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Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism
Book by Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, Hilary Wainwright
253 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
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389 people want to read
About the author
Sheila Rowbotham
77 books87 followersSheila 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)
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)
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 14, 2007
opne of my favorite political books on women and revolution
January 22, 2025
This was quite interesting as a historical document - three women active in the socialist and socialist feminist movements in the UK in the 1960s/70s, writing about broad debates and issues in the left from the perspective of what these debates and the broader left can learn from socialist feminism.
On the first essay by Sheila Rowbotham:
This essay was basically an argument about the things which (socialist) feminism could offer the Left to make it better. It focused on arguments like: the nature of leadership, the Leninist idea of the vanguard, how consciousness is achieved, and the relationship between the party and autonomous movements. To be honest I found it pretty hard to follow and the arguments hard to get into, though they weren't particularly complex. A lot of the problem is that she spent a lot of time discussing the intricacies of different political positions among various factions of the left, which I found very difficult to follow. What I got out of it is that Leninists (and then followed by Stalinists in a worse way) are big on everything coming from the party and not big on letting people (rank and file? That doesn't feel like quite the right term) come up with their own understandings, which is in conflict with the practices and theory that the emerging (socialist) feminist movement was developing.
She seemed to have a very partial and odd understanding of women's oppression, continually talking about it as "personal" issues, and I'm not really quite sure what she meant by that or that her own thinking about it was very consistent with itself - she seemed to at the same time think that women's issues are "just" personal issues, but at the same time that they are political and larger than that. I also found a lot of the insights she spoke about that feminism could bring to the Left to be pretty basic and obvious, as well as a little vague. But it was early on in the women's movement, so these things were just being worked out for the first time and so it's interesting to see that happening.
On the second essay by Lynne Segal:
This one was the most enjoyable and readable for me. She basically talked about her experiences doing local socialist feminist organising in Islington, London, over a period of time. It was fascinating to read about all the different things they did, and the various challenges they experienced while doing them - many of which were broadly familiar to me.
She had a more interesting understanding of the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism than Rowbotham - more like dual systems, though she didn't use those terms, and without seeming to see patriarchy as subordinate to capitalism as many dual systems theorists did. I liked the way she articulated the relationship between the two systems.
On the third essay by Hilary Wainwright:
This wasn't extremely interesting and didn't talk all that much about feminism. Most of it was a discussion of the relationship between the socialist movement within the Labour party and the socialist movement outside of it, an argument which often veered a bit into irrelevancy from my perspective. And she didn't talk enough about feminism for me to work out what her position on it is.
On the first essay by Sheila Rowbotham:
This essay was basically an argument about the things which (socialist) feminism could offer the Left to make it better. It focused on arguments like: the nature of leadership, the Leninist idea of the vanguard, how consciousness is achieved, and the relationship between the party and autonomous movements. To be honest I found it pretty hard to follow and the arguments hard to get into, though they weren't particularly complex. A lot of the problem is that she spent a lot of time discussing the intricacies of different political positions among various factions of the left, which I found very difficult to follow. What I got out of it is that Leninists (and then followed by Stalinists in a worse way) are big on everything coming from the party and not big on letting people (rank and file? That doesn't feel like quite the right term) come up with their own understandings, which is in conflict with the practices and theory that the emerging (socialist) feminist movement was developing.
She seemed to have a very partial and odd understanding of women's oppression, continually talking about it as "personal" issues, and I'm not really quite sure what she meant by that or that her own thinking about it was very consistent with itself - she seemed to at the same time think that women's issues are "just" personal issues, but at the same time that they are political and larger than that. I also found a lot of the insights she spoke about that feminism could bring to the Left to be pretty basic and obvious, as well as a little vague. But it was early on in the women's movement, so these things were just being worked out for the first time and so it's interesting to see that happening.
On the second essay by Lynne Segal:
This one was the most enjoyable and readable for me. She basically talked about her experiences doing local socialist feminist organising in Islington, London, over a period of time. It was fascinating to read about all the different things they did, and the various challenges they experienced while doing them - many of which were broadly familiar to me.
She had a more interesting understanding of the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism than Rowbotham - more like dual systems, though she didn't use those terms, and without seeming to see patriarchy as subordinate to capitalism as many dual systems theorists did. I liked the way she articulated the relationship between the two systems.
On the third essay by Hilary Wainwright:
This wasn't extremely interesting and didn't talk all that much about feminism. Most of it was a discussion of the relationship between the socialist movement within the Labour party and the socialist movement outside of it, an argument which often veered a bit into irrelevancy from my perspective. And she didn't talk enough about feminism for me to work out what her position on it is.
January 22, 2013
this was a very interesting book. it was written in the earliest 70's and this version was updated/revised and reprinted in 1979 so much of the material is around specific arguments that were going on in british organizing at that time. however there is a lot in here that i think is relevant today - especially in light of the ongoing collapse of the swp (uk). it seems that some socialist groups never considered the organizational implications of the rising feminist movement of the 70's and only took a very narrow view of the movement and painted the whole thing as middle class and theoretically incorrect (patriarchy theory) and then dismissed the whole thing. my historical view of this debate and more importantly attempts to square feminism based on patriarchy theory and revolutionary socialism based on marxism was that it was all about theory. and in so far as it was about theory, the rejection of patriarchy as a theory in favor of marxism i believe is correct. however this debate was not simply one of theory. it was also one of practice and organization. and in this regard it is clear that the revolutionary left had/has a lot to learn from the feminist movement. as such i think that revolutionaries in the US have a lot to learn from the particular critiques this book raises. whether you end up agreeing or disagreeing with some of this, it is still a very useful read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews