Sally Baker - Mothers, Wives and Changing Lives: Women in Mid-Twentieth-Century Rural Wales

WOMEN IN MID TWENTIETH-CENTURY RURAL WALES

B. J. Brown and Sally Baker, 2011
Cover image: Dwyryd farm tenant, 1956; photograph by Geoff Charles. By permission of the National Library of Wales

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 owners 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.

British Library CIP
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7083-2334-2
e-ISBN 978-1-78316-443-1

The rights of B. J. Brown and Sally Baker to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is dedicated to R. Merfyn Jones,
Graham Day and Duncan Tanner

In memoriam Duncan Tanner (19582010)

Acknowledgements

We extend our thanks to the many people who agreed to be interviewed for this book and who subsequently gave so generously of their time, providing fascinating and moving narratives of their earlier lives. We also need to thank numerous friends and neighbours who for years have provided us with information and anecdotes regarding the recent past of rural Wales that stimulated our interest in the socio-politics of a region of Britain in many ways very different from the one in which we originated, long before we began formally researching it.

We are especially grateful to Derek Robbins of the University of East London, who provided critical feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript, and it was at his urging that we explored the parallels between our respondents lives and culture and Bourdieus ethnographic work. We have benefited enormously from the enthusiasm and expertise of colleagues at Bangor University, especially Merfyn Jones, whose work on the subject initially interested us in researching this fascinating region, and Graham Day, whose willingness to share his vast knowledge and experience in the sociology of Wales is invaluable. Particular thanks are also due to Howard Davis (who has an uncanny ability to spot potential problems) and to Ian Rees Jones. We have not been able to use in this volume all of the material that we collected during the interviews. We have further publications planned. It was a privilege to have planned the future work with Duncan Tanner, Professor of Modern History at Bangor University, who was generous in his encouragement of scholars lesser than himself. His recent untimely death has stolen from us a guide and a friend. This volume builds therefore on the intellectual capital of different scholars and disciplines, and represents a trajectory which was at times arduous but was also enormously rewarding.

The fieldwork for this book was funded by British Academy Grant SG-45236 and we are most grateful for this support.

Introduction: Womanhood, Wales and Culture

Wales is a land steeped in history, yet the histories most readily brought to mind are often ones from which women are curiously absent. Whether they involve industry and labour struggles or more distantly glimpsed legends, it is increasingly recognized that many of the better known histories of the nation have focused their attention away from the spheres of domestic and community life, where women were most active, and have under-theorized the role of women in creating and supporting the social movements that have shaped the distinctive history of the country. Women have made a major contribution to Wales as it is today, but so far there have been few authors who have brought the story of their struggle to light. Inspired by extended interviews with forty older adults in Wales who were invited to describe their early lives, we have written this volume partly in an attempt to place the hitherto hidden history of women in rural twentieth-century Wales under scrutiny. We illustrate this with historical examples and first-person accounts from people reminiscing about their own and their families histories.

In this respect, this book follows a different pathway from much work already published. A further important part of our project in the current volume is to show how insights from the social sciences can give us important new ways of interpreting the data of oral historians. We draw on many techniques oral history, narrative theory, hermeneutics and even theories usually associated with literary criticism but our major theoretical focus will be upon the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930 2002). This interdisciplinary approach will allow us to understand peoples biographies as both historical and sociological documents. Bourdieus theory allows us to understand broad cultural and symbolic patterns in communities as well as to account for anomalous findings. The use of Bourdieusian notions shows that domestic life is important for the transmission of culture and illuminates womens crucial role in this. As we explored these themes, it became apparent that this kind of analysis offered a valuable supplement to much existing scholarship on Wales, which had not explored the relationship between public/political/professional life and the domestic sphere.

In this chapter we will lay out the ground and describe the context for the volume as a whole. By way of introduction, we will explore the historical antecedents to the situation in Wales in the mid-twentieth century and the role of nineteenth-century developments in the formulation of twentieth-century Welsh culture.

Wales has often been thought of as a traditional place where gender is concerned, yet in this volume we will describe how women took leading roles in a number of important events, such as religious revivals. Additionally, in their tens of thousands, women promoted education, a love of learning and culture and a sense of ambition that has taken many of the current generation of Welsh men and women into the sciences, the arts and into public life. This desire for knowledge and aspiration towards better things characterized community life in homes, schools, chapels and eisteddfodau, and in the last century women have played a vital, yet underappreciated, role in fostering it. This book unearths the hidden debt owed to Welsh women in laying the foundation for feminist advances and present-day cultural, professional and political achievement in Wales.

The role of women in the recent history of rural Wales is an area that has received scant attention from social scientists and historians. We draw upon family stories told about womens roles in education, the chapel and the family itself to address some of the important gaps in the knowledge base relating to women and Welsh culture. Although this book is primarily concerned with these spheres, we will also explore women at work, in the context of the work in which our participants found themselves frequently teaching, but also, for example, farming. Whilst the issue of women at work in Wales has been covered in some depth previously by other authors, our intention here is to focus on the cultural work involved in accumulating, sustaining and reproducing modes of life, cultures of learning and in creating social capital, rather than to focus on the labour processes of material production found elsewhere.