Our Mothers' Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History, 1830-1939

OUR MOTHERS’ LAND

Gender Studies in Wales

Astudiaethau Rhywedd yng Nghymru

Series Editors

Jane Aaron, University of Glamorgan

Brec’hed Piette, Bangor University

Sian Rhiannon Williams, University of Wales Institute Cardiff

Series Advisory Board

Deirdre Beddoe, Emeritus Professor

Mihangel Morgan, Aberystwyth University

Teresa Rees, Cardiff University

The aim of this series is to fill a current gap in knowledge. As a number of historians, sociologists and literary critics have for some time been pointing out, there is a dearth of published research on the characteristics and effects of gender difference in Wales, both as it affected lives in the past and as it continues to shape present-day experience. Socially constructed concepts of masculine and feminine difference influence every aspect of individuals’ lives; experiences in employment, in education, in culture and politics, as well as in personal relationships, are all shaped by them. Ethnic identities are also gendered; a country’s history affects its concepts of gender difference so that what is seen as appropriately ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ varies within different cultures. What is needed in the Welsh context is more detailed research on the ways in which gender difference has operated and continues to operate within Welsh societies. Accordingly, this interdisciplinary and bilingual series of volumes on Gender Studies in Wales, authored by academics who are leaders in their particular fields of study, is designed to explore the diverse aspects of male and female identities in Wales, past and present. The series is bilingual, in the sense that some of its intended volumes will be in Welsh and some in English.

OUR MOTHERS’ LAND

CHAPTERS IN WELSH WOMEN’S HISTORY, 1830–1939

Edited by

Angela V. John

CARDIFF

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2011

© The Contributors, 1991

First published, 1991

New edition with updated introduction, 2011

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Our Mothers’ land : chapters in Welsh women’s

      history 1830–1939.

      I. John, Angela V.

      305.4209429

ISBN 978-0-7083-2340-3

e-ISBN 978-1-78316-287-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.

The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Three women next to an archery target c.1910, by D. C. Harries. Reproduced by permission of The National Library of Wales

In memory of the Welsh writer

Menna Gallie

1919–1990

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following for permission to use their work/records: the Masters and Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge, the archivists at Cyfarthfa Castle Museum, Glamorgan Record Office, Powys Record Office, the Imperial War Museum, Viscount Wimborne, Philip N. Jones, Hywel Francis, Ann Williams, Ryland Wallace, Thalia Campbell, Diana Atkinson and the editors of the journal Llafur (where an earlier Welsh version of Sian Rhiannon Williams’s article originally appeared). Thanks also go to members of Llafur (The Welsh People’s History Society) for their support via a day school. We are especially grateful to Susan Jenkins and Ceinwen Jones at the University of Wales Press. For this new edition we are indebted to Sarah Lewis and the team at the Press and the editors of the Gender Studies in Wales series. The editor would like to thank the reader for constructive comments and all the contributors for being so co-operative and committed.

Photographs appear by kind permission of the following: in chapters 1, 3, 6, 7 the National Library of Wales, in chapter 2 the late John Owen, in chapter 4 Aberystwyth University, in chapter 5 the National Museum of Wales, in chapter 8 the Imperial War Museum.

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

List of Contributors

Another Chronology

Two Decades of Development: Introduction to the New Edition

Introduction to the 1991 Edition

1 Women, Community and Collective Action: The Ceffyl Pren Tradition

Rosemary A. N. Jones

2 Beyond Paternalism: The Ironmaster’s Wife in the Industrial Community

Angela V. John

3 The True ‘Cymraes’: Images of Women in Women’s Nineteenth-Century Welsh Periodicals

Sian Rhiannon Williams

4 ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’? Women and Suicide in Carmarthenshire, c.1860–1920

Russell Davies

5 Counting the Cost of Coal: Women’s Lives in the Rhondda, 1881–1911

Dot Jones

6 From Temperance to Suffrage?

Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan

7 ‘The Petty Antics of the Bell-Ringing Boisterous Band’? The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1890–1918

Kay Cook and Neil Evans

8 Munitionettes, Maids and Mams: Women in Wales, 1914–1939

Deirdre Beddoe

Illustrations

Map of Wales

The second four of Doctor Syntax

The Ladies patronize the Oddfellows Society

The front cover of Y Gymraes, April 1913

Wood engraving by George du Maurier

Mrs George, the washerwoman

Sarah Jane Rees (‘Cranogwen’)

Cartoon showing a Liberal view of the suffrage campaign

WSPU and NUWSS branches

Funeral procession of a woman munition worker

Abbreviations

Contributors

D

EIRDRE

B

EDDOE

is Emeritus Professor of Women’s History at the University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd and the President of Archif Menywod Cymru / Women’s Archive of Wales. She is the author of Out of the Shadows: A History of Women in Twentieth-Century Wales (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2000) and works widely in television and radio.

