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

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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 people’s biographies as both historical and sociological documents. Bourdieu’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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.

A further source of inspiration for this book arose from earlier work that we conducted that set out to explore the personal narratives of people from rural Wales who had attended university. Time and again, women were mentioned – as mothers, grandmothers, schoolteachers and Sunday school-teachers – as providing the foundations for a love of learning and a sense that culture was important and something that everyone could enjoy. This we have characterized as an ‘aspirational habitus’, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s work, to assist us in thinking theoretically about the relationship between knowledge, culture and community. We will explore this idea of an aspirational habitus further in chapter 6. The value of such conceptual tools lies in their ability to make sense of the relationship between highly particularized reminiscences, the broader historical context and social theory, linking the personal to the political, the individual to society and the private to the public, to build up a picture of mid twentieth-century rural Wales.

We unearthed a wealth of reminiscences, accounts, anecdotes and personal narratives attesting to the role of women in rural communities in twentieth-century Wales. Yet, as we have noted, much of the history and sociology of Wales has tended to stress themes relating to economic life, working relationships and practices and the role of religious nonconformity. In scholarship on all of these issues, the occupational experience, political role and theological hegemony of men has been paramount.

By contrast, prompted by the richness and the explanatory potential of the fieldwork data that we acquired, we became concerned to record and document the accounts of women who lived through the economic, cultural and political transformations of rural Wales in the middle years of the twentieth century. The bulk of our material will concern events and experiences from 1940 to 1970, but we will also trace forwards and backwards from this period to illustrate precursors and important sequelae, especially for feminism, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although the reminiscences concern small communities in north, mid and west Wales, they convey an orientation to the world as well as a complex of knowledge and aspiration that were manifested through everyday practice. These included, as we have mentioned, the aspirational habitus, but also a sense of intellectual entitlement and the idea that literary interests and culture were ‘good things’ and matters from which everyone, even the poorest person, had much to gain. This also tells us how these women’s lives involved the groundwork for the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s. The manifestation of this in the rural communities in which our participants grew up and spent most or all of their adult lives, provides an important conceptual foundation to issues of politics and employment. This yields a fascinating insight into women’s roles in supporting and affording the cultural and political activities of the region in the last sixty or seventy years. Indeed, this work on the part of women seems to go well beyond mere ‘support’ and there are intimations that women had considerably more creative control over many matters than has hitherto been supposed.

The very idea of a distinctive ‘Welsh culture’ is itself enigmatic. The passionate conviction that contemporary Wales is heir to a centuries-old tradition of spirituality and learning coexists with the somewhat uncomfortable contention that Welsh culture is a late nineteenth-century invention. Yet, however it originated, the important feature is that it was meaningful to the people themselves. An image of Welsh culture was entertained by many participants, which provided a sense that their aspirations were achievable and that the world beyond the village school would be appreciative of their contribution.

As we have suggested, these processes were part of a much more widely articulated, yet slow, process of social change. We will show how women’s cultural labour in Wales not only sustained communities but prefigured and encouraged the changes in gender roles, which involved the current generation of adults, including our participants. We use the theoretical tools of sociological enquiry so that experiences related by participants can be incorporated into grander theoretical schemes, enabling us to explain notions of culture and politics at the community, or even national, level. Thus, we attempt to bridge the divide between the local, vernacular commemoration of the past and the patriotic formalism of official culture.

It is the everyday institutions – the school, the chapel, the family, the Sunday school – that played a formative role in shaping family and community relations. It is these ‘small things’ and their part in framing and constituting family life and communal relationships that we explore here. The micro-history of marriages, childhoods and communities plays a role in determining the experiences and accounts of relationships between men and women. The organization of sexual difference was important in structuring social institutions, social relations and material realities, and we will explore the connections between these through our participants’ accounts. In this way, our volume will complement previous works that have explored the lives of women in Wales, such as Betts (1996), Beddoe (2000; 2003) and Rees (in Herbert and Jones, 1995) and, we hope, move the debate forward and enhance its theoretical footing.

