Gender in Modern Welsh History: Perspectives on Masculinity and Femininity in Wales from 1750 to 2000

By Paul O'Leary and Stephanie Ward

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.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781837720804

Book preview

GENDER IN MODERN WELSH HISTORY

Gender Studies in Wales

Astudiaethau Rhywedd yng Nghymru

Series Editors

Dawn Mannay, Cardiff University

Rhiannon Marks, Cardiff University

Diana Wallace, University of South Wales

Stephanie Ward, Cardiff University

Sian Rhiannon Williams, Cardiff Metropolitan University

Series Advisory Board

Jane Aaron, University of South Wales

Deirdre Beddoe, Emeritus Professor

Paul Chaney, Cardiff University

Mihangel Morgan, Aberystwyth University

Paul O’Leary, Aberystwyth University

Teresa Rees, Professor Emerita (1949–2023)

Roiyah Saltus, University of South Wales

This multi-disciplinary and bilingual series explores the characteristics and effects of gender difference in Wales, both as it affected lives in the past and as it continues to shape present-day experience. Socially constructed concepts of masculinity and femininity influence and shape every aspect of individuals’ lives; experiences in employment, in education, in culture and politics, as well as in personal relationships. Gender also intersects with other identities including race, class, (dis)ability, sexuality and nation in framing experiences and representations of individuals and groups. To date, the series has published important contributions addressing these concerns in literature, social studies and history that have enriched this growing academic field. The editors would particularly welcome ground breaking studies which engage with contemporary theories of gender, identity and intersectionality relating to Wales in all its diversity.

GENDER IN MODERN WELSH HISTORY

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Perspectives on Masculinity and Femininity in Wales from 1750 to 2000

Edited by Beth Jenkins, Paul O’Leary and Stephanie Ward

© The Contributors, 2023

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. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

ISBN: 978-1-83772-078-1

eISBN: 978-1-83772-080-4

The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Josef Herman, Cockle Gatherers (1974), lithograph on paper © Estate of Josef Herman, all rights reserved, DACS 2023

Contents

List of Abbreviations

List of Contributors

Foreword

1Introduction

2Sex Work and Economies of Makeshift in Wales, c. 1750–1830

Angela Muir

3Family Matters: War-time Discourses on Women in Wales, 1793–1805

Marion Löffler

4Masks and Matter: Mining Masculinities in the South Wales Coalfield, 1870–1914

Paul O’Leary

5‘Can You Look in the Mirror and Say, I See a Man?’ Masculinity and the Labour Movement in South Wales, c. 1870–1939

Steven Thompson

6Spaces and Places of Women’s Social Movements in Wales, 1890–1914

Neil Evans and Beth Jenkins

7Nation and Gender: St David, St David’s Day and Masculinity during the Great War

Mike Benbough-Jackson

8Exploring Race and Gender in Cardiff, c. 1900– c. 1945

Simon Jenkins

9Heroic Housewives: Political Worlds, Domesticity and the Welsh Mam in Interwar Wales

Stephanie Ward

10 ‘Beware you free, emancipated girls, your warden wouldn’t like it’: Women’s Activism at Swansea University, 1970–1990

Jay Rees

11 Reflections of Gender in Anti-nuclear Politics in Wales, 1970–2000

Elaine Titcombe

Notes

List of Abbreviations

ASRS – Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants

BUASC – Bangor University Archives and Special Collections

BHAC – Butetown History and Arts Centre

CR – consciousness-raising

GA – Glamorgan Archives

ILP – Independent Labour Party

IWM – Imperial War Museum

LHASC – Labour History Archive and Study Centre

NLW – National Library of Wales

NUWSS – National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies

MADRYN – Mudiad Amddiffyn Dynoliaeth Rhag Ysbwriel Niwclear

PANDORA – People Against Nuclear Dumping on Rural Areas

RBA – Richard Burton Archives

REF – Research Excellence Framework

SU – Student Union

SWCC – South Wales Coalfield Collection

SWLG – Swansea Women’s Liberation Group

TNA – The National Archives

UGC – University Grants Committee

WAVAW – Women Against Violence Against Women

WFL – Women’s Freedom League

WFLOE – Women for Life on Earth

WGA – West Glamorgan Archives

WL – Women’s Library

WLL – Women’s Labour League

WLM – Women’s Liberation Movement

WSPU – Women’s Social and Political Union

WUA – Women’s Unionist Associations

List of Contributors

Mike Benbough-Jackson is a senior lecturer in modern British history at Liverpool John Moores University. He has published books and articles on a variety of topics including national days, masculinity and sub-national identities.