K

AY

C

OOK

(now B

ROWNING

) is a native of Barry. She completed a degree in History and Sociology at the University of Warwick in 1991. She has recently retired after working for sixteen years with the Development Board for Rural Wales which merged with the Welsh Development Agency in 1998 and then became part of the Welsh Assembly Government.

R

USSELL

D

AVIES

is Marketing Manager at Aberystwyth University. He is the author of the highly successful Secret Sins: Sex, Violence and Society in Carmarthenshire 1870–1920 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1995) and Hope and Heartbreak: A Social History of Wales and the Welsh, 1776–1870 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2005). Both books were turned into television series on S4C.

N

EIL

E

VANS

is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History and Welsh History at Cardiff University and at the Welsh Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs at Bangor University. He has been joint editor of Llafur since 1994 and has edited (with Charlotte Williams and Paul O’Leary) A Tolerant Nation? Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Wales (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2003) and (with Eberhard Bort) Networking Europe: Essays on Regionalism and Social Democracy (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2000).

A

NGELA

V. J

OHN

comes from Port Talbot and now lives in Pembrokeshire. She is an Honorary Professor of History at Aberystwyth University, held a Chair in History at the University of Greenwich, London for many years and is a vice-president of Llafur. Having published extensively on women’s and gender history, she now concentrates on biographical history (see www.angelavjohn.com). She co-authored (with Revel Guest) a biography of Lady Charlotte Guest, paperbacked by Tempus / The History Press in 2007. Her most recent biography is Evelyn Sharp. Rebel Woman 1869–1955 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009). She is currently writing the life of Lady Rhondda. She has also penned several Introductions to reprints of Menna Gallie’s novels for Honno Press. The most recent (co-authored with Claire Connolly) is for You’re Welcome to Ulster (2010).

D

OT

J

ONES

(now T

HOMAS

) has retired. Her last job was at the Canolfan Uwchefrydiau Cymreig a Cheltaidd Prifysgol Cymru/University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth where she worked on the Social History of the Welsh Language project. Earlier writings include articles on workmen’s compensation and the south Wales miner, the Poor Law and women’s Friendly Societies.

R

OSEMARY

A. J

ONES

read History at the Universities of Aberystwyth and Lampeter, and is a former Research Fellow of the University of Wales (having participated in the Social History of the Welsh Language project at the Canolfan Uwchefrydiau Cymreig a Cheltaidd/Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies). She was employed for many years at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and, more recently, was a member of the management team of ‘Gathering the Jewels’, the website for Welsh cultural history.

C

ERIDWEN

L

LOYD

-M

ORGAN

was brought up in Tregarth, Caernarfonshire, and was educated at the Universities of Oxford, Poitiers and Wales (Aberystwyth). In 2006 she retired from the National Library of Wales where she was Head of Manuscripts and Visual Images. She has published widely in Welsh, French and English, including studies of Welsh women writers and artists. She is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Welsh, Cardiff University.

S

IAN

R

HIANNON

W

ILLIAMS

is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Education at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff. Her publications include Oes y Byd i’r Iaith Gymraeg (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1992), a study of the social history of the Welsh language in industrial Monmouthshire and, with Carol White, Struggle or Starve: Stories of everyday heroism between the wars (Dinas Powys, Honno, 2009 edition). She is co-editor of the series Gender Studies in Wales (University of Wales Press).

Another Chronology

Wales, showing the pre-1974 county boundaries.

(From T. Herbert and G. E. Jones (eds), People and Protest: Wales 1815–1880, by permission of the Open University.)

Two Decades of Development: Introduction to the New Edition

It is twenty years since this book was first published. In 1991 women’s history in Wales was still a tentative, even controversial, subject. Now in the twenty-first century it seems much more established. Indeed, the book’s welcome inclusion in a series on Gender Studies in Wales is one indication of how its subject matter has subsequently developed.

There has been a flowering of articles and books about modern Welsh women’s history over the last two decades. Our Mothers’ Land has played a part in stimulating this development and it has even produced offspring! We have Our Daughters’ Land and Our Sisters’ Land, published by the University of Wales Press. A 2007 BBC television series on women’s history was entitled ‘Land of Our Mothers’.

One early response to Our Mothers’ Land was a project entitled Project Grace. Designed to produce teaching materials in Welsh women’s history and funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, its essays and documents by Neil Evans, one of this book’s contributors, along with Pamela Michael and Annie Williams, have been widely used in Welsh university libraries.

The 1991 Introduction lamented the absence of women academics in Welsh university history departments. This situation has improved and they are now visible and influential. Women are also more evident in senior university positions. The University of Glamorgan has appointed Wales’s first female vice-chancellor.

