CANCELLED: We regret that due to unforeseen circumstances we have had to cancel this event. We hope to reschedule at a later date.

We welcome back to Housmans Sheila Rowbotham to dissect the 1980s, to go through her own “reasons to rebel” and discuss the outcome of that rebellion. It was the worst of times, it was the best of times…

“The 1980s were a shock. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government battered left movements, painfully disrupted working-class peoples’ livelihoods and pressed down on many groups who faced discrimination. There was no shortage of reasons to rebel. Along with thousands upon thousands of others I opposed not just the repressive laws, but the fundamental tenets of the new right. Hanging on to visions of creative utopias, we strove for new ways of organizing and relating to others and we sought to connect a liberatory sexual politics with rebellions against many kinds of inequality. We argued wrote, campaigned, demonstrated, picketed.

We established alternative cooperative projects, secured reforms through local government and made direct international links. Resourceful resistance slowed down the onslaught but we were contending not simply with the doctrinal resolve of a right-wing government. We faced something larger, something that could not be voted out – a more ruthless global capitalism, geared to profits which was prepared to dump hard-won social provision and neglect to conserve even basic infrastructure.”

Sheila Rowbotham is an English socialist feminist theorist and historian. She is the author of many books in the field of women’s studies, including Hidden from History (1973), Beyond the Fragments (1979), A Century of Women (1997) and Threads Through Time (1999), as well as the 2021 memoir Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s.