Sunday Times: One woman's revolution

["M A Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

PROMISE OF A DREAM: Remembering the Sixties
by Sheila Rowbotham
Allen Lane £18.99 pp255
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JOAN BAKEWELL



It has for too long been the received wisdom to trash the 1960s. Souls as
disparate as lords Tebbit and Puttnam have blamed the decade for everything
that has gone wrong in our own times. Yet what they blame is not the rampant
unleashed forces of the market and late capitalism which have galloped away
with all sense of idealism ever since. They rather blame the spontaneous
impulses of the young who wanted a fairer sharing of the country's growing
wealth, and a chance to enjoy freedom from their parents' stifling
conformity. Well, well, we certainly live today in a more competitive and
less equal society than the 1960s. History, if it still exists, will one day
have to judge. In the meantime, this wholesome book offers its evidence.

 Sheila Rowbotham was in the thick of it. Born to middle-class parents in
Leeds, she was bundled off to a Methodist boarding school where she fuelled
her rebellious inclinations on Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir.
English at Oxford, a year in Paris, then a thesis and lecturing in London .
. . getting more radical all the way. Richard Cobb taught her, Edward (EP)
and Dorothy Thompson befriended her, Eric Hobsbawm was her supervisor. . .
she was indeed taught by masters. In Promise of a Dream, she dredges old
diaries, "hoping to evoke what it felt like at the time".

Here are lovers and clothes and music and politics, politics, politics. She
has opened her heart to let us in, confiding her weaknesses - "my personal
life might be messy and inconclusive"; "at the end of [19]67, I was feeling
profoundly disjointed and askew" - but setting out the utopian hopes and
running battles of the left, and not just with the authorities. This is a
document historians dream of. It captures the spirit of the 1960s - all its
silliness and fun and crazy idealism - in the life of one spirited young
woman.

"It was to be networks and movements that drew me rather than 'proper'
politics," she writes. And, indeed, proper politics was busy transforming
society for the better under its own steam. First step, the abolition of
censorship - Lady Chatterley giving that move its high profile and Larkin a
witty line of poetry. Divorce reform, an end to hanging, the
decriminalisation of homosexuality, the legalising of abortion all followed.
It is this legislation - usually private members' bills - that gave the
1960s their deeper character, creating the basics of the civilised society
we know today. It was a decade of serious social progress. Would anyone -
except perhaps Tebbit - go back on any of those reforms?

By contrast, Rowbotham's politics were non-parliamentary, direct action,
street protests picking up on the successful example of American civil
rights. CND was the first and probably the most effective of these
campaigns. Here she joined the Aldermaston marches, even leading one column
off into woods reputed to be the base of the regional seat of government in
the event of nuclear war. The ludicrous nature of official advice in the
face of attack - paper bags on the head, hide under the table - seems
ridiculous now. It's obvious who was the wiser.

Despite all the fun, the early 1960s were times of real danger in the cold
war: China was exploding atom bombs into the atmosphere, Kennedy and
Khrushchev were eyeballing each other over Cuba. All who lived through that
crisis recall it as the most dangerous day of their lives. Pressures were
great for test-ban negotiations, and street protests may have helped. But
there was never going to be a revolution. The 1960s enjoyed steady
unemployment, little inflation and an increasing flow of luxury goods at
prices people could afford . . . hardly the setting for the overthrow of
society.

Instead what we had was the arrival of "the student" and the first flexing
of youth power. There was a huge boom in higher education - 16 new
universities, 30 new polytechnics - and what student sit-ins of the late
1960s were often about was setting the agenda of how people were to be
taught. (Vietnam protests were, by necessity, more generalised.) The
hierarchies of teaching were being challenged, and Rowbotham did her bit,
lecturing day-release apprentices in Hackney about Gerard Winstanley and the
significance of Milton's Areopagitica. They, for their part, found her
King's Road op-art dresses and old fur coats a bit hard to take.

And yet, of course, there was a revolution. Perhaps the most significant
change of the century, it had been started decades earlier by suffragettes
and educationalists, but given an irresistible push by the movement for
women's liberation. Rowbotham was organiser, inspiration and chronicler of
this powerful force for change. It's hard to imagine how much, at the start
of the 1960s, women were expected to support their men, even on the radical
left. She noticed that it was the men who made the speeches while she rushed
around selling copies of the magazine, Black Dwarf. Rather than protesting
in the streets, women began meeting in small groups in each other's homes.

By l969, the national joint action committee for women's equal rights had
mobilised nurses and cleaners, factory workers and teachers. For the first
time, it was suggested that men might share childcare. Their developing
consciousness put many women's sexuality on the line: filmed by Jean-Luc
Godard, Rowbotham refused his suggestion that she strip to demonstrate her
freedom. This was the one that mattered . . . the revolution that has
changed all our lives and goes on changing them today.