Sheila Rowbotham

Women encounter technology: changing patterns of employment in the Third World.

This collection explores the effects of new technologies on womens employment and on the nature of womens work. The volume is edited by two pre-eminent scholars in the field and contains thirteen articles from leading academics worldwide. The book provides a critique of postmodernism and ecofeminism and demands that new technology is used as a vehicle for gender equality in the developing world.

Mapping the women's movement : feminist politics and social transformation in the North

Contributors to the book include Bianca Beccalli, Johanna Brenner, Jane Jenson, Vera Mackie, Evelyn Mahon, Maxine Molyneux, Sheila Rowbotham, Monica Threlfall and Peggy Watson.

Weapons of the Weak

The amiable and modern-sounding term ’flexibility’ has become the stalking horse of low-paid sweated labour. Homework has become a contemporary issue once again as both small and large firms have sought to cut production costs to the bone in competition with the newly industrialized countries. Homeworkers are still mainly women, either because they are looking after children, cannot find better paid jobs or have language problems or fear racism in the workplace. The 1994 National Survey of Homeworkers in Britain found the majority were still doing various forms of sewing, but that assembly work, packing and clerical work were also common. Not only were they extremely low paid, they lacked security of employment and could suffer from ill health or accidents without any protection (Huws, 1994: 2). This is the human cost of ’flexibility’. This pattern of employment has become widespread in Europe as well as in poor countries, as Ieke van den Burg from the Dutch trade union movement noted at the 1996 meeting of the International Labour Organization (ILO),

After Thatcher: Still trying to piece it all together

S heila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright wrote Beyond the Fragments a generation ago. Inspired by the activism of the 1970s and faced with the imminent triumph of the right under Margaret Thatcher, they drew on their experiences as feminists and socialists to offer ideas for a project that would help create stronger bonds of solidarity and alliance, through the formation of a new kind of left movement. Since then the obstacles facing those struggling for radical social transformation have grown formidably: we have seen among other disasters the decline of the left as a national force, the massive impact of the neoliberal agenda, the collapse of manufacturing industry, greatly increased environmental problems and a widening inequality gap.

Desert Island Texts

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen ...

Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism.

New Introduction(2012) - Beyond the Fragments, Sheila Rowbotham Reporting back(2012), Hilary Wainwright Today, Yesterday & Tomorrow: Between Rebellion and Coalition Building(2012), Lynne Segal. Original Introduction(1979), Hilary Wainwright The Womens Movement and Organizing for Socialism(1979), Sheila Rowbotham A Local Experience(1979), Lynne Segal Moving Beyond the Fragments(1979), Hilary Wainwright.