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

Monthly Review, Nov, 1996 by Vinay Bahl

The studies collected by Rowbotham and Mitter, and Sheila's own recent work, document the emergence of new kinds of social and economic democratic practices among the poor women of the world as their labor power is commodified. In this process, so deserving of our attention, the poor women of the Third World are demanding a very basic and minimum human need - dignity and daily bread. "These women who labor for such small [basic] rewards present us a tremendous human challenge [one that] compels us to ask the following questions: What kind of development? What kind of growth? What kind of society can ensure that these basic aspirations are met?"(11) Can we find answers to such basic questions of dignity and daily bread by postmodernism's appeals to 'differences' and cultural relativism? Rather, the recent work of Sheila Rowbotham is a continuing demonstration by one admirable woman of a unity of practice and theory in practice that is a model to all, worldwide.

NOTES

1. Sheila Rowbotham, Women's liberation and New Politics, Pamphlet n. 17, (London: May Day Manifesto Group, 1971) pp. 5, 10.

2. Sheila Rowbotham, Homeworkers Worldwide (London: Merlin, 1993), p. 2

3. Ibid., p. 84.

4. Sheila Rowbotham and Swasti Mitter eds., Dignity and Daily Bread (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 11.

5. Sheila Rowbotham, Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 296-297.

6. Ibid., p. 306.

7. Sheila Rowbotham, The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. xii-xiv.

8. Sheila Rowbotham and Swasti Mitter eds., Women Encounter Technology: Changing Patterns of Employment in the Third World (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 14.

9. Ibid., p. 15.

10. Ibid., p. 343.

11. Dignity and Daily Bread: New Forms of Economic Organizing Among Poor Women in the Third World and the First, (London; New York: Routledge, 1994).

Vinay Bahl is the author of The Making of the Indian Working Class: A Case Study of Tata Iron and Steel Co. 1880-1946 (SAGE 1995). She is an Assistant professor of Sociology at the Pennsylvania College of Technology (Penn State) at Williamsport.