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

Rowbotham, Sheila

3.67

43 ratings by Goodreads

9780670874200: A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670874205 ISBN 13: 9780670874200

Publisher: Viking, 1997

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A distinguished social and feminist historian chronicles the dramatic changes that have taken place in the lives of American and British women over the course of the last one hundred years, explaining how women have shaped the twentieth century and featuring essays on topics ranging from lesbian culture to Barbie dolls.

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Review:

A Century of Women is an amiable though exhaustingly packed overview of women's lives from 1900 to the 1990s in England and America, two countries joined by a language but divergent in many other ways. Cross-pollination of fads and politics ferried across the Atlantic yielded similar, though hardly identical, fruit. The British suffragettes who plotted ways to get themselves jailed inspired their American sisters, who leaned more heavily on the lever of propaganda. Tactics used by women trying to unionize the U.S. garment trade owed a tip of the hat to English labor organizers who encouraged waves of strikes in the first decade of the century. In the 1960s, when ripples from the American women's liberation movement splashed down in parts of England, trade unionists fought for equal job opportunities and the London Women's Liberation Workshop labeled their newsletter "Harpies Bizarre." Sheila Rowbotham fills each page with so many quotes, people, and events that readers may grow frustrated at being hustled along too fast to enjoy a particular time.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An almanac of the events and personalities that have driven the changes in women's lives from 1900 to the present. Rowbotham, a sociology research fellow at the University of Manchester in England, has written previously about women's struggles (Hidden from History, 1975, etc.). Here is a decade-by- decade overview that ranges from Christabel Pankhurst's call for a women's vote in 1905 to the international women's conference in Beijing in 1995. From the beginning, the author shows, the goals of women were (and continue to be) muddled in the debate about mothering and homemaking vs. careers and independence. And comparing the progress of women in Britain and the US, she demonstrates that they were parallel but not identical. British women, in a society defined by class, fought for security and a living wage. US women, in a struggle complicated by racism, fought for equality. The debate about family values surfaced in the 1950s as independent and liberal women were viewed as communist sympathizers. In the 1960s and '70s, the women's movement gained visibility and strength, spinning off from the civil rights movement in the US and from class and economic struggles in Britain. The 1980s saw Margaret Thatcher take the spotlight as prime minister of Britain, and women begin to turn their political attention to welfare cuts and nuclear energy, while in the US under President Reagan, women struggled to keep their gains, including the right to abortion. The author sees the 1990s as a time when feminism is not a separate agenda, but bound to global as well as local economic and social policy. Short essays about such aspects of women's culture as theater and comedy lighten this densely packed history; a series of several hundred biographies and footnotes are icing for researchers. A storehouse of the known and unknown women and organizations who fought for and framed the 20th-century struggle for equal opportunity for women. (100 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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