Neil Evans is an honorary research fellow at Bangor University, vice-president of Llafur and co-editor (with Charlotte Williams) of the University of Wales Press series ‘Race, Ethnicity, Wales and the World’. He has published extensively on the history of modern Wales, including on women’s suffrage, the campaign for pithead baths and women in the Labour Party.

Beth Jenkins received her PhD from Cardiff University and subsequently held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Essex. Her first monograph, Graduate Women and Work in Wales, 1880–1939: Nationhood, Networks and Community was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.

Simon Jenkins received his PhD from Cardiff University in 2017. His thesis examined prostitution in Cardiff in the first half of the twentieth century, and he has published articles in Cultural and Social History and the Journal of Social History focusing on prostitution, racism and the policing of Butetown. He is currently working on a monograph, entitled Race and Prostitution in Cardiff, 1850–1960, under contract with Palgrave Macmillan.

Marion Löffler is reader in Welsh history at Cardiff University. Originally from Humboldt University Berlin, she worked at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies Aberystwyth until 2017. She has published widely on the cultural and economic entanglements of modern Wales with Europe, empire and the world, and appears regularly on television and radio. Her most recent book is Political Pamphlets and Sermons from Wales, 1790–1806 (University of Wales Press, 2014).

Angela Muir is a lecturer in British social and cultural history, and the current director of the Centre for Regional and Local History at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on gender, sex, crime, deviance, identity and the body in Wales during the long eighteenth century. Her book Deviant Maternity: Illegitimacy in Wales, c.1680–1800 (Routledge, 2020) was awarded the Francis Jones Prize for Welsh history. She is also author of ‘Courtship, Sex and Poverty: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-century Wales’, Social History, 43 (2018), ‘Midwifery and Maternity Care for Single Mothers in Eighteenth-century Wales’, Social History of Medicine, 33 (2018) and ‘Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century Wales’, Welsh History Review, 26 (2013). She is currently researching diversity, identity and social change in south Wales during the long eighteenth century using depositional evidence from the Court of Great Sessions.

Paul O’Leary is the Sir John Williams Professor of Welsh history at Aberystwyth University. Among his publications are Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales, 1798–1922 (University of Wales Press, 2000) and Claiming the Streets: Processions and Urban Culture in South Wales, c.1830–1880 (University of Wales Press, 2012). With Charlotte Williams and Neil Evans, he co-edited A Tolerant Nation? Revisiting Ethnic Diversity in a Devolved Wales (University of Wales Press, 2015).

Jay Rees completed her PhD in history at Swansea University. Her thesis examined student life at the institution from 1920 to 1990. A historian, specialising in higher education, everyday living, gender and post-war history, her passions have seen her write about the major societal themes that defined the twentieth century, including youth culture, war and student activism. She is currently working on a project that examines women’s continued response to the gender boundaries of British student life. By taking a four-nation approach, through the analysis of four civic universities, her project will demonstrate how universities’ masculinist cultures encouraged women to sustain their pleas for autonomy between the ‘waves’ of feminism.

Steven Thompson is a senior lecturer in the Department of History and Welsh History at Aberystwyth University. He specialises in the history of medicine, welfare and disability in modern Wales, in addition to the history of labour movements, trade unions and industrial relations. He is author of Unemployment, Poverty and Health in Interwar South Wales (University of Wales Press, 2006) and, with Kirsti Bohata, Alexandra Jones and Mike Mantin, Disability in Industrial Britain: A Cultural and Literary History of Impairment in the Coal Industry, 1880–1948 (Manchester University Press, 2020).

Elaine Titcombe is an independent researcher. In 2018 she graduated from the University of the West of England with a PhD in history, having published her first peer-reviewed article in Women’s History Review in 2013. Her main interests are in women’s history, Wales and protest movements in the twentieth century, and her thesis explored the narratives of the Greenham Common peace protest. However, she is currently embarking on a new project investigating societal reactions to the unlawful deaths of women in rural Carmarthenshire during the late nineteenth century. Elaine has also held the post of membership secretary for the West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network since 2012.

