Reflections on the recent work of Sheila Rowbotham: women's movements and building bridges

Monthly Review, Nov, 1996 by Vinay Bahl

Sheila Rowbotham is an active British socialist feminist as well as a political-historical writer. Growing up intellectually and politically in the Marxist tradition as shaped by Edward and Dorothy Thompson, growing and changing in struggles lost and won, Rowbotham continues to base her analyses in history. Her personal history and memory contribute significant details to the political analyses she offers, especially of grassroots movements. Rowbotham lives the life of a politically committed activist and an historical reporter, while a single mother actively engaged in her community. She has written fifteen books, innumerable articles, introductions, essays, poems, films, record jackets, reports, reviews, and interviews. Her first book, Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (New York: Pantheon), created a major stir when first published in 1972. Her writing is a product of her own experience as a teacher of apprentices in continuing education (where she has taught hairdressers and typists), her efforts to organize night cleaners, of marching with coal miners and their wives, and of years of active engagement in the Trotskyist movement and in the world of left publications.

In the later 1970s and the early 1980s she helped organize a movement inspired by her pamphlet Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (Islington Community Press), published in 1979. Later it was published in book form in both America and Britain. The pamphlet acted as a springboard and inspired a small social movement that brought together people in traditional workers' organizations, the Leninist left, local community initiatives, women, gays, blacks, and youth. Beyond the Fragments groups appeared throughout England in the early eighties. These were not only political forums, but also social networks, part of people's everyday life and leisure, connected to looking after children, having fun, being active on the job and in the community. Sheila carried the politics of the Beyond the Fragments groups into the government itself. In 1982 she went to work for the Greater London Council (GLC), the then popularly elected governing body of the city of London in which the Labour left had a majority. It sought to mobilize people usually excluded by the formal political process, and to organize them in informal ways combining participatory democracy and representative government. She also edited Jobs for Change, a widely distributed photo magazine about economic policy and projects. Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC in 1986, a sort of tribute to the success of its programs. After working for the GLC, Sheila has returned to supporting herself and her son by her writing. This has not been easy in the depressed political atmosphere of the late eighties and early nineties. She has never retreated into academia or become cynical about the power of working people. She lives both her scholarship and active left feminist politics, which has made her a true public intellectual.

I

Movements develop in the process of communicating themselves.... We have not even words for ourselves. Thinking is difficult when the words are not your own. Borrowed concepts are like passed down clothes, they fit badly and do not give confidence.... We walk and talk and think in living contradiction.(1)

Sheila Rowbotham wrote these lines in the context of feminists using male-centered language and concepts. But I find these lines also useful to explain my dilemma as a "Third World" woman using the English language, as well as using Western feminist concepts and categories. This dilemma started back in India, where the English language has long been a status symbol as well as a vehicle for social mobility. The position of the English language within India as well as in the world today is a tacit mark of the continuing vigor of Western imperialism. Thus I found that who I was for others, my "intelligence," indeed my essence, was a function of how well I had mastered the English language. Postmodernist notions of "difference" and "identity" offered not help but further obstacles, embedded as they are in a language impenetrable to any but a few.

These notions have been put to dubious use, as has the slogan of "multiculturalism." The notion of multiculturalism was interpreted as promotion of "differences" and separation among various ethnic and national groups within the United States as well as in the world at large. Such interpretation of the concept of "multiculturalism" came at a time when the Cold War was ending and large areas previously beyond the direct reach of the multinational companies (particularly the former "Eastern Bloc," but also India and to some degree China as well) were being ripped open for exploitation under the banner of "liberalization." The promotion of segregation of identifies among various ethnic and national groups within these states led inevitably to political conflicts and to the weakening of potential resistance to imperialism. Such ethnic and nationality group conflicts in turn further ensured global domination by the First World in the name of "maintaining the peace" in the post-Cold War era.