Gender Studies in Wales – serie

Twentieth-Century Women's Writing in Wales documents Welsh women's writing in both Welsh and English in the twentieth century. It identifies a distinctive female literary tradition in which Wales is represented as a 'different country' by its modern women writers; a country in which both Welshness and womanhood are variously lived and performed. This volume is arranged chronologically and deals with a wide range of literary genres, including the short story; the novel; poetry; autobiography, travel writing and drama. It affords long-overdue serious critical attention to the works of early twentieth-century women writers - from the comical short stories of Jane Ann Jones to the powerful naturalist novels of Elena Puw Morgan and free-thinking 'New Woman' Bertha Thomas - while also dealing with better-known literary figures such as Kate Roberts and Gillian Clarke. This pioneering study of twentieth-century writing by Welsh women provides a much-needed alternative literary history to the stereotypical land of male bards.

The study of borders has recently undergone significant transitions, reflecting changes in the functions of boundaries themselves, as the world political map has experienced transformations. Gender (defined as the knowledge about perceived distinctions between the sexes) is an important signifier of borders as constructed and contested lines of differences. In the interplay with other categories of difference like class, race, ethnicity, and religion, it plays a major role in giving meaning to different forms of borders. It is not surprising, then, that an increasing number of studies in the last years have aimed for a gendering of border studies. This book explores this new interdisciplinary field and develops it further. The main questions it asks are: How do we define 'borders', 'frontiers' and 'boundaries' in different disciplinary approaches of gendered border studies? What were and are the main fields of gendered border studies in different fields? What might be important questions for future research? And how useful is an inter- or transdisciplinary approach for gendered border studies? Sixteen established scholars from various disciplines contribute chapters in which they set out how the issue of gender and borders has been approached in their discipline and describe what they expect from future research.

This book explores the neglected history of women who were active in Liberal politics, campaigning for women's rights, the vote, and a full role for women in Welsh public life, at the end of the nineteenth century, and before the First World War. The over-arching argument of the book is that Welsh women's Liberal politics was distinctive, in its attempt to integrate an understanding of Liberalism which they shared with their English counterparts, and which included the aim of full equality for women, with a distinctively Welsh political agenda, and constructions of Welsh national identity. These constructions sometimes included a positive view of women in the nation, but in times of political crisis redefined gender on a more reactionary model.

This book assesses how policies developed by the National Assembly for Wales are affecting gender inequalities and investigates whether they are having an impact on social justice for women in Wales. In 1999 the first elections to devolved governments took place in Scotland and Wales. In Wales this resulted in 40 per cent of Assembly Members being women. In 2003 this proportion increased to 50 per cent which makes the National Assembly for Wales 'the first legislative body with equal numbers of men and women in the world' ("The Guardian", 3/5/03). This new gender balance of political representatives is a significant change in the gendering of political institutions and this, together with the creation of a new tier of government, has the potential to create new opportunities for the development of social policies which address gender and other social inequalities. Focusing on distinct policy domains, this book explores gender politics in a devolved Wales. Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of social policy, exploring the way it has developed since devolution and the extent to which considerations of gender and social justice for women are central to this development. The empirical chapters which form the core of the book are situated theoretically and politically by the first chapter which discusses how gender and social justice can be theorised and explores devolution and its relation to gender politics in Wales.

Equality of opportunity is a contested concept. It evokes strong emotions from proponents and opponents alike. Enduring issues of inequality and discrimination mean that it remains at the forefront of political priorities in the twenty-first century. Traditional analyses tend to focus on developments at the level of the unitary state or European Union. In contrast, this book underlines the salience of multi-level governance and offers the first detailed comparative analysis of contemporary efforts to promote equality of opportunity in the wake of constitutional reform in the UK. It presents a summary of social theory on equalities in relation to gender, and a full range of social groups and identities - such as disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation and age. It outlines the contemporary evidence base relating to patterns and processes of inequality in the 'devolved' nations. A 'governance perspective' is also advanced; one that details how constitutional law establishing the devolved legislatures contains equality clauses that enable and empower government to promote equality in public policy and law. Analysis reveals the development of distinctive regulatory structures and equalities policy lobbies in each territory. Overall, this volume charts the development of divergent legal rights and public policy on the promotion of equality in the wake of constitutional reform in the UK. Notwithstanding ongoing challenges, it is argued that the move to quasi-federalism is significant for it marks a shift from the predominant, centralised administration of social policy witnessed throughout the twentieth century, to divergent approaches designed to address contrasting socio-economic patterns and processes in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Margiad wrote about the elderly, about love between women, about elusive, enigmatic characters. She is renowned for her ability to depict place, yet she also makes place reflective of the emotional and spiritual lives of her characters and her own concerns as an artist. Evans was a border writer, concerned with cultural complexity and conflict characteristic of borderlands, but also filled with passion for the landscape of the borders and the many meanings, local and figurative; she effortlessly invests in the places she loved. Her life was transformed in later years by epilepsy, followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumour that lead to her early death, on the evening of her forty-ninth birthday, in 1958. Evans wrote A Ray of Darkness, an acclaimed autobiography about her experience of epilepsy, and as a result Margiad Evans is being 'rediscovered' by the medical community as it becomes more interested in patient experiences. This collection of essays assesses Evans's extraordinary literary legacy, from her use of folktale and the gothic to the influence of her epilepsy on her creative work.