In such respects it is good that some of the original Introduction is now anachronistic. There remains, however, a need for more research and teaching in Welsh women’s history. Recognising the centrality of gender relations to our understanding of the past is vital but, given that women’s history was so neglected for so long, it requires continued attention. The fact that the huge Encyclopaedia of Wales/Gwyddoniadur Cymru published in 2008 has an entry entitled Women/Menywod suggests how far there still is to go. Women constituted only a tenth of the top ‘100 Arwyr Cymru/100 Welsh Heroes’ in Culturenet Cymru’s 2003 online poll (that attracted 41, 223 nominations) and most of them were born in the twentieth century.

It is more than eighty years since universal female suffrage was achieved in Wales. And much has happened in the wider context of women’s rights since this book was first published. The National Assembly for Wales has helped to foster a very different climate from that of the early 1990s. Its second assembly created its own history by being the first democratic institution in the world to have a fifty/fifty gender split.

Yet at the time of writing only a quarter of local councillors are female and less than ten per cent of council leaders. There are still glaring gaps in employment opportunities with no female chief executives at the leading 100 companies in Wales. In terms of sexual violence, pay, media representation and much more, it is evident that a chasm still exists between theory and practice. As early as 1991, the year this book was first published, a hefty tome called Backlash by the American Susan Faludi chronicled the reaction against modern feminism that was becoming apparent. We were soon told that we had entered Post Feminist times.

And despite heartening changes of policy designed to promote gender equality, legislation cannot guarantee shifts in thinking. The decision in 2009 to name the north Wales health board after a much travelled nineteenth century Bala woman who nursed in the Crimean War under Florence Nightingale and wrote her own autobiography seemed eminently appropriate, especially since there are Aneurin Bevan and Hywel Dda health boards. However, the name Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board produced many critics. Their chief complaint was that few would recognize who she was. Yet how are such figures to become, let alone remain, known if society will not allow them the space they deserve alongside other names celebrated in history?

By making Our Mothers’ Land available once again, it is hoped that a new generation of history students (in the widest sense of the term) can interrogate and so begin to understand the dynamics of women’s lives in the past and how they might relate to change in the present and future.

This reprint reproduces the original Introduction and eight essays. They serve as part of the valuable historiography of a rapidly developing subject. Each essay is accompanied by a bibliographical note reflecting the publications available in the early 1990s. In order that readers can appreciate the degree to which the subject has developed since then and to aid current and future research it is also worth citing some of the significant publications in Welsh women’s history that have appeared over the last two decades. This is done below.

There has not been an even development in recent publications. Some of the topics addressed in this book have generated more research than others. What follows is a summary of what we (the authors of the chapters) see as the most relevant publications since 1991. Taken alongside the original bibliographical notes they provide readers and potential researchers with the opportunity to take subjects further and perhaps ultimately add themselves to this growing field.

The literature on the subject of the first chapter (on women, community and collective action) is now extensive. Martin Ingram has published seminal essays in Christopher Brooks and Michael Lobban (eds), Communities and Courts in Britain, 1150–1900 (London, Hambledon Press, 1997), 61–82 and in Herman Roodenberg and Pieter Spierenburg (eds), Social Control in Europe, Volume 1:1500–1800 (Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2004), 288–308. He critiques David Underdown’s work (cited in the original bibliographical note) in ‘Scolding Women Cucked or Washed: a crisis in gender relations in early modern England?’, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London, University College of London Press, 1994), 48–80.

For additional information on the role of women in community sanctions in Wales see Rosemary Jones, ‘Sociability, solidarity, and social exclusion: women’s activism in the south Wales coalfield, ca.1830 to 1939’, in Laurie Mercier and Jaclyn J. Gier (eds), Mining Women: Gender in the Development of a Global Industry, 1670–2000 (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 96–118 (although due to an error during the publication process, the published version is incomplete). For an interesting perspective on community sanctions during and immediately after the period of the Rebecca Riots, see also Richard W. Ireland, ‘A Want of Order and Good Discipline’: Rules, Discretion and the Victorian Prison (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2007), chapter 1. See too Sharon Howard, ‘Riotous community: crowds, politics and society in Wales, c.1700–1840’, Welsh History Review, 20, No.4 (December 2001), 656–686. For explorations of Welsh women’s protests in more recent times see, for example, Steffan Morgan, ‘Stand By Your Man: wives, women and feminism during the Miners’ Strike 1984–5’, Llafur, 9, No. 2 (2005), 59–71.

