Vice Chancellor

As we come together today to celebrate the achievements of our History graduates, and wish them well on their future paths, it is hard to imagine a more inspiring or appropriate Honorary Graduand than Professor Sheila Rowbotham. Sheila is a writer, socialist feminist activist and one of the founders and foremost thinkers of the British Women’s Liberation Movement. And as a lifelong historian, she understands all too well the pleasures and pains of studying the past. In a poem that I had pinned to my office door for many years, she wrote: ‘I cannot quite get hold of history/I take it around with me,/bags and parcels/I never quite explore’. I imagine many of you know that feeling very well – I certainly do.

Sheila was born in Leeds to Lance and Jean and educated at Hunmanby Hall, a Methodist school. She remembers her stylish and sardonic history teacher, Olga Wilkinson, who required her class to list the events they’d learned about in chronological order, creating a strong sense of history where ‘one thing leads to another’. She studied History at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and at this time met the socialist historians Dorothy and Edward Thompson, who became close friends and mentors, and important role models for engaging with history and politics. She then embarked on a PhD on the history of adult education, living and working in Hackney – a place which would be central to her activism over the next two decades.

Sheila was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the Hackney Young Socialists, and on the editorial board of the underground magazine Black Dwarf. Responding both to women’s inequality in society, and the sexism within the New Left, she wrote in one of the first public statements of Women’s Liberation in Britain: ‘We want to drive buses, play football, use beer mugs not glasses….We do not want to be wrapped up in cellophane or sent off to make the tea or shuffled in to the social committee. But these are only little things. Revolutions are about little things. Little things which happen to you all the time, every day, wherever you go, all your life.’  With this idea that the personal was political, Sheila and her fellow feminists were expanding what counted as politics.

Sheila was one of the organisers of the first Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College in 1971, and went on to write a series of books which are among the foundational texts of the British Women’s Liberation Movement. In these works she explored three key themes: first, the need to understand the history of women in order to understand the roots of inequality in the present. Second, the relationship between feminism and Marxism, and how class structures contribute to the oppression of women. And thirdly, the importance of exploring and understanding women’s experience of the world, and a politics that made room for the seemingly trivial details of everyday life: housework, dreams, and love. These values were reflected in her activism. Alongside her work as a lecturer at the Workers’ Educational Association, in the 1970s she was involved in helping to unionize night cleaners, campaigning to save Family Allowances and abortion rights as well as extending nursery provision.

Sheila’s career has combined writing, teaching, activism and research, and a trailblazing appointment as Professor of Gender and Labour Studies at the University of Manchester. Her many books – which have been translated into 14 languages - have spanned history, biography, sociology and feminist thought. She has written extensively on the globalisation of labour, on women’s history, and the history of radical thinkers in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including her prize-winning biography of the utopian socialist and LGBT rights pioneer Edward Carpenter, who she says ‘always cheers me up’. Her two wonderful memoirs, Promise of a Dream and Daring to Hope, give a vivid, honest, life-affirming account of her life and work in the 1960s and 1970s and I’m happy to report that she is now working on a third volume covering the 1980s.

Sheila moved to Bristol in 2010) after researching the radical history of the city for her book Rebel Crossings, and has been an in-demand speaker for the Festival of Ideas, the Women’s Literature Festival, the Arnolfini and the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft. We welcome her partner and fellow historian, Mike Richardson and friends, Nigel Fountain, Monica Henriquez, Gabrielle Mander and Sue Tate (TBC), who join us today.

Sheila described Edward Carpenter as having ‘feet on the ground and eyes on the stars’: this also beautifully captures her own blend of activist commitment, intellectual rigour and radical optimism. Her work continues to inspire generations of activists, feminists – and historians.

Vice-Chancellor, I present to you Sheila Rowbotham as eminently worthy of the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa.