Sheila Rowbotham’s Feminism: Women’s Consciousness, Man’s World

Recently I found myself discussing the dawning of contemporary feminism with two young women—one a first-year student at Brandeis and another a senior in high school about to enter Brandeis. My cousin—the high school senior—was writing her senior thesis on the founding of Ms. magazine, a topic destined to make me feel old. Her friend, who was lending her reading material from a Brandeis women’s studies course, explained that she found the course interesting, even though the professor was a socialist-feminist “I’m not a socialist,” she quickly confessed, making it clear that her professor was a relic from another era. How times have changed—from the day when the only Brandeis students who would dare to admit that they weren’t socialist were those who found socialism reformist!

The conversation made me recall my own college days and the fierce battles over feminism we had at Sarah Lawrence College almost twenty years ago. The college was co...