struggles of women who have been wronged around the world, who are trying/ unable to find a place for themselves in an unequal public order, under the heading of ‘the labor problem’.

As is known, marxist thought and scientific socialism claim that feminist thought is a non-class movement, that it undermines the class struggle, that the problems Decried by feminism are not class problems, and set strict boundaries between it and feminist thought. However, Rowbotham has come under an obligation by taking the reins at this point and explains that women's struggle for social equality is a class problem and even the most intractable area among these class problems, and reveals that there is no non-class issue in the middle, as claimed by socialists.

The problems mentioned are social and domestic problems, of which there are vivid examples that continue to live and live today. With this book, Rowbotham has addressed his book with a revolutionary discourse, thinking about a new era that will be started by a much larger segment of people who will be accepted even from the working class with this book. This book can be a road book for women activists. People might call it feminist because they think in a classification way, but it's not like that. The author has created the book on a truly revolutionary line in an effort to surpass even feminism.

[Sergio Gómez Senovilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheila Rowbotham's Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972) remains a seminal work of social-feminism, charting the role of women from the beginnings of British socialism and the French Revolution, through the Russian revolutions, to the struggles in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria.
Rejecting any triumphalist narrative, Rowbotham frames revolution as dialectical: women appear both as agents and as constrained participants, shaped by patriarchy and capitalist or socialist systems alike.

She argues that genuine emancipation arises only from revolutionary upheaval, not reform. “A revolution within the revolution” is needed to uproot the sexism embedded even within left‑wing movements.

Rowbotham criticises liberal, individualist feminism as politically isolated and idealistic—especially when detached from anti‑class, anti‑racist, and anti‑imperialist struggles. She acknowledges the interconnected oppression of women across race, class, and coloniality, especially in chapters on Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria, a concept she terms "intersectionality.”

Rowbotham surveys centuries across many regions, linking local resistance to global revolution. She challenges Marx and Engels for marginalising women’s experiences within class struggle.
To me, the only weak point is that when she speaks about women outside Western contexts, they are sometimes described through an authorial Western voice.

Women, Resistance & Revolution stands as a seminal second‑wave feminist text. Its broad historical approach, combined with a robust critique of both capitalism and patriarchal structures, continues to resonate today. Her demands for collective organising, socialist transformation, and an intersectional perspective remain urgently relevant.

A must-read, top priority.

[Heidi Bakk-Hansen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another of the paperbacks I picked up a few decades ago. (A library copy from the old Cathedral Catholic school.) A product of its time (the early 70s), but an interesting analysis of how women's history and the history of revolutions have played out.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Thorough look into what does and does not work for women under socialism and a critical analysis of male socialists while being pro-socialism as a means of working towards liberating women.

This is a historical piece and not up to date but is extremely important.

[زينا · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most informative books on feminism that I’ve read. It is a bit western-centric but the information is still valuable. The writing style is sharp and almost poetic.