Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties

Description

At the beginning of the decade renowned historian Sheila Rowbotham was a rebellious sixteen-year-old at a Methodist boarding school in the north-east of England, reading Sartre and dreaming of Paris. By the end of the sixties she was a seasoned political activist, planning Britain's first-ever women's liberation conference, and beginning to find her voice as a writer. Her story of the intervening years moves from coffee bars in Leeds to the Sorbonne and Oxford University, where she arrives wearing frayed Levis and clutching a volume of Rimbaud. A participant in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, she was also a member of the editorial board of the notorious revolutionary newspaper Black Dwarf. While faithful to the exhilaration and enthusiasm of the sixties, Rowbotham is also wryly amusing about her younger self. When Jean-Luc Godard wanted to film her in the nude, she dithered between principle and vanity. Wearing the shortest of mini skirts she argued passionately for women's liberation. Promise of a Dream is a moving, witty and poignant recollection of a time when young women were breaking all the rules about sex, politics and their place in the world. Sheila Rowbotham was, and remains, one of their most effective and endearing voices.

Sheila Rowbotham is Honorary Research Fellow in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Manchester University and Visiting Fellow in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her many books include the James Tait Black-shortlisted Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love and Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century. She has written for, among other newspapers, the Guardian, The Times, The Independent, New Statesman, and The New York Times. She lives in Manchester.

A record of an era, winding one girl's coming-of-age story through the drama of political evolution ... 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 also upon us. -- Mary Maher * Irish Times * This is a document historians dream of ... it captures the spirit of the 1960s-its fun and crazy idealism-in the life of one spirited young woman. -- Joan Bakewell * Sunday Times * Unerringly perceptive and funny ... if you want to know what the sixties were like, read this book. -- Julie Christie The book works best in conveying the excitement generated by ideas, not just straightforwardly political ones but those about art and the wider definition of liberation ... I wasn't there, but I'm happy that Rowbotham was, and that she remembers it with such clarity. * Literary Review * A rich, painful picture emerges of women searching for both words and spaces to articulate the insights of feminism. * The Women's Review of Books * The accounts of the successes, failures, joys and pains of young adulthood have the qualities to be found in the best creative writing. It is a book to be read for the quality of its writing and the honesty and humor of its presentation, as much as for the history it reveals. -- Dorothy Thompson * Times Higher Education SUpplement * An honest account of radical activism, love affairs, studies, travels, teaching, agitation and other stuff of the sixties. -- Anna Aslanyan * Tribune *