ABSTRACT
To reflect upon, let alone describe, ‘feminism in action since the 1960s’ is certainly a monumental task. (I was amazed to hear, at the event held to launch the book, that Sheila Rowbotham had actually doubled her task by allowing the book a ten-year gestation period!) Most of the ‘action’, however, does take place in the seventies, and as Rowbotham says in the introduction, is ‘an account of ideas and assumptions’ rather than a history of the movement. Any feminist retrospective will have to negotiate the treacherous path between the assertion of the validity of an individual’s personal experience, and its inevitable usurpation of the experience of others, and Rowbotham’s book does not quite achieve the balance she hopes for in the introduction. It is exciting to chronicle the Women’s Liberation movement using ‘leaflets, magazines, letters and internal papers, snatches of poetry and memories of conversation’, rather than the ‘official testimony’ of books, but the immediacy one would expect to result from this kind of research is strangely elusive.
