Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties
Sheila Rowbotham
Allen Lane/the Penguin Press £18.99, pp261
Buy it at BOL

Most of the time, history happens elsewhere, to other people. It acquires a shape and hardens into a meaning as it withdraws into the past. We learn about it in schools, read about it in newspapers, rarely feel on intimate terms with it. But for some people, the Sixties (by which we usually mean the late Sixties and early Seventies) had the exhilarating sense of being history in the making: a grass-roots, present-tense and emotionally charged revolution, a world turned upside down and flooded with new freedom.

And for many other people,who were born too early and who came of age in the grey and tailored Fifties, or who came too late, or who never quite grasped what was going on until they read about it later, there was the feeling of having missed out on something: on a moment, a promise, a dream, a sense of possibility. Philip Larkin wrote that 'sex began in 1963/ which was too late for me'.

A friend of mine was backpacking in Paris in 1968, but never knew he was in the middle of a student uprising; for him, it just meant the trains were delayed and the bars were closed. I left school in the late Seventies. I was hanging on the coat-tails of the decade. By the time I was at university, for instance, women's studies was already on the curriculum.

However hard we tried to be part of a 'movement', it had become a subject and an ism rather than a process. And we hadn't been there, in the trenches sharing adventures and hardship, suffering and triumph. We could never be heroes, just inheritors, with all the grateful, resentful, competitive, disdainful and idealising feelings that inheritors have.

The nostalgia many of us feel for the mythologised Sixties is a curious, fake nostalgia for somewhere we have never been. Reading Sheila Rowbotham's touching memoir of the Sixties, however, it is clear that many people who had been there, involved and excited and touched with the glow of history, also felt this sense of not quite belonging - hence the title, in which two abstract words are yoked together to give a sense of elegy and disappointment.

I had always thought of Rowbotham - feminist historian, seasoned political campaigner, one of the organisers of the first women's liberation conference in Britain - as a secure and assertive feminist; someone who was at the centre. I had not been expecting the raw and uncertain tone of her autobiography; her endearing self-doubts, her vanity and pluck.

When Rowbotham says the Sixties, she means it. Her autobiography starts in 1960, when she was a 16-year-old in the north of England, pushing against the confines of her conservative upbringing at home and struggling with A-levels and cold showers at a Methodist boarding school.

Written down cold, her CV is impressively radical: she spent a year in France, where she was a Paris beatnik, dressed in black, lived with a pavement artist in Marseilles, fell in and out of love. She went to Oxford University, where she became excited about the silent history of ordinary people. She lived in a communal house in Hackney, where nobody cleaned up and everybody was welcome; she taught history for the Workers' Education Association. She was on the editorial board of the radical propagandist magazine Black Dwarf.

She spent her life in meetings, making tea for the men until she learnt that men should be making tea for her, licking envelopes, slogging round from door to door trying to sell her dreams, arranging workshops, marching, chanting, protesting. Her friends were people like Tariq Ali, Robin Blackburn, Eric Hobsbawm, Dorothy and E.P. Thompson, Sally Alexander, Raphael Samuel. She was involved in a Jean-Luc Godard project.

But between the lines of the CV another Rowbotham emerges. She got up and spoke, yes, but she felt sick with fear before and often she stumbled in her delivery; she marched, but thought about what clothes to wear as well; she stood up for herself, but felt easily crushed; she had a good many sexual relationships, often casually, yet continued to be full of romantic yearnings and a sense of her own helplessness; she was part of the woman's liberation movement (though she realised that she was a feminist surprisingly late into her twenties), but wanted men to dominate her; she wept easily enough; she felt humiliated as often as the rest of us feel it; she was angry and needy; funny and earnest.

Her account of herself is emphatically unglamorous. Lots of people are good at writing about their large tragedies, but she is good at writing about her small failures, which is far more rare and revealing. Rowbotham is not used to the subjective voice; she is a historian and her subject has been the previously unheard voices of others (Women, Resistance and Revolution, Women's Consciousness, Man's World, Hidden History and A Century of Women). At times, she falters, can't seem to find the right words for feelings which are complicatedly tangled. She can occasionally fall into the pedagogic tone that comes easily to her, explaining the significance of events to us rather than exploring her own involvement.

But for the most, she remains inside the personal history she tells, deliberately unable to see the wood for the trees. She lost her virginity late and without much pleasure; her first women's meeting was in a lavatory; her Vietnam Solidarity efforts in 1968 were to organise a jumble sale in her house, attended by a few old ladies; she couldn't revolutionise her students; she was chronically low in self-confidence. One of her ex-lovers, Bob Rowthorne, said to her in 1969 that her political significance was as an example. 'People could look at me and feel convinced: "If she can do it so can I." I laughed, but I think there was truth in what he said. I seemed often to bumble almost unconsciously into doing a lot of things in my life.'

To know that Sheila Rowbotham, the unflagging, impressive Sheila Rowbotham, bumbled - well, that's a gift to be cherished.