Well-known community studies, including work by Davies and Rees (1960) and Emmett (1964) touched on women’s lives, but there was not usually an in-depth exploration of women’s position or identity – the community as a whole was the focus. However, Frankenberg (1957) did venture into the complexities of the politics of gender, discussing the position of women, both as individuals and as a group, in a manner unusual for scholarship of that time. John (1991) published a history of pre-war women in Wales and Aaron (1994) edited a contemporary account of women’s position in Wales, overlaid with ideas derived from Anglo-American feminism. Recently, writers have turned their attention to the position of women in twentieth century Welsh politics (Chaney et al., 2007).

This book owes a great deal to our participants who agreed to be interviewed about their early life-experiences and reminiscences. We will meet them more formally in chapter 2 and sketch out the contours of the processes through which the data was collected and analysed. However, at this stage a few further introductory remarks are in order to set out the manifesto for the book and to outline what we are hoping to contribute to the historiography and sociology of Wales.

Our work differs from much of the existing scholarship on Wales in that it uses a different range of analytical techniques, which have in the past been more closely aligned with social analysis. This enables us to make links between the micro-politics of everyday life and the domestic sphere and professional, public and political life. In this way we hope to show that what happens in Wales has an international academic relevance and is emblematic of more general social experiences and processes. Likewise, we will complement much of the work on education in Wales, such as that by Jones (1997) and Jones and Roderick (2003), by our use of Bourdieusian theory and our exploration of women’s role in transmitting the rich seam of cultural capital that was present in so many otherwise materially disadvantaged Welsh communities.

Histories, memories and the imagination of tradition

The sense of identity found in Wales and the very fabric of its history is inherently controversial. To some it epitomizes the ‘invention of tradition’ described by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), where histories are exposed as recent creations. Whatever the literal truth of the history of Wales however, it is important to devote some consideration to this, as the sense of history is itself important.

At present the status of Wales is well known. Largely rural, it typically discloses high levels of disadvantage when measured against criteria related to income, employment or housing. In the face of this, however, our participants described something that they saw to be enduring and distinctive about ‘Wales’ and the ‘Welsh’. Despite a single national designation, there is considerable differentiation within its borders. Life in industrial urban south Wales is considerably different from life in Snowdonia. However, as Jones (1992a: 330), observes: ‘the Welsh have for centuries sustained an identity … despite … a recent history that has witnessed massive immigration and integrationist pressures’. This sense of national identity can be traced over the last century and a half. Jones (1992a: 332) argued that during this period a distinctive Welsh self-image was formulated: ‘cliched and inadequate as were the observations of outsiders, there developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a distinctive Welsh self image, an identity rooted in a specific combination of social and economic conditions’.

The spiritual climate in Wales was influenced by a distinctive religious history. Religious Nonconformity was explicitly permitted by the 1689 Toleration Act, which granted freedom to Dissenters, who had gained strength during Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector and in the subsequent Restoration period. The Act itself led to the open development of many differently inflected variants of Christianity. The first chapels in Wales were built soon after the Act was passed. At around this time, influential books such as Vicar Prichard’s Welshman’s Candle (Canwyll y Cymru) and the first Welsh translation of The Pilgrim’s Progress were widely circulated and read. The key feature here is that the development of Nonconformity was accompanied by developments in literacy in the Welsh language, thus helping to cement the relationship between chapel life and learning. The major events shaping religious belief and observance in Wales came with the advent of Methodism in the eighteenth century. In Wales, this involved some notable women, such as Ann Griffiths (1776–1805). Jones (2004), states that in 1801 only 34 per cent of places of worship in Wales were Nonconformist. By 1850, this had risen to some 70 per cent. Of the total number of worshippers in Wales in 1851, 77 per cent claimed affiliation to the Nonconformist tradition. Jones (2004: 178) observed that by the middle of the nineteenth century, there was no part of religious or secular human life that Nonconformists had not penetrated, but, ‘by 1850 the religious element had faded in intensity and we see it being secularized and nurturing a social ethos’. Jones, (1982: 43–4), when writing about north-west Wales, noted that ‘chapels … dominated behaviour outside of the mere act of worship’ and that ‘their presence was central to the life and structure of slate-quarrying communities: a complex network of allegiances and a powerful organisational framework, nonconformity came to hold a position of quite particular importance’. He also described how villages grew around their chapels and the intense hold that the chapels held on the community (Jones, 1982). Jones (2004) maintains that Nonconformists, again and again, tried to give a united leadership to the nation.

