A Promise of a Dream.

• Author: Flanders, Laura
• Position: Book

A Promise of a Dream by Sheila Rowbotham Verso. 280 pages. $25.00.

Political people talk a lot about what they think. Far more rarely do they get to tell us how they came to think that way. This lack of storytelling may help the establishment media cover activists as they do wildlife: "Here in the strange surroundings they call demonstrations, this is what the activist looks like (masked), and this is what the activist eats (tofu)." More often than not, the demonstrator is caught on tape, screeching some incomprehensible slogan, fist jutting in the air.

An antidote to that kind of National Geographic reporting is Sheila Rowbotham's Promise of a Dream, in which she tracks just how she came to raise that fist and why. It's a gambol through sixties London with one of England's swinging socialists, and it's a treat.

That there is a book at all is thanks, indirectly, to Radio Three, the stodgy British radio service known better for Western classical music and cricket. Someone at the service had the bright idea of doing a program about the sixties. And two of Rowbotham's friends and sixties allies, Tariq Ali and Richard Neville, got her to come on the air and talk. The result is a personal and political history that is entirely feminist, entirely unorthodox, and altogether a good read.

Political ideology, Rowbotham reminds us, is not some learnt-in-a library, dried-out thing. It's sometimes hammered out in hard-core debate, but more often than not it's the fruit of friends and fashions and odd fancies and chance. She bonds with Ali at a dreary Communist Club lecture, for example, because she admires his white woolen hat.

Rowbotham is best known for her pathbreaking feminist research: Hidden from History: Women, Resistance and Revolution, and, most recently, the excellent Century of Women. In A Promise of a Dream, she trains her research skills upon herself.

It's no mean feat for a historian to be her own subject: "to finds words which could express inner feelings while reaching towards outer worlds of politics, social existence, culture." As she admits in the introduction, it's an exercise in writing from the inside-out, and the outside-in simultaneously, and you can sometimes feel the author strain. But if her aim was to produce a document that was both historically revealing and pertinent to politics today, she pulls it off. Part of her purpose, says Rowbotham, was to restore the validity of the aspirations of those years: As a historian, she's...