A personal history of life, love and women’s liberation In this powerful memoir Sheila Rowbotham looks back at her life as a participant in the women’s liberation movement, left politics and the creative radical culture of a decade in which freedom and equality seemed possible. She reveals the tremendous efforts that were made to transform attitudes and feelings, as well as daily life. After addressing the first British Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970, she went on to (...) encourage night cleaners to unionise, to campaign for nurseries and abortion rights. She played an influential role in discussions of socialist feminist ideas and her books and journalism attracted an international readership. Written with generosity and humour Daring to Hope recreates grassroots networks, communal houses and squats, bringing alive a shared impetus to organise collectively and to love without jealousy or domination. It conveys the shifts occurring in politics and society through kernels of personal experience. The result is a book about liberation in the widest sense. (shrink)

Jean McCrindle is treasurer of Women Against Pit Closures. In November 1985 Sheila Rowbotham interviewed her on the process through which women became involved in the strike, the impact of this on miners and the trade union officials, and the specific problems of a movement in support of a mainly men's strike which also expresses the autonomous needs of the women. Jean McCrindle reflects on the socialist-feminist politics she brought into her support of the miners’ strike, the interaction, sometimes highly (...) suspicious, sometimes enthusiastic, between the women in the coalfields and feminism, and the implications of the experience for socialism. (shrink)