The Nonconformist movement, punctuated by periodic ‘revivals’, held a firm grip on Wales until the mid twentieth century. Foreshadowing the key roles that our participants described for women, teenage girls were among the most charismatic preachers in the 1904–5 religious revival (Orr, 1975; Whittaker, 1984). Jones (1982: 63) considered that ‘Nonconformity gave to Wales a self-confidence and security which also often engendered self-righteousness and a generally smug belief that Wales was the most faithfully religious corner in the whole world’ and that ‘During the 1904–5 revival echoes of a belief in the special mission of the Welsh people could at times be heard … the young men of Wales, it was prophesied at one revivalist meeting, are to lead the way in the salvation of the world.’ ‘Many in 1904–5 thought that God had chosen the Welsh people to be his especial agents’ (Jones, 1982: 64).

Although there was a rapid decline in Nonconformist congregations in the latter half of the twentieth century, many older people are still actively involved and a strong legacy remains. Davies (1994) noted the emphasis on ‘self-culture’ in Nonconformity, involving an interest in education and the alignment of this with religion itself. Although Welsh society changed greatly in the late twentieth century (Chaney et al., 2007; Jones, 2004), the idea of a Welsh culture has proved robust and forms a lived historical background to the experiences related later in this book.

The idea of this ‘Welsh culture’ stretching back through the centuries has been undermined by many historians, who have argued that much of it was invented in the nineteenth century (Jones, 1992a; Morgan, 1983). There have been challenges to the very notion of a Welsh culture. Jones (1982: 55) was explicit regarding the origins of Welsh culture and the identity of its ‘propagandists’:

for in a quite profound sense the Welsh radical tradition, and the cultural apparatus which sustained it, was a genuinely ideological construct … the programme of late-nineteenth-century Welsh liberalism was built around land reform and disestablishment. The cement which held the political alliance together was Welsh culture and its institutions, and this culture and these institutions came to be thought of as synonymous with nonconformity and radical liberalism. During the 1880s and 1890s the middle-class nonconformist elite, through the agencies of chapel and press, re-defined the idea of Wales in its own image, deftly excluding its opponents and sometimes also its supporters.

The idea of the gwerin, a kind of hard-working simple country folk, was popularized in the poetry of W. J. Gruffydd and helped to consolidate an idea of a classless or one-class Welsh democracy. The Wales of the gwerin (Morgan, 1986a), traditional, of the land and Welsh-speaking, became both symbolically and actually ‘a storehouse of a specifically Welsh rural identity and as such was specifically politicised’ (Gruffudd, 1999: 159).

The idea of rural Wales as being populated by the gwerin, including quarry workers, tenant farmers and purveyors of craft skills steeped in local culture, was also promoted in the educational philosophy of Sir Owen M. Edwards. Yet Edwards himself was influenced by John Ruskin’s preoccupation with the value of craft skills and rural working life. Thus, the idea of the gwerin, says Jones (1982), was an ‘ideological achievement’ of middle-class Nonconformists. Yet there is a further serious point here. The patterns of social class perfected in industrial life in England have never mapped easily on to the situation in which Welsh people have found themselves. Consequently, the notion may have gained in popularity because of the comparative ease with which people felt it embraced their identity and their situation.