Stephanie Ward is a senior lecturer in modern Welsh history at Cardiff University. Her research focuses upon political activism, social movements, family life and gender. Her publications include the monograph Unemployment and the State in Britain: The Means Test and Protest in 1930s South Wales and the North-east of England (Manchester University Press, 2013) and, more recently, articles on working-class women’s political identities and miners’ embodied masculinities.

Foreword

This edited collection began life as a conversation over lunch about the state of Welsh gender history. Sitting in Aberdare Hall, the women-only residences at Cardiff University, Beth and Stephanie were surrounded by the portraits of the hall’s former female principals and wondered about the visibility of women in the material culture of wider institutional spaces and histories of Wales. They were left with mixed feelings about the state of the field. Scholars of gender in Welsh history are now able to access works on diverse areas of Welsh women’s past including employment, education, home life, sexuality and political activism. This work has been complemented by a growing interest in masculinity; studies of same-sex desire, disabled industrial workers and miners’ bodies have shown the potential within the field. Yet, despite this growing and important body of work, gaps remain in our understanding of gender within Welsh history. While there is now an undoubtedly rich historiography of women’s history to draw upon, the impact of gender as a category of analysis upon the field was less certain. It was decided that a focused one-day symposium would allow the question of the state of Welsh gender history to be interrogated by a wider audience.

The symposium was organised around the theme of ‘new directions in femininity and masculinity in modern Welsh history’. The papers highlighted the potential directions for gender history and included discussions of embodied approaches, material culture, spatial analyses and sexuality. A roundtable discussion with Angela V. John, Neil Evans and Paul O’Leary allowed for a reflection on developments in the field from three individuals who had been foremost in establishing studies of women’s history and masculinity. We are very grateful to all the participants in the symposium whose thoughtful papers and contributions to debates helped spark further ideas about the confluence of gender and nation. The success of the symposium highlighted the pressing need for a new study on gender history in Wales. The volume here builds upon the research presented at the event as well as some additional invited contributions. Paul O’Leary joined the editorial team, bringing expertise in, amongst other areas, masculinity and Welsh-language source materials.

We feel that the volume incorporates an excellent range of scholarship in terms of career stage, from well-established historians to early career scholars, and geographic and temporal coverage. The volume is intended to showcase the potential of new approaches to gender history for future studies within the field, but the chapters here will also be of interest to those working within the fields of sociology, literature and media studies. It is hoped that the book will act as a stimulus for further investigations into gender history along with interdisciplinary approaches. This collection is intended as a starting point, rather than the final word.

All editors owe a debt to their contributors. However, we feel a particular debt to ours for their patience and forbearance shown over the challenging period of Covid-19. The closure of workplaces, archives and, not least, the personal impact of lockdowns and extended periods of restrictions, would have affected all authors. We are very grateful that nobody has had to take the difficult decision to pull out. The closure of archives also reminded us all about the valuable work of archivists, library staff and heritage professionals. Histories could not be written without access to primary materials and the professional expertise of archivists and librarians; we would like to extend our gratitude to all professional staff who have informed this volume.

Finally, we would like to offer some more personal thanks. First, to University of Wales Press for generously funding the symposium and this volume. The staff at University of Wales Press have been excellent to work with. We are particularly grateful to Llion Wigley whose swift responses, knowledge, enthusiasm and calmness have made working on this volume an enjoyable process. The anonymous reader and the Gender Studies editorial team have also helped shape this final volume and we very much appreciate their comments. All three contributors would like to thank their family, friends and colleagues for their support and patience while they have finished this volume of essays. The final thank you must go to our collective body of students, past and present, whose own work and opinions have both stressed the need for a volume such as this and shaped the contents within it. We hope it will help inspire future studies within the field and the next generation of Welsh gender historians.

Introduction

This collection of essays stems from a one-day symposium held at Cardiff University in September 2019. Its aim was to bring together early career researchers and established scholars working on various aspects of gender in histories of modern Wales. In this collection of essays, many of the contributors to the symposium build on the papers that they delivered there. They foreground gender as an analytical framework to offer fresh perspectives on familiar events and themes, as well as to chart new terrain in the field. Together, the chapters highlight how a gender lens can enrich our understanding of political cultures, the labour movement, social protest, work, education and national identity across different regions and at different junctures in history. The aim is to showcase new approaches to gender in the modern history of Wales and to point towards fruitful avenues for researchers in the future. The authors also revisit well-established narratives in landmark events in Wales’s past and build on a rich body of research in gender history which has developed across the past four decades.

