In the 1960s, Rowbotham together with Sally Alexander and Anna Davin and was one of the founders and leaders of the History Workshop movement associated with Ruskin College. The History Workshop movement sought to write a "history from below" by focusing on the experiences of ordinary people by marrying the Marxist tradition of history-writing to the labour movement tradition.Towards the end of the 1960s Rowbotham became involved in the growing women's liberation movement (also known as second-wave feminism); in 1969, she published her pamphlet "Women's Liberation and the New Politics", which argued that Socialist theory needed to consider the oppression of women in cultural as well as economic terms. She was heavily involved in the conference "Beyond the Fragments" (eventually a book), which attempted to draw together democratic socialist and socialist feminist currents in Britain. Between 1983 and 1986, Rowbotham served as the editor of "Jobs for Change", the newspaper of the Greater London Council.