Sheila Rowbotham’s 1972 monograph Women, Resistance and Revolution is a study of the roles of women in global revolutionary movements across history. A radial work of socialist feminism and one which is a foundational text within this tradition of political thought, Rowbotham’s book is a treatise upon the necessity of revolution as an instrument to bring about a democratic and equal society.
Beginnings, Rowbotham asserts, are hard to find: ‘there is no ‘beginning’ of feminism in the sense that there is no beginning to defiance in women’ (p. 16). And yet when it comes to women’s liberation, revolution must be the beginning, the inciter of change. Women, Resistance and Revolution is Rowbotham’s attempt to trace, as far as she can, feminism’s relationship with socialism and capitalism, and provide a trans-historical survey of revolution. Investigating early British socialists, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolutions of the 1890s (leading to the assassination of Alexander II) and 1920s under Lenin, and the structures of the twentieth-century societies of China, Vietnam, Algeria, and Cuba, Rowbotham demonstrates the formation of a pattern whereby women’s liberation follows moments of revolution. Rowbotham argues for women as double-revolutionaries: they must take on “male” forms of revolution and react against revolution as male-defined political action. She does not believe liberation and Marxism to be synonymous, nor does she perceive them as mutually exclusive. They operate in contradiction and conjunction with each other. This is also true of women’s liberation and Revolution: ‘many women in women’s liberation are not revolutionaries’ (p. 246). She takes the schools of Marxist thought to task, arguing that women are perversely absent within the theories of Marx and Engels, who view “the women question” as tangential to the problem they seek to resolve and who are merely paying the question lip service. Political reformation, too, can only go so far, it cannot eradicate the social landscape and its deeply embedded structures within it, for example, the social entrenchment of masculinity and femininity. Revolutions, therefore, have facilitated change but this has been a gradual process: women have been subjected to too many forms of oppression to be freed by a singular revolution. The conditions for total emancipation have been yet to align. Women, Resistance and Revolution ‘puts together some of the things we have already done’ in order for us to understand how to move forward.
Rowbotham speaks against the individual as the arbiter of change or spokesperson for other women arguing that individual revolutionary action is socially ostracising whereas collective resistance begets revolution: ‘an individual woman who appears as the spokeswoman for the freedom of all women is a pathetic and isolated creature. She is inevitably either crushed or contained as a sexual performer’. To quote a famous passage from the text ‘it is only when women start to organise in large numbers that we become a political force’ (p. 12). This is an inherently anti-capitalist sentiment; it renounces capitalism’s insistence on the meritocracy of the individual to maintain its systems of power, and yet as Rowbotham explores, the violations enacted upon individual women in colonialist and capitalist systems are subsumed into the violence of the whole. Individuals are in opposition to and dialectical within the structures that repress them.
What is interesting, at least in the context of my research, is that Rowbotham did to a certain extent become a spokesperson to feminism due to this quote being adopted and disseminated by the publishing house Virago press, who used it at the beginning of their books as the statement their publishing intent. Virago themselves trod the line between maintaining profitability and networking in sisterhood, capitalism, feminism, and sisterhood. Contradictions in the book and its context implicitly challenge the narrative of the waves which has been constructed around feminist activity.
As Kate Hardy states, ‘despite being a defining book of the second wave, [Women, Resistance and Revolution’s] contents mitigate against the very notion of waves’ (Hardy, Feminist Review, 2017): revolution is presented by Rowbotham as protean, growing and constricting in dependency on historic and revolutionary conditions. Yet, revolution, argues Rowbotham, can be found anywhere, and seeking it in the places that have been written out of history offers a revisionist narrative of “women’s history” which is resistant to the “wave” that the text has supposedly come to define.[1] Its contextual placement as a pivotal text of seventies second-wave feminism is therefore curious and speaks to the ingrained character of the “waves” to feminist discourses. Indeed, Rowbotham herself claims her desire that the book be deconstructed and argued against as feminism progresses, ’what I write is simply a contribution to a permanent communication’ (p. 12.).
Although the term would not be coined until 1989, Rowbotham argues the need for an intersectional approach that considers the specific oppressions inherent within gender, race, class, and coloniality. Hardy suggests that this marks Rowbotham’s book apart from other texts of its time and form. It must be stated though that intersectionality as a concept was created by black feminists, specifically the academic Kimberlé Crenshaw and not by Rowbotham. Although Rowbotham posits that the differences in gender, race and class must be understood as separate, she does not name this as a phenomenon. Nor, too, does this change the marginalised experience of Black and Asian women from second-wave feminist action that this text is contextually placed at the forefront of. Actions, as Rowbotham herself argues for, speak louder than words.
In places Women, Resistance and Revolution it is hard to fully acquiesce with Rowbotham. She uses phrases and sentiments which betray Eurocentrism and the othering of men and women outside of white and Western spaces. Although Rowbotham makes it clear that she does not want to speak on the behalf of other women, by virtue of the text’s structure she cannot escape this. Rowbotham acts as the authority on her topics, she cannot help but to slip into such a role of speaker. This is as much a problem inherent in the structures of the second wave “sisterhood” to which the book belongs to as well as the text. Despite the rise of such forms of oral history which feminists in this time used to allow women to tell their own stories (and there are questions we may ask about the ethics of these voices being used in order to further a political cause they may or may not adhere to), many polemical and academic texts with an authorial voice which scrutinised women’s oppression were written by and for the emancipation of white women. Another problem of the book is that while it could be argued that the most socially reconstructive revolutions have occurred due to communist action, as Rowbotham does argue, she tends to overstate her affirmations towards regimes such as Leninism and Maoism. She glosses over the atrocities of such regimes in favour of the ways they advanced women’s conditions, looking back with contemporary retrospection it is hard to acquiesce to this level of communist praise.
It will be interesting to see how and if this book is taken back up in the contemporary consciousness. Although modern audiences may find certain dialectical choices of Rowbotham’s unsuitable to the modern discourses of colonialism, racism, and legacies of communism, her staunch anti-capitalism certainly can be felt in the current structures of feeling of feminism and liberation movements at the moment. Her insistence upon an intersectional [perspective], too, speaks to the ways the socio-political climate is discussed by the liberal left. While women’s liberation has advanced since the days Rowbotham speaks to, in terms of birth control and women’s autonomy outside the bourgeois family unit, for example, many of the conditions of women’s experiences she discusses are still issues faced – women’s sexualisation and sexual violence enacted upon women, structural inequality between men and women, white women and black women, cisgender and transgender women (not that this is discussed by Rowbotham), expectations of motherhood (the list goes on) remain. Rowbotham’s call for the need to ‘transform the whole cultural conditioning of women, and, hence, of men’ remains as true today as it was in the seventies.
I would recommend Women, Resistance and Revolution to any interested in the relationship between capitalism, socialism, and feminism, the history and forms of women’s resistance, and the discourse of core texts of the feminist movement. Read with its context in mind, Rowbotham’s core argument remains pertinent, particularly today when it feels as though nothing but a radical disruption to current modes of living can break the system.
[1] Despite the fact that “women’s history” is the history of half the population- a fact widely called upon by feminists of this period as a way to underscore the marginality placed upon women who are an equal, if not more, populous subset of humanity- it is necessary to distinguish women’s history as separate when discussing the ways women have been written out.
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