Free Dreamers of a New Day by Sheila Rowbotham

Acknowledgements
    The inspiration for Dreamers of a New Day was Dolores Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (1981). Hayden’s fascinating account of women reshaping everyday life struck powerful chords with my own observations of women’s activism in trade unions and community politics, my work in the early 1980s at the Popular Planning Unit as part of the Greater London Council’s Industrial Strategy, and then for the United Nations University’s economics institute, WIDER, where I began to learn of the global networks being formed by poor women. My knowledge would be deepened by the commitment of women organizing around homework in Britain and internationally.
    It has been my good fortune to write in a period when a historical culture informed by feminism has not only ‘brought women in’, but questioned who and what can be seen. Dreamers of a New Day rests on the extraordinary growth of interest in women’s and gender history which has occurred since the emergence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s. To assert the inventiveness of women is not to deny men’s role as historical agents; instead, women’s history as I see it seeks to rebalance the frame of reference. Rather than creating a new separate sphere, the aim is to alter the bias in perspectives in which women have been either absent or added as appendages.
    My mother used to joke that my father had big ears because he was a farmer’s boy, used to listening to the earth. In looking back at the ‘everyday makers’, I have drawn on the historical equivalent of putting your ear to the ground – an approach I learned from Richard Cobb and E. P. and Dorothy Thompson. Ideas most certainly come from those who write books, articles, pamphlets, reports, but they are also generatedthrough action and lived experience, recorded in passing and snatched up by many people about whom little is known. I have consequently sought out obscure ‘dreamers’ who questioned prevailing assumptions, along with the figures who left more extensive traces. It is an orientation which is appropriate not simply for women but for all those who are excluded from dominant versions of what has been.
    I owe a profound debt to Rosalyn Baxandall, who suggested books and articles and read early drafts of the manuscript, making detailed comments and criticisms; and to my agent, Faith Evans, whose editing skills, insights and knowledge of the period were invaluable in helping me to rewrite chapters. The enthusiasm and expertise of my publishers at Verso have been crucial in enabling me to complete a project which has been long in the making. Tom Penn’s meticulous editorial suggestions and criticisms helped me to express concepts with greater clarity, and his empathetic interest inspired me. Lorna Scott Fox’s copy-editing not only spotted errors but cleverly improved my phrasing. Big thanks are due to Sonia Lane and Anne Morrow, my RSI rescuers, who typed the manuscript and gave greatly appreciated support. I am also grateful to Logie Barrow, Susan Porter Benson, Lucy Bland, Myrna Breitbart, Stella Capes, Lee Diggings, Carina Galustian, Linda Gordon, Temma Kaplan, Ruth Milkman, Alison Ravetz, Linda Walker, Colin Ward, Harriet Ward, and Barbara Winslow who provided help with written and visual sources. Particular thanks are due to Candace Falk, Barry Pateman and Jessica Moran at the Emma Goldman Papers Project at the University of California at Berkeley, who not only guided me to references but dug up material even after I had returned to Britain. Thank you as well for the encouragement of Stephanie Barrientos, Huw Beynon, Diane Elson, Swasti Mitter, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright who saw the relevance of this history to contemporary movements and policies relating to gender, class and race.
    For permission to quote I am grateful to the following: Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New