Book Review: Woman's Consciousness, Man's World

Abstract of Book Review only.Women's Consciousness, Man's World is the third of Sheila Rowbotham's three recent books to reach the United States. In Women, Resistance and Revolution Rowbotham ranged over the history of pre-industrial and industrial Europe, the Russian, the Chinese and the more contemporary third world revolutions in Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam. She sought to recover the origins, development and fates of feminist ideas and movements, and most particularly their interaction with socialist movements, in opposition and in power. In Hidden From History she gives more detailed consideration to the history of feminism and socialism in England. With Women's Consciousness, Man's World Rowbotham departs from social history but not from her focus on the mutual coming to terms or inability to come to terms of socialism and feminism in both theory and practice. (Sheila Rowbotham, Women's Consciousness, Man's World. Baltimore: Penguin, 1973. 136 pp. $1.95.