Researchers wanting to follow up the life of Lady Charlotte Guest (one of the subjects of the second chapter on the ironmaster’s wife in the industrial community) now have the opportunity to view her wonderful original journals. They have been deposited on loan in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth and can be consulted by the public. There is also now a paperback edition of her biography: Revel Guest and Angela V. John, Lady Charlotte Guest. An Extraordinary Life (Stroud, Tempus/The History Press, 2007). See too Keith Strange, Merthyr Tydfil. Iron Metropolis. Life in an Industrial Town (Stroud, Tempus/The History Press, 2005) and Andy Croll, ‘Writing the insanitary town: G. T. Clark, slums and sanitary reform’, in Brian L1. James (ed.), G. T. Clark: Scholar Ironmaster in the Victorian Age (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1998). K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998) is a study of women and power.

Aled Jones’s book, Press, Politics and Society: A History of Journalism in Wales (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1993), provides a useful context for the third chapter on images of women in their nineteenth-century Welsh periodicals. Discussion about the historical significance of the 1847 commissioners’ reports on the state of education in Wales continued during the 1990s with the publication of Prys Morgan (ed.), Brad y Llyfrau Gleision: Ysgrifau ar Hanes Cymru (Llandysul, Gomer, 1991) and Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1998).

Jane Aaron’s work on nineteenth-century women’s literature has further demonstrated that the ideology of femininity in Wales was greatly influenced by the ‘Blue Books’ debate and that the ‘true Cymraes’ who emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century was a strong-minded and ‘steely’ character in contrast to the rather insipid and submissive image of the ‘Angel in the House’. This discussion is detailed in Pur fel y Dur: Y Gymraes yn Llên Menywod y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg [Pure as Steel: The Welshwoman in Women’s Nineteenth-century Literature] (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1998). In it Aaron also argues that Y Frythones and Y Gymraes (from 1891 onwards) played an important role in nurturing women’s writing and awareness of a feminist agenda. See chapters 5 and 6 of her more recent volume, Nineteenth-century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2007) for English-language discussion of these ideas (this is also informative about women’s temperance literature). R. Tudur Jones’s ‘Daearu’r Angylion: Sylwadau ar ferched mewn llenyddiaeth 1860–1900’, in J. E. Caerwyn Williams (ed.), Ysgrifau Beirniadol, XI (Denbigh, Gwasg Gee, 1999), 191–226 also discusses the concept of the ‘Angel in the House’ in Welsh religious literature, while Rosemary Jones has written on women, the Welsh language and respectability in Victorian Wales. See ‘Sfferau ar wahân? Menywod, iaith a pharchusrwydd yng Nghymru Oes Fictoria’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), Gwnewch Bopeth yn Gymraeg: Yr Iaith Gymraeg a’i Pheuoedd 1801–1911 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1999) [also in English].

Other relevant works on closely related themes include Kirsti Bohata’s ‘Engendering a new Wales: female allegories, Home Rule and imperialism 1893–1910’, in Allyce von Rothkirch and Daniel Williams (eds), Beyond the Difference: Welsh Literature in Comparative Contexts (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2004) and Ursula Masson, ‘Hand in Hand with the women, forward we will go: Welsh nationalism and feminism in the 1890s’, Women’s History Review, 12, No. 3 (2003), 357–86.

Two books by Russell Davies, the author of chapter 4, provide a wider context for his work on women and suicide in Carmarthenshire. They are Secret Sins: Sex, Violence and Society in Carmarthenshire 1870–1920 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1995) and idem, Hope and Heartbreak: A Social History of Wales and the Welsh 1776–1970 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2005).

Since Dot Jones wrote her chapter the potential for online census research has increased dramatically and census material is now available for the thirty years she examined that is from 1881 to 1911. The census data used here can now be accessed online through various websites mostly designed to serve a genealogy interest. A good starting place is the National Archives at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. Here there are links to www.ancestry.co.uk, a subscription site where searching is free but a charge is made for downloading material. But be warned: if you use indexes they are only as accurate as someone else’s transcriptions. No one should plunge into analysis of census material without consulting Edward Higgs, Making Sense of the Census Revisited: Census Records for England and Wales 1801–1901 – A Handbook for Historical Researchers (London, The National Archives and Institute of Historical Research, 2005).

One important book consulted for this chapter, Elizabeth Andrews’s autobiography, has now been reprinted along with her political articles, edited by Ursula Masson: Elizabeth Andrews, A Woman’s Work is Never Done (Dinas Powys, Honno Press edition, 2006). For the Rhondda more generally see two books by Chris Williams: Democratic Rhondda: Politics and Society 1885–1951 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1996) and Capitalism, Community and Conflict: The South Wales Coalfield 1898–1947 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1998). Although focused on the Aber Valley, Michael Lieven, Senghenydd. The Universal Pit Village 1890–1930 (Llandysul, Gomer, 1994) includes interesting material on women’s lives in a south Wales coalfield community. There is more material on women’s domestic lives in