“Rowbotham records hearing an American use the expression ‘male chauvinism’ in 1967 and asking what it meant. It meant exactly what she and other women on the Left had suffered from for years…being ignored. If they spoke at meetings, the men would pause as if for a plane passing overhead, and then resume the discussion.” … Lynn Barber, Daily Telegraph

“The accounts of the successes, failures, joys and pains of young adulthood have the qualities usually found in the best creative writing.” … Dorothy Thompson, The Times Higher Educational Supplement

“We catch a whiff of urgency and hope, briefly as ubiquitous and available as oxygen in the sixties London air.” – The Women's Review of Books

“[Rowbotham’s] account of herself is emphatically unglamorous. Lots of people are good at writing about their large tragedies, but she is good at writing about her small failures, which is far more rare and revealing.” … Nicci Gerrard, The Observer

“A serious book, but also a seriously funny book.“… Robert Irwin, Scotland on Sunday

“A record of an era, winding one girl’s coming-of-age story through the drama of political evolution. For all the light and colour . . . this is a serious book, an appraisal of the connecting strands of 1960s radicalism, the links and breaks between past and present. She has captured that amazing sense of possibility that grew with each year, the confidence that not only was the promised dream within reach, it was almost upon us.” … Mary Maher, Irish Times

Sheila Rowbotham is Professor of Gender and Labour History at the University of Manchester, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her many books include A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century; Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love is forthcoming from Verso. She has written for, among other newspapers, the Guardian, The Times, the Independent, New Statesman, and the New York Times.

260 pages
25 b/w photographs

Cloth
ISBN-13: 978 1 85984 622 3
US$25 (US only)

Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 85984 400 7
$17 (US only)