The collective sense of identity in Wales in the mid nineteenth century and discourse about its culture and politics was also dominated by the so-called ‘treachery of the Blue Books’. This came about when, in 1846, William Williams, himself a Welshman and serving as MP for Coventry, pressed the government with his concern about the state of education in Wales. The government responded by appointing three commissioners, R. R. W. Lingen, Jellynger C. Symons and H. R. Vaughan Johnson. They toured Wales, but were handicapped by the fact that they spoke no Welsh and frequently relied on the testimony of English speakers – often Anglican clergymen – in Welsh-speaking areas. They completed their reports in April 1847, presenting them to Parliament in three blue-coloured volumes. Schools in Wales, they argued, were inadequate. Often, the teachers spoke only English and only English textbooks were available in areas where the children spoke only Welsh. Welsh-speakers, they reported, had to rely on the Nonconformist Sunday schools to learn to read and write. This much confirmed Williams’s fears. But the commissioners did not confine themselves to the state of the schools. They concluded that the Welsh were ignorant, lazy and immoral, particularly the women, and that among the causes of this were the use of the Welsh language and Nonconformity. Commissioner Lingen especially condemned the people and their culture. It was this latter excursion into sniping at the culture and the morality of the Welsh that provoked a furious reaction in Wales.

Yet, only half a century later a very different image of Wales prevailed: ‘National identity came to be associated with specific political and religious beliefs … a sense of identity fuelled by notions of religious purity, by the intimacy of chapel services and the strains of communally known and sung hymns’ (Jones, 1992a: 338–9). It is apposite that the reconstruction of the image and re-engineering of the culture of Wales and the Welsh took place in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a time of industrious rebuilding and reconstruction. The Nonconformist intellectuals and middle classes were inculcating the notion that Wales had a heritage of scholars and poets to be proud of (Jones, 1992a).

This much must be understood to appreciate the cultural meaning of what follows later in this volume. These are debates and events familiar to scholars of Welsh history, but they are also part of the lived experience of Welsh culture, as we shall see.

To further specify, contextualize and periodize the experiences we will be focusing on later, it is worth briefly outlining the situation in nineteenth-century north-west Wales, a region in which many of our interviewees were raised. Jones (1982: 53), eloquently describing the situation in the late nineteenth century, stated that ‘Gwynedd came to be effectively two societies, culturally and religiously defined, with their respective elites struggling for control of the local state’, the two societies being the Liberal consensus and Tory Gwynedd. Jones (1982: 342) defines Liberal Wales as ‘nonconformist, closely associated with the Welsh language, temperate, and based on the community of interest between small farmers, industrial workers, and small businessmen and professionals in the gwerin’. Surprisingly, perhaps, Jones (1992a: 338) notes that

there were many Anglicans involved in Welsh liberalism … but the engine house was nonconformist, and increasingly, the two forces – one political, and the other denominational – embraced and sustained each other. All the demands of this political movement, articulated on public platforms and in a vibrant radical press by nonconformist ministers and their radical allies, derived, often explicitly, from the aspirations of nonconformity … all suited … the interests of the denominations.

Jones (1992a: 338–9) describes the situation as

a religio-cultural rather than a national discourse … it created a series of definitions of Welshness that excluded much of the actual population of the country and constructed a history of nonconformist heroes with which many could not identify. Welshness thus became a cause to which one adhered, rather than a country to which one belonged … this powerful mix of politics, religion, culture and place, had, by the turn of the century, created what appeared to be a hegemonic Welsh identity. That this identity was based on an assumed and proclaimed homogeneity can hardly be overemphasized.

Jones (1982: 50) emphasizes that the interrelationship between language, class and politics wasn’t static or automatic, offers major problems in interpretation and explains that the problems are ‘compounded by the inexactitudes of the self images of the propagandists of Welsh culture and by the rhetoric which nourished these images’ (p. 55).

Morgan (1981) states that, during the 1880s, ‘dramatic transformations swept through the land which added up to a