Socialist Outlook devotes more space to this debate in future issues because it is a very rich one and touches on many questions of concer to marxists and feminists.
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A balance sheet on the women's
The past is before us; feminism in action since the 1960$ by Sheila Rowbotham, published Pandora Press, £15
Reviewed by Judith
Arkwright 'While the future is behind us and prophesy most perilous, the past really is before us, so the charting of experience can bring a sense of direction. The process of a movement in transforming itself can link past and future without attempting to impose the past upon the future'.
In these words Sheila Rowbotham attempts to explain what she had set out to do in her history of the Women's Liberation Movement. With its detailed reference to source material including leaflets and documents of the time, this is certainly the most comprehensive history of the movement and a must for all feminists.
Every woman who participated in the movement of the 1970s has her own story to tell, and Rowbotham makes no apologies for the fact that 'how the past is seen depends very much on who is looking'.
Rowbotham is a socialist feminist and the book clearly holds the line against those feminists who, with the advent of the Tory dark ages, began to waver in their commitment to those principles. In particular she takes up Bea Campbell's notion that women have no interest in making alliances with male trade unionists, saying that such arguments are: "part of a shift among feminists away from theory based on social relationships within capitalism and towards an emphasis on male workers' responsibility for female subordination at work'
She develops this into an argument against theories of patriarchy which underlie this. According to her the use of this word raised more problems than Page 30
REVIEWS liberation movement it solved. The word suggests that there are two separate systems divided along male/ female lines, so that "patriarchy' oppresses women and capitalism oppresses male workers.
Apart from this defence of some of the basic precepts of socialist feminism, the book is thought-provoking in the