Women, Resistance and Revolution

In this classic text, Sheila Rowbotham explores four centuries of feminist struggle and revolutionary politics. She shows how women rose against the dual challenges of an unjust state system and social-sexual prejudice. First published in 1972, Women, Resistance and Revolution is a major statement of second-wave feminism on the imperative for revolution within the revolution. It is also a rich and highly readable history of the growth of a radical consciousness from the beginnings of feminist possibility in the early-modern world.

Rowbotham charts the acceleration of feminist activity and theory after the French Revolution, despite the ambiguities of "liberty, equality, fraternity" for women. From Wollstonecraft’s Vindication to Flora Tristan’s Worker’s Union and Engels's Origin of the Family, she describes how women’s liberation became a live and explosive issue in emerging socialist movements. She traces feminist strands in modern revolutionary movements in Russia and China, including fascinating creative experiments during the early period of Bolshevik rule.

The book also considers the situation of women in anticolonial struggles in Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam. Women, Resistance and Revolution is an invaluable historical study, as well as a trove of anecdote and example.