Sheila Rowbotham
Sheila Rowbotham is Honorary Research Fellow in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences within the Faculty of Humanities at Manchester University and Visiting Fellow in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her many books include the James Tait Black–shortlisted Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century, Promise Of A Dream: Remembering the Sixties, and Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century. She has written for, among other newspapers, the Guardian, The Times, The Independent, New Statesman, and The New York Times. She lives in Manchester.
Upcoming Events
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May 28, 2012
Old Fire Station
Sheila Rowbotham at the Working Class Movement Library, Salford
The third annual Frow lecture: 'Dreamers of a new day: British and American women's alternative economic visions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries'
Blog
Sheila Rowbotham announced as Writer in Residence at the British Library
Trailblazing socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham has been announced as the first ever Writer in Residence at the British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies, alongside author Naomi Wood. In this role, both writers will work to raise awareness of the British Library's North American collections and also make use of them for their next projects with the generous support from the Eccles Centre.
Rowbotham was selected due to her "innovative ideas" and the uniqueness of her proposed use of the Library's collections in researching her forthcoming book with Verso, Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in the US and Britain 1880 to 1910. The book will trace a small network of British and American radicals during the turn of the century.
Choice on Sheila Rowbotham's Dreamers of a New Day
Choice "highly recommends" Sheila Rowbotham's Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century as we approach the book's publication in paperback (June) ...
Sheila Rowbotham writes for the Guardian on "The revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg"
Sheila Rowbotham reviews The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg for the Guardian, bringing into relief the portrait of Luxemburg's passionate political and personal life painted by the letters:
George Shriver's new translation of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg is the most comprehensive collection of her correspondence yet to appear in English. It transports us directly into the private world of a woman who has never lost her inspirational power as an original thinker and courageous activist in first the Marxist Social Democratic party, and then the German revolutionary group, the Spartacist League. She suffered for her convictions; jail sentences in 1904 and 1906 were followed by three and a half years in prison for opposing the first world war. Her brutal death at the hands of the militaristic Volunteer Corps during the 1919 workers uprising in Berlin has contributed to her mystique: she is revered as the revolutionary who never compromised. This collection of her letters reveals that the woman behind the mythic figure was also a compassionate, teasing, witty human being.
Citing Luxemburg as an influence on her own work, Rowbotham, the author of Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century and Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, untangles Luxemburg's ambivalent relationship with the feminist movement of her time:
Luxemburg's criticism of Marxism as dogma and her stress on consciousness exerted an influence on the women's liberation movement which emerged in the late 60s and early 70s. When I was writing Woman's Consciousness, Man's World during 1971, I drew on her analysis in The Accumulation of Capital (1913) of capital's greedy quest for non-capitalist markets, adapting it as a metaphor for the commodification of sexual relations and the body
Books
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Dreamers of a New Day
The acclaimed exploration of the women who revolutionized American and British life. -
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A renowned historian introduces Mary Wollestonecraft's seminal feminist tract.
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Edward Carpenter
Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize: The acclaimed biography of the pioneering advocate of free love, gay rights and women’s suffrage.