A Promise of a Dream.

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 rightly concerned about the way the sixties have been alternately belittled, idealized, and reviled.

"It is not simply a matter of memories having been swallowed; our hopes have been appropriated, our aspirations twisted. In these circumstances, claiming a space to remember not only defies an overtly guarded set of political assumptions but also touches the sources of desire," she writes. "Retrieval has become an act of rebellion."

The first part of the book is dedicated largely to how she shaped herself into a political person and was shaped by the historical and social trends of her age. Sheila's "I" turns into "we" as she discovers that many of the feelings and thoughts she believed to be personal were shared by much of her generation: individual angst is zeitgeist, it turns out.

The second part of the book describes how she seasoned as an activist. Refreshingly, Rowbotham tells what most of us know but fewer admit--that political convictions and choices have a lot to do with whom one is besotted with--and that political work that is only hard slog is doomed. Along the way are lots of tender observations, particularly about the people who befriended her, the people who, she says, as much as books, "communicated a socialism which was conscious of irony, critical, and open to ideas."

Rowbotham was lucky. The people she was befriended by were great, engaged, leftwing historians, including Richard Cobb and, most significantly, E.P. Thompson and his wife, Dorothy. Perhaps because she is by profession an analyst of relationships, Rowbotham is particularly good on the dynamic between generations. Like those who cherish vicarious nostalgia for the sixties, Rowbotham arrived on her scene just as the New Left was shattering over Stalinism.

"A persistent intimation of having arrived just a little too late remained with me," she writes. "One day, when I was visiting the Thompsons, Edward gathered a bundle of New Reasoners from the late fifties and gave them to me. The feel of New Reasoner, engaged and enthusiastic, was very different from that of the New Left Review, which inclined towards cool overviews, not the creation of a new politics. `What will distinguish the New Left will be its rupture with the tradition of factionalism, and its renewal of the tradition of open association, socialist education, and activity,' Edward had written in May 1959. But where had the damn thing gone? I was to spend the rest of my life on the look-out for a socialist journal like the New Reasoner, where Karl Marx and William Blake could meet between two covers."

Rowbotham reminds readers that political mobilizations do not attract followers by words alone. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was the first social movement in Britain that broke with party politics. She was attracted to the moral cause, but also to CND's style.

"CND enlarged the space to be weird," she writes. "As the Aldermaston march approached London in 1964, I saw a political figure standing by the side of the road holding a placard on which there was simply a question mark. He had a completely green face and strange insect-like antennae. `That's Hoppy,' said someone, as if this was explanation enough. It was, indeed, John Hopkins, who later started the underground paper IT. He had just taken LSD."

And she understood the radicalizing effect of campus protests. "The very act of sitting-in itself became a learning process," she writes, "not only because it enabled students to talk together continuously, but because it broke the pattern of daily life and involved a bodily defiance, not just ideas but action."

She's writing about the London School of Economics in '67 but she could as well be writing about Genoa 2001. Way back then, she and her colleagues engaged in a very relevant conversation on adrenaline as action-fuel: "It became evident increasingly evident to many of us that simply escalating the violence and getting into fights with the police detracted from the main issue," she writes.

But Rowbotham describes a sixties politics that seems more personally engaged than today's. When Ali and others launch a new radical newspaper, Black Dwarf, for example, they send Rowbotham around the country by train to distribute the publication to student activists, union members, and people involved in grassroots politics. Would they have gone public via the Internet if Black Dwarf had come out today? Probably. But Rowbotham might never have found the voice she did had she stayed stuck behind the screen.

A historian of revolutions sparked from below, she taught extension classes to workers throughout her Black Dwarf years. The secretaries and London Transport employees who studied with her kept her daily aware of how often leftist language can, well, fail to resonate.

The anti-war uprisings of May '68 affected those in her classroom, but it was the tenants' campaign that made them take the big step of demonstrating with the students, whom they had previously reviled for being disrespectful and unpatriotic. "Their mothers had been coming back from tenants' marches angry about police violence against working-class people. They had gone to [the huge anti-Vietnam war rally in London's] Grosvenor Square to avenge their mums."

Call it revelation from below. Reading Promise, one wonders' how much of this class work contemporary leftwing intellectuals--with the exception of Barbara Ehrenreich--are willing to do today.

Rowbotham is best known as a feminist, but if you're looking for an account of an emancipatory trickle gathering steadily into a rushing tide, the flow she records in A Promise of a Dream is a whole lot more meandering than that. For the first two thirds of this memoir, the author is skeptical of feminists, if not utterly put off by a movement that struck her as too "prim and proper."

In 1967, when homosexuality between consenting adults and abortion were legalized, Rowbotham sighed, "Thank goodness." But she had no knowledge of, or relationship to, the long campaigns that had brought those huge reforms about.

She did begin brooding about being a woman that year, "yet feminism did not interest me," she writes. "I knew it only as the suffrage movement of long ago or as a lobby of professional women for advancement at work. This narrow version of `feminism' as the demand for external rights had no purchase on the personal relationships which preoccupied me. I associated even the broader term `emancipation' with competing with men and regarded the claims of women in the public arena as `men's attitudes' in reverse."

If nothing else, Rowbotham's reflections serve to remind us that movements can be too quick to condemn the unconverted. By the end of 1968, however, Rowbotham is invited onto the editorial board of Black Dwarf and asked to help produce a special women's issue. She reaches out to a woman trade unionist, a friend who is a single mother, and a family-planning activist to contribute articles, and she starts writing herself.

"In the spirit of '68, I knew I must write not from received authorities on `women' but from my own observations and feelings," she recalls. "As the words splattered out onto the pages, it felt as if I had reached a clearing."

As the sixties ends, Rowbotham is planning Britain's first-ever women's conference and connecting with women's liberation activists in Europe and the United States. "As we prepared for the first Women's Liberation conference, the movement I envisaged was to be an entirely new kind of politics--no leaders, no ego trips, no more sectarian disputes. It would assert the claims of working-class women, not only those of the more privileged, and it was going to be about bread and roses," she writes.

Reading that, I heard an echo: "But where has the damn thing gone?"

What actually happened to the movement, as Rowbotham admits, was not quite what she imagined--in some ways more, and in some ways very much less.

But her voice is wonderful to hear. It's the voice of an unabashedly patchwork ideology, pieced together from experiences of fury and frustration, luck and love.

You can hear Laura Flanders's new radio show on KALW in San Francisco. Her columns appear daily on www.workingforchange.com