Catrin Stevens - Böcker

Iorwerth C. Peate's outstanding achievement was to create a National Folk Museum at St. Fagans. It was Peate who dreamt of an open-air museum in Wales on the Scandinavian model where the visitor could view the way of life of past ages. It was he, too, more than anyone else, who strove to see the dream realized and to establish the study of folk life as a respected academic discipline in Britain. The story of these accomplishments, and of the opposition Peate encountered--within the National Museum of Wales, for example--is lucidly outlined by Catrin Stevens. She also presents a clear and useful appraisal of Peate's academic writing in the field of folk studies.

In Wales the post-Second World War period was one of gradual decline for the major, traditional, male-orientated industries of coal, steel and slate. While whole libraries have been devoted to chronicling the rise and fall of the heroic miner and quarryman in Welsh history, the story of working-class Welsh women, who laboured in our factories in Wales during this same period, has been largely neglected and ignored. Voices from the Factory Floor aims to put this right and to allow the women to tell their own stories. Over 200 ‘factory girls’ were recorded in this oral-history project, which was run by Archif Menywod Cymru/Women’s Archive of Wales, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (Wales) and other sponsors.Their stories are fascinating. The women talk of long hours, low wages, and difficult working conditions with few health and safety regulations, but also of communal solidarity, camaraderie, controversial rites of passage and a vibrant social life. Many of them abandoned their personal ambitions and, through their sacrifice, they managed, in the sixties and seventies especially, to raise their families out of poverty. The voices of these extraordinary, ordinary, feisty working-class women deserve to be heard and appreciated.