Women in Movement (Routledge Revivals): Feminism and Social Action

First published in 1992, this book is an historical introduction to a wide range of women’s movements from the late eighteenth-century to the date of its publication. It describes economic, social and political ideas which have inspired women to organize, not only in Europe and North America, but also in the Third World. Sheila Rowbotham outlines a long history of women’s challenges to the gender bias in political and economical concepts. She shows women laying claim to rights and citizenship, while contesting male definitions of their scope, and seeking to enlarge the meaning of economy through action around consumption and production, environmental protests and welfare projects.

About the Author

Sheila Rowbotham is a Writer in Residence in the Eccles Centre for American Studies in the British Library and an Honorary fellow at the Universities of Manchester and Bristol. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society. She helped to found the Women’s Liberation Movement in the early 1970s and has written many books on women’s and labour history. These include A Century of Women; Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties and Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love which was awarded the Lambda Literary Prize for Gay Biography in the US and short listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her poems and two plays have also been published. Her most recent work, Dreamers of a New Day: Women who Invented the Twentieth Century , describes American and British women’s ideas and plans for changing daily life from the 1880s to the 1920s and was published in 2010.