While these chapters pose questions about the narratives of Welsh history, they also intersect with approaches to the histories of Britain and beyond, demonstrating that gender history can illuminate different levels of experience, whether in relation to the locality, region, nation, state or empire. Research on the women’s suffrage movement, for example, has demonstrated how such levels of experience were interrelated and can shed light on one another, with the identities of suffragists being shaped by, within and against, different cultures.¹ A ‘four nations’ approach to the study of gender has much to recommend it in this regard, emphasising that while there were many common experiences across cultures that affected the gender identities of women and men, there were salient differences too. There are different well-springs for studying an historical phenomenon that is so heavily influenced by culture and experience. For example, a book of essays on Scottish gender history, edited by Lynn Abrams, was in part a response to the changed circumstances of devolution from 1999 and the need to challenge dominant narratives of Scottish history.² Similarly, Irish historians have sought to challenge distinctive historical debates in their past.³ Attention to the national and territorial differences of Britain and Ireland is an essential feature of cultural constructions of gender, such as manliness.⁴

As Julie des Jardins has emphasised, gender history cannot be separated from the rise of women’s history.⁵ Significant advances have been made in the field since the first calls for a history of women in Wales in the early 1980s and the publication of the seminal collection of essays edited by Angela V. John, Our Mother’s Land (1991).⁶ Historians have deepened our knowledge of the experiences of women in the areas of political activism, women’s work, family life and national representations of femininity. Although recognising the continued need to uncover histories of women, this volume is not confined to an analysis of women and femininity. Since Paul O’Leary’s call for studies of masculinity nearly two decades ago, the way men’s lives have been shaped and constrained by cultural ideals of gender has also come under increasing scrutiny by historians of Wales.⁷ But histories of masculinity are yet to have a transformative impact on understandings of how gender hierarchies operated in the home, workplace and political culture. Many of the chapters in this volume reflect on these historiographical developments, while also opening new areas of historical enquiry and pointing towards the gaps that remain.

The volume spans a broad chronological period from the late eighteenth century through to the late twentieth, allowing insights into the changes – and, indeed, continuities – of gendered structures and performances of gendered identities over time. There are common themes throughout all chapters. In line with British histories of gender, close attention is paid to lived experiences alongside discursive representations of gender, with many contributors demonstrating how they were mutually constitutive.⁸ The chapters move beyond simplistic stereotypes to analyse the subjective experiences, constraints and subversion of gender prescriptions by people in Wales’s modern past. The contributors draw on a diverse body of primary material, including legal documents, Welsh-language sources, institutional records, newspaper reports, autobiographies, pamphlets, poems and photographs. Class, long an organising theme in Welsh historical studies, is also central to the discussion of many chapters here, reflecting an enduring concern of gender historians from Joan W. Scott onwards.⁹ Importantly, the authors here demonstrate how exploring class alongside other identities through an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach has much potential for extending and amplifying our understanding of the past. In this introduction, we outline some of the key approaches taken by contributors and the central themes they address.

Labour history was the dominant historiographical trend in the writing of modern Welsh histories from the early 1970s to at least the turn of the twenty-first century. Its dominance reflected the personal, political and educational backgrounds of a generation of historians as well as the major narratives of the making of modern Wales: industrialisation, the growth of a working class and the rise of socialist politics.¹⁰ While the classic approaches to labour histories have long been questioned, historians continued to focus on studies that foregrounded the movements and experiences of the working class. The inclusion of women’s experiences and, more recently, recognising the importance of masculine identity, have revealed the potential for exploring the intersection between class and gender. While many historians have acknowledged the macho culture of the labour movement or public life in south Wales, for example, few have interrogated the meanings of this gendered political culture beyond noting its pernicious impact on the marginalisation of women. Several of the authors in this volume demonstrate how a gender analysis can shed new light on the lives and experiences of working men and women and the labour movement.

