I spent my 1950s adolescence at a Methodist school in east Yorkshire, longing to be somewhere else. I was interested in history from an early age and as I grew older biographies, autobiographies and memoirs provided me with a means of travelling beyond the school gates. Through reading I met all kinds of dissenting individuals and entered excitingly diverse circles. Realising there were alternative ways to think about yourself and how to live, I became a cerebral rebel.
Individuals’ stories introduced me to political and social ideas and I maintained the connection when I eventually produced two of my own: Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties and Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s. Recollections which are both personal and yet connected to a wider social and political milieu have always engaged me the most and I am in the midst of editing my manuscript on the 1980s.
After sifting through several piles, I finally settled on the following – beginning with a novel:
1. I was still at school when I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, (1954). Though I had heard of Sartre and Camus, I was unable to distinguish what was fact or fiction in her novel’s disguised characters. It was the intellectual milieu she describes of figures who floated through Parisian cafes, magazines and salons discussing books, philosophy, politics and plays – all while having affairs – that seemed alluring. De Beauvoir left me puzzled, but determined like many young women of my generation, to get to Paris. Her imagination created an alternative reality for us.
2. Emma Goldman’s Living My Life (1931) was startling and revelatory. I sat in a library in Oxford in my second year as a student, immersed in her account of her anarchist commitment, her belief in toleration for differing radical ideas, her frankness about love and desire, along with her insistence on a space for beauty and pleasure.
3. My discovery of Edward Carpenter’s My Days and Dreams (1916) introduced me to a socialist with anarchist stripes who loathed class hierarchies. Moreover he was a supporter of women’s emancipation who questioned Victorian masculinity and an advocate of same -sex love, when this could send you to prison in Britain. Carpenter poked fun at the pomposities of English colonialism, criticised the destructive impact of industry on the environment and advocated “the simple life”, retaining throughout his life a wry sense of humour about human foibles.
4. The manuscript of Hannah Mitchell’s The Hard Way Up, a pithy, reflective autobiography by a working-class socialist and militant suffragette in Lancashire who loved books, remained in a drawer until her death in 1956. Her grandson, Geoffrey Mitchell found a publisher in 1968 and I bought a remaindered copy. Her account transformed my understanding of the suffrage movement, and I was to return to it over and over again.
5. Dora Russell’s The Tamarisk Tree (1975), which covers the first world war through to the 1930s, brought out the connections between personal life and politics, feminism and socialism, in the very different context of the upper middle-class intelligentsia. I identified with Dora’s “quest for liberty and love” and felt grateful for her struggles for birth control. Rereading it in 2022, her observation of how the onset of economic depression in 1929 subtly affected individuals’ feelings has assumed a disturbing contemporary relevance.
6. Arthur Miller’s Timebends: A Life (1987) is a driven, intricate book. As a left writer, he looks “into the window” of his times, while remaining acutely aware of his own “inner paradoxes”. It was hard for me to grasp and is even harder to distill, but I cleaved to his herculean, exploratory resolve to hold on to political commitment and personal integrity.
7. Walking in the Shade (1997), the second volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography, is about the period 1949 to 1962. Despite being too young to have known the London she describes, I could connect to it more closely than Miller’s New York because I later encountered some of the people and places she mentions. In the mid 1960s New Leftists in London of my generation who rejected Stalinism, were still chewing away at the rather stringy kebabs at Jimmy’s restaurant in Soho. We read Lessing with intensity, admiring her sardonic comments on left politics and the frank sensuality of her writing on sex. I felt sad in the 1970s that, unlike Simone de Beauvoir, she would have no truck with women’s liberation.
8. Sara Maitland’s edited collection Very Heaven: Looking Back on the 1960s (1988) has an interestingly random feel – the mix of women ranges far and wide from Barbara Castle to Julie Christie, giving diverse perspectives on the decade. Several testimonies by less well known contributors record their later participation in radical social and political movements, material that often eludes historians. Sue O’Sullivan, from the US, was a member of the pioneering Tufnell Park women’s liberation group in the 1970s and helped to edit Sheba Feminist Press in the early 1980s; Terri Quaye became a singer and taught Black cultural studies. When the book was published Gina Adamou was a retailer of women’s coats and seeking election as a Labour councillor. I found a contemporary postscript online – she has recently become mayor of the London borough of Haringey. Collections of memories accentuate interesting commonalities and differences.
9. Margaret Busby’s Daughters of Africa (1992) is a work of breathtaking research which includes the experiences of many women of African descent from the US. Some were slaves or the daughters of slaves, such as Mrs Nancy Prince and Anna J Cooper, the perspicacious political thinker who was one of the first three black women graduates in the US. In the 20th century Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, and many more, wrote fiction as well as autobiography, depicting both blackness and being a woman. It was harder for women from Africa itself or from the Caribbean, but they, too, are to be found in the 1,089 pages of this extraordinary anthology, which Busby subsequently complemented with New Daughters of Africa in 2020.
10. Anne and Betty: United By The Struggle (2020) is by Anne Scargill and Betty Cook with Ian Clayton. “The struggle” is, of course, the miners’ strike of 1984 to 85, in which they were both deeply involved through Women Against Pit Closures. As a child Betty was urged to study and taken to C&A in Leeds twice a year for clothes, while Anne resolutely pedalled the secondhand tricycle that she loved to the Co-op and back in Barnsley. The young miner called Arthur, who she married, introduced her to the music of Big Bill Broonzy and debates on socialism v capitalism. Betty became a shop steward and was a member of the Labour party. The two women met through the mass movement of women in the mining communities in support of the strike. The miners were defeated – but their friendship and their political and social commitment carried on through the decades, Their warmth, thoughtfulness and humour resound on every page.
• Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s by Sheila Rowbotham is published by Verso (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
