Betty Friedan launched the women's movement, Germaine Greer fuelled it with rage and Juliet Mitchell supplied theoretical analysis. But it was Sheila Rowbotham, with Women, Resistance and Revolution, who brought it all together for those women who were already up to their ears in revolution and unsure how this new mutiny gibed with their prior commitment to overthrow the entire rotten system.
Sheila Rowbotham put feminism in context for the socialists, who, though never as numerous as they seemed - or hoped - were the driving force in the early days, for the very good reason that hardly anyone else had that hands-on experience of what an anti-establishment campaign demands: blind dedication and the brute stamina to endure long, quarrelsome meetings, write leaflets and then print and distribute them, run fund-raisers and demonstrations, debate and persuade and generally hang in there in the abiding, exhilarating conviction that you were making history.
That book was Sheila Rowbotham's first. It was successful not only because the message was solidly buffered with historical research but because it was a pleasure to read, unlike so many feminist tomes. So is this, her most recent book; and while the people, places and pageantry will ring bells for all who marched their way through the 1960s opposing everything from the bomb in principle to the bomb in Vietnam, this memoir is not the exclusive preserve of old radicals. It is a record of an era, winding one girl's coming-of-age story through the drama of political evolution.
In 1960, Sheila Rowbotham was a soulful schoolgirl determined to abandon Leeds and find existentialism, liberal values, and the bohemian life. Being scholarly as well, she headed for the Sorbonne, and a tumultous sojourn it turned out to be. But it was only the prelude. The real rite of passage began when she arrived in Oxford the following year and gradually began accumulating as friends and comrades and lovers the radicals who were emerging as the student leaders of their generation in Britain.
They were bright, energetic, and educating themselves and each other as they argued. "These young left-wing intellectuals," she writes, "all possessed much clearer maps of intellectual terrains than my laborious and messy collages, and they set about arguing me into socialism." Chief among them was Bob Rowthorn (now professor of applied economics at Cambridge) with whom she spent much of the period the book covers, but the cast is huge and lively. There are dozens of familiar names and some star turns: Ronnie Laing, Eric Hobsbawm, Tariq Ali, Danny the Red, Stokely Carmichael and Jean-Luc Godard, who wanted to film the author in the nude reading a polemic on women's exploitation in 1969. (She dithered, but didn't.)
The schoolgirl from Leeds was plunged into a bewildering world of meetings where fingers jabbed the air as scornful insults were flung back and forth to catcalls and applause. Through the maze of conflicting ideologies, contradictions and re-evaluations, she converted to the cause but clung stubbornly to her own vision; for the rest of her life, she writes, she was to be on the look-out for the kind of socialist journal "where Karl Marx and William Blake could meet between two covers". Theory was naturally matched with action, organising, demonstrating, and struggling to live out an ideal from a commune in Hackney, where everyone paid £1 for bills and rates and £1 to a political fund of choice, which left nothing for repairs to the disintegrating house.
Then there was the problem of matching the political to the personal: the decisions about clothes - the tight black halter dress with the existential look gave way to the Sergeant Pepper "Chelsea Girl" coat - the who and when of the first orgasm, and the eventual dilemmas presented by the "open relationships" that were so popular, in theory, at the time. (There is nothing really gratuitous in any of this, though, and if it makes me uneasy I'd like to believe it is only because I have reservations about the general wisdom of disclosing identities. Supposing a principal player in your sexual memoir didn't bother mentioning you in his biography?)
FOR all the light and colour, however, 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.
She has also, I think, identified some major defects. By the end of the 1960s, Sheila Rowbotham was working on her doctorate, teaching skinheads in an adult education programme, wrangling endlessly with other socialists, especially fellow board members of the journal Black Dwarf. Like many women on the left, she had also sat through too many meetings ignored by her male comrades. In a couple of swift decisions, boats were burned, and the women's movement was embraced with hopes of "an entirely new kind of politics - no leaders, no ego trips, no more sectarian disputes." Yes; well, as she observes, that is another story with its own ironies.
One decade is quite enough for this book, and I cannot end this review without recounting an anecdote that sums up all that feisty courage and faulty aim, the tale of the "OXBRIDGE PADDLES WHILE VIETNAM BURNS" banner. Painstakingly painted letter by letter on individual cloths, the banner was to be co-ordinated by a line of protesters and draped over the bridge during the Oxford and Cambridge boat race at the exact moment the boats reached it, in full view of the television audience. When they were thwarted by the police from assembling at the appointed venue, the protesters lined up instead on the riverbank and duly whipped out the letters for the cameras as the boats approached.
They returned jubilantly to base and found they had indeed succeeded. Unfortunately, they'd forgotten the direction of the cameras as the boat passed. What millions of viewers saw was: "SNRUB MANTEIV ELIHW SELDDAP EGDIRBXO".
Mary Maher is an author and an Irish Times journalist