Customer Reviews

A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century

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Disappointingly dim (and also English-language only] book. It describes life for women - and describes occasional protests - but of course has no suggestions how they could themselves improve matters. At the end of the book is a list of famous women with brief biogs - example Kate Adie [she read out censored material about Iraq wearing camouflaged clothing] and Diana [married a rich royal] and Margaret Mead [phoney academic] - generally women of no great character. The cover design perhaps sums up the book - a woman perched on metal eagle's head on a skyscraper, holding a large bellows camera - all the artefacts being designed by males.

She went to St Hilda's College, Oxford. One of her books says '.. my intense visionary moments didn't help.. read Gibbon and Macaulay or study the growth of the judiciary in the Middle Ages or the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I found this kind of history boring at the best of times.' She seems to have been influenced far more by her experiences later, for example with supposed lefties influenced by what everyone still calls the 'Russian Revolution'.

The social material is entirely convention - Suffragettes, World War 1, then World War 2 with judgments about e.g. Jews, 'appeasement', strikes. Then 'the pill', civil rights, capitalist use of the labour of married women...

She has the usual inability to grasp the importance of science; and of course power structures aren't analysed. So weapons or cars or medical advances or whatever 'develop'. 'Poverty' is the 'cause' of hardship. 'Capitalism brought new relationships of property and domination. It brought into being a class which did not own the means of production, 'free' labourers who had to sell their labour on the market.' She doesn't face the fact that consumers could presumably have still bought hand loom stuff, but preferred the new machine stuff.

Rowbotham had two books published in 1973, Hidden from History - 300 years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It, which is a bit of a ragbag or conspectus, arranged by topics pre-selected by other writers. She has a footnote on the 'Churching of Women' perhaps taken from Dora Russell.

And another 1973 book, Woman's Consciousness, Man's Worlds. She was influenced by Betty Friedan, 'The Feminine Mystique' which Rowbotham dates 1968, and steals from: 'graphically describes a sense of isolation.. suburban coffee meeting in an American city.. dissatisfaction.. yearning.. 'Is this all?''. Rowbotham is, compared to these Americans who were funded deliberately to promote agenda, a very soft type.

I'd guess most of the material in this book is taken from other works, and they she has taught women's issues - in fact, I checked using Google and she seems to have been at Manchester.

Although I used this book primarily for American Women's history, it does a great job with British history too. The book is well organized, looking at american and british women's history separately by decades starting with 1900 and going through 1995. In most cases, each chapter is divided by politics, work, social life and sex.