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Rebel Crossings:New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States
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The transatlantic story of six radical pioneers at the turn of the twentieth century
In a feat of extraordinary archival research Sheila Rowbotham uncovers six little-known women and men whose lives were both dramatic and startlingly radical. Rowbotham tells a story that moves from Bristol, Belfast and Edinburgh to Massachusetts and the wildernesses of California, showing how rebellious ideas were formed and travelled across the Atlantic.
Rebel Crossings offers fascinating perspectives on the historical interaction of feminism, socialism, anarchism and on the incipient consciousness of a new sense of self, so vital for women seeking emancipation. Their influences ranged from Unitarianism, High Church Anglicanism, and esoteric spirituality through to Walt Whitman, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Eleanor Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Benjamin Tucker, and Max Stirner. In differing ways they sought to combine the creation of a co-operative society with personal freedom, enhanced perception and loving friendships, experimenting with free love, rational dress, health diets and deep breathing.
A work of significant originality in terms of historical scholarship, this book also speaks to the dilemmas of our own times.
Reviews
Rebel Crossings contains remarkable tales of courage
Like the radicals of the sixties who shaped Rowbotham, the subjects of her new book connected their political action to their pursuit of personal transformation and spiritualism...Rebel Crossings...is animated by this idea, as essential now as ever, that socialism and feminism are inseparable.
Rowbotham is a leading feminist historian, and an unapologetic utopian … Rebel Crossings is crammed with hopeful visions from the past.
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An immersive book with a gripping narrative drive and it will make you wonder why stories like this are usually ignored by historians.
, Mail on Sunday -
Miriam and Robert are two of a cast of six fin-de-siècle figures that Sheila Rowbotham has unearthed, all courageous in defying convention and fighting to bring a new world into being. Rowbotham is the right person to tell this story. She has spent her career writing about historical attempts at liberation and has herself become a doyenne of the feminist movement ... The stories she has uncovered are timely because the principles they prize are under threat.
, Sunday Telegraph -
Rowbotham gives us a unique flavour of the era and insight into the bravery, boldness, imagination and occasional wackiness of a period in left-wing British and American history...a first-rate piece of social history, a well-paced and extraordinarily well-organised narrative
New Statesman -
I can't wait to read this ... Juicy historical gossip for nerds.
, LitHub -
This is a story of individuals involved in the anarchist movement, tied together by love, friendship and politics … [A] very human work about what it means to be human. Sheila Rowbotham has created a wonderful text that is at the very least a unique history, a fascinating romance, and a travelogue.
, Counterpunch -
[A] monumental work of research...[Rowbotham] follows the lives and loves and the endlessly mutating politics and enthusiasms of four women and two men who sought a utopian way of life.
, In These Times -
Rebel Crossings approaches this subject of what we might call radical overlap by way of fascinating, free spirited individuals, often personally lost in the need to make a living and make a meaningful life for themselves...If they exert no memorable political effect and would be lost to history without the staggering archival work of Rowbotham, still, they have a lot to tell us...Rowbotham has entered their lives almost as if they were her contemporaries, the political and cultural dreamers of the 1960s-70s, generations later still sure something far better could be worked out, as much personally as politically.
, Counterpunch -
Clear and even stylish.
, Times Literary Supplement -
An example of meticulous research in resurrecting forgotten lives.
, CHOICE -
Like the best fiction, it is the sweeping narrative of sympathetic characters and noble acts that makes us want to keep on reading. Rebel Crossings is epic-like in its intimate portrait of individuals who went against the grains of their times... Rowbotham has succeeded in the daunting task of making sense of lives lived in the gaps of history.
, Socialism and Democracy