Poetry, Geography, Gender explores literary and geographical analysis, cultural criticism and gender politics in the work of such well-known literary figures as Gwyneth Lewis, Menna Elfyn, Christine Evans and Gillian Clarke, alongside newer names like Zoe Skoulding and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. Drawing on her unpublished interviews with many of the featured poets, Alice Entwistle examines how and why their various senses of affiliation with a shared cultural hinterland should encourage us to rethink the relationship between nation, identity and literary aesthetics in post-devolution Wales. This series of lively and detailed close readings reveals how writers use the textual terrain of the poem, both literally and metaphorically, to register and script aesthetic as well as geo-political and cultural-historical change. As an innovative critical study, this volume thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first-century Wales.

This book breaks new ground in the history of Welsh women's literature, by tracking the life and work of the two forgotten women from the countryside who made their mark on their communities, their society and their nation through their campaigns and literature.

The relationship between nation and queer sexuality has long been a fraught one, for the sustaining myths of the former are often at odds with the needs of the latter. This collection of essays introduces readers to important historical and cultural figures and moments in queer life, and it addresses some of the urgent questions of queer belonging that face Wales today.

The last two decades have seen big changes within a small nation; the distinctiveness of Wales, in terms of its political life and culture, has grown considerably in that time. This edited collection by a range of eminent Welsh writers, emerging academics and creative artists examines what is distinctive about Wales and Welshness in an interdisciplinary yet comprehensive manner. The core concepts of gender, class and identity are explored throughout the book, which presents twelve chapters in three distinct yet overlapping thematic sections: Wales, Welshness, Language and Identity, Education; Labour Markets and Gender in Wales; and Welsh Public Life, Social Policy, Class and Inequality. The chapters explore the role of men and women in Wales and of Wales itself as a nation, an economy, and a centre of partially devolved governance, raising questions related to equality, policy and progression. The collection also features photographs, graphic art and poetic verse that both represent and extend the central arguments of the book.

The book subjects male characters in six south Wales novels written between 1936 and 2014 to detailed, gendered reading. It argues that the novels critique the form of masculine hegemony propagated by structural patriarchy serving the material demands of industrial capitalism. Each depicts characters confined to a limited repertoire of culturally endorsed behaviourial norms – such as displays of power, decisiveness and self-control – which prohibit the expression and cultivation of the subjective self. Within the social organisation of industrial capitalism, the working-class characters are, in practice, reduced to dispensable functionaries at work while, in theory, they are accorded the status of patriarchally-sanctioned principals at home. Ideologically subservient and ‘feminised’ in one context, they are ideologically dominant and ‘masculinised’ in another. As they negotiate, resist or strive to reconcile the irreconcilable demands of such gendered practices, recurring patterns of exclusion, inadequacy and mental instability are made evident in their representation.

This innovative collection offers a reappraisal of gender as a category of analysis in modern Welsh history. Beginning with sex work in the eighteenth century and concluding with women’s late twentieth-century anti-nuclear activism, the contributors show how gender has been constructed, represented, performed and experienced by men and women at different times and places throughout Wales’s modern past. Using a variety of approaches, the collection interrogates gender as a concept that encompasses both femininity and masculinity, provides fresh perspectives on familiar themes, and demonstrates the value of gender analysis for our understanding of the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Wales. Chapters by leading historians and early career academics each set an agenda for exploring the intersection of gender with nationality, race, class, age and sexuality.

During an age of extreme gender polarisation when women were confined to the domestic sphere, Sarah Jane Rees (1839–1916) from Llangrannog, better known by her bardic name Cranogwen, won high esteem as a poet, lecturer, journal editor, preacher and temperance campaigner. She also succeeded in her aim of inspiring other Welsh women to overcome class and gender barriers and enter the public sphere, and was hailed as a pioneering forerunner of the ‘New Woman’. This biographical volume follows her through the various stages of her career from early years as a sailor, showing how an underprivileged woman succeeded in winning such influential renown. New light is also thrown on her homosexual love life, and her progressive views on gender – ‘gender difference is nothing’, she proclaimed in 1888. The Welsh-language version of this volume, entitled Cranogwen, won the Wales Book of the Year award for creative non-fiction in 2024.

This collection of essays deals with the material, social and cultural experience of women in Wales from the 15th to the 18th centuries. It offers information and insight about every aspect of female experience, covering the more conventional aspects of life, such as religion, education and work, as well as a variety of other topics, such as violence, radicalism, embroidery and its connotations, festivals and poetic creativity. Some of the contributions, notably those on female abduction, witchcraft, needlework, and masculinity, have had light thrown upon them alongside such traditional topics as unionm reformation, Anglicanisation, the Civil War and revivals.

Argues that the way in which people came to perceive and to represent themselves as Welsh was profoundly affected by the gender ideologies prevalent during the Romantic and Victorian periods. This title introduces readers to a hundred Welsh women authors at work during the years 1780-1900, some writing in Welsh and some in English.

This is a new edition of a book that was originally published in 1991 as the first of its kind, written when women's history in Wales was in its infancy. The chapters range widely across time (1830-1939) and place, from exploring working class women's community sanctions and the perils of being a collier's wife to the very different lifestyles of ironmasters' wives. It also tackles the idealised images of respectable Welsh women in periodicals and the tragic reality of those who committed suicide as well as the transgressive actions of suffrage rebels.