Rowbotham's writing together with her picture of what Cook called the "potential contradictory nature of women's desires and needs" ensured that Women's Consciousness, Men's World reached a broad audience. In her 1977 book Dutiful Daughters, co-written with Jean McCrindle, Rowbotham interviewed fourteen women of lower-middle-class and working-class origin. Though Rowbotham notes that the life stories of women interviewed for Dutiful Daughters were not intended to be representative of all British women, she argues that these snap-shots of different lives, if combined with enough other oral histories, can provide an understanding of the experience of ordinary women. As part of relating the personal to the political, Rowbotham has examined the sexual and political beliefs of such late 19th- to early 20th-century radicals as the gay rights activist Edward Carpenter, who saw socialism as way for humanity's spiritual rebirth, and the feminist Stella Browne who fought for the legalisation of birth control and argued for the importance of sexual pleasure for women. Rowbotham argued that the political beliefs of Carpenter and Browne were closely tied to their personal lives. Besides her work as a historian, Rowbotham has been active in left-wing causes. In her book Beyond the Fragments, co-written with Hilary Wainwright and Lynne Segal, Rowbotham called for the various fractions of the British left to unite, and work for a socialist Britain through grassroots activism. She has great faith in activist social movements working from the bottom up to change society, and feels that historians have a duty to contribute to social change by writing books that expose what she sees as the evils of society. Placing Rowbotham as one (of three women) in her 2000 collection of Fifty Key Thinkers on History, Hughes-Warrington describes Rowbotham as a researcher who "draws upon a wide variety of sources including songs, novels, governmental and organisational records, pamphlets, other historical works and her own experiences" Hughes-Warrington noting her audience of ordinary men and women (and their history), considered it unsurprising that "she rejects much of the current literature of gender studies, Marxist theory and historiography. For her, the importation of French structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives have not only made academic writing inaccessible to the public, but have also discouraged academics from taking an interest in the developing world and in the life and work of people with different heritages from their own." Referring to Rowbotham's "The Trouble with Patriarchy", Hughes-Warrington concurs with the need