Mothers, Wives and Changing Lives

Brian Brown, Sally Baker

Description

The role of women in the recent history of Wales is an area that has received scant attention from social scientists and historians. This book will therefore seek to fill that gap by drawing upon the family stories told about women's roles in education, the chapel and the family to address some of the important gaps in the knowledge base.

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• 20th century
• Wales

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783164431
• Langue: English

Extrait

MOTHERS, WIVES AND CHANGING LIVES
Mothers, Wives and Changing Lives
WOMEN IN MID TWENTIETH-CENTURY RURAL WALES
B. J. Brown and Sally Baker
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 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.
www.uwp.co.uk
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 (1958-2010)
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 Bourdieu s 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.
Contents

1 Introduction: Womanhood, Wales and Culture
2 Narratives, Biography and Culture: Situating Participants Life Stories
3 Women and Society 1940-1970: Culture, Gender and Politics
4 Havens in a Heartless World: Accounts of Gender, Femininity and Domestic Life
5 Education and Attainment: Women s Roles in Informal and Formal Schooling
6 Cultures of Aspiration: Women and the Genesis of Cultural Capital
7 Religion and Spiritual Life
8 Moral Guardianship and Respectability: Lives Beyond Suspicion
9 Culture, Capital, Learning and Conversion in the Next Generation
Appendix: Table Outlining Participants Details
Bibliography
1
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