Ebook: Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism

A generation ago, they wrote Beyond the Fragments. Inspired by the activism of the 1970s and facing the imminent triumph of the Right under Margaret Thatcher, they sought to apply our experiences as feminists to creating stronger bonds of solidarity in a new kind of Left movement. Since then the obstacles facing them have grown formidably—deepening recession, environmental pollution, falling real wages, and savage welfare cuts. New forms of resistance have appeared, but how are they to coalesce? In three new essays to this third edition of Beyond the Fragments , Shelia Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright return to the fraught question of how to consolidate diverse upsurges of rebellion into effective, open, democratic Left coalitions.

Sheila Rowbotham is Honorary Research Fellow in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences within the Faculty of Humanities at Manchester University and Visiting Fellow in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her many books include the James Tait Black-shortlisted Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century, Promise Of A Dream: Remembering the Sixties, and Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century. She has written for, among other newspapers, the Guardian, The Times, The Independent, New Statesman, and The New York Times. She lives in Manchester.

Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. Her books include Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism; Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men; and Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure.

Hilary Wainwright is an academic and radical activist who co-edits Red Pepper and is a Fellow of the Transnational Institute. She is Senior Research Associate for the International Centre for Labour studies at Manchester University. In 1991 she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, LA. Her previous books include Labour: A Tale of Two Parties and (with Sheila Rowbotham and Lynne Sega) the classic Beyond the Fragments.