A focus on the masculine rhetoric of union politics and the linkages that were made between trade unionism and manliness uncovers the manifold ways ideals of masculinity underpinned union culture for mine workers. Steven Thompson’s interrogation of the representation, ideology and discourse of masculinity reveals how the masculine identity of industrial workers was constructed in relation to other, and often subordinate, masculinities, as well as in relation to their dependant families. Studies of women’s political activism can also benefit from closer scrutiny of the language used by political parties, as shown by Stephanie Ward’s chapter which explores the inter-relationship between femininity, domesticity and class in working-class women’s political engagement following their enfranchisement. Interdisciplinary approaches also enhance our understanding of the factors that shaped gendered working-class identities. Drawing on insights from social anthropology, Paul O’Leary’s chapter centres on a key issue for the labour movement, but one approached here through a very different analytical lens. He shows the potential for exploring the gendered cultural meanings of coal dust – an apparently insignificant material substance – that connected the colliery and home in a number of significant ways. This provides a different, but complementary, approach to materiality and domestic space to that adopted, for example, by Freya Gowrley in her recent study of gift-giving and material process in the home.¹¹ By placing gender at the heart of the analysis, these chapters destabilise grand narratives that often privilege class struggle and instances of industrial conflict.

Considering the different spaces in and through which femininity and masculinity were formed points towards another methodological approach that is used in many chapters. The spatial turn in the humanities provides historians with a mechanism for considering how culture and social structures were reinforced through the gendering of space.¹² They do this by examining how particular spaces were used, both in practical and ideological terms at specific points in the past. Jay Rees, for example, shows how in the later twentieth century the conservative sexual attitudes of the management of Swansea University were reinforced by the design of women’s student halls. How the racialisation and gendering of space affected the treatment of people of colour is examined by Simon Jenkins. In Cardiff, the physical separation of multi-ethnic Butetown from the remainder of the city became a cultural divide as white outsiders represented Black residents as lacking in sexual morality and excluded from hegemonic masculine identities. This is not the only chapter to draw on the work of sociologists and geographers. Neil Evans and Beth Jenkins trace the spaces and places which inhibited or enabled women’s social movements to emerge in the crucial period from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. Utilising social movement theory alongside a spatial analysis, they examine how and why women’s political movements were mobilised at different times and places. Evans and Jenkins, therefore, demonstrate how a gendered analysis can broaden our understanding of what constitutes political activity and who engages in it.

While more familiar terrain is revisited and reconsidered in some chapters, the lesser explored areas of the Women’s Liberation Movement (Jay Rees), anti-nuclear disarmament politics (Elaine Titcombe) and working-class women’s engagement with the Conservative Party (Ward) break new ground and provide models for how the scope of historical research can be extended. A key strength of gender history has been to shift the historian’s gaze to areas of activity or spaces that were previously considered insignificant or not worthy of historical analysis. Indeed, when taken together the chapters that consider women’s activism testify to continuities in tactics and rhetoric from the late nineteenth-century suffrage movement, through interwar food price protests, to the feminist and peace campaigns in the second half of the twentieth century. These chapters provide a richer picture of women’s politics and identities than has been available hitherto.¹³ They achieve this by moving away from traditional concerns and prescriptive definitions of political activism.

Social class is a major theme in the debates about women’s politicisation. While some contributors to this book point to how material circumstances affected access to resources, time and shaped political identities, others highlight the political identifications shared by Welsh women across class divides. As Jay Rees shows, in post-war Swansea ideas from the Women’s Liberation Movement inspired activism among female undergraduates, and the commonality of women’s subjugation on the grounds of expectations of feminine behaviour united working- and middle-class women within and beyond the boundaries of the university. Elaine Titcombe’s study of Greenham Common also stresses the cross-class appeal of feminist activism. It was the demand for women’s sexual liberation and attempts by others to police their morality and bodies that led to a cultural and generational clash. These chapters remind us of the importance of thinking beyond one class to recognise cross-class alliances, as well as differences. Codes of sexual morality were also shaped by both gender and class relations. This is an underexplored aspect of Welsh history, although several chapters in this book take this agenda forward by demonstrating how sexuality (like class, gender and race) is essential to studying the gendered dynamics of power.

One of the familiar difficulties facing historians interested in the subjective experiences or private lives of women and men who were not members of elites is uncovering evidence that can provide meaningful insights about them.¹⁴ People whose voices are inadequately represented in the historical record present challenges for historical research, although these are not insurmountable, even though the nature and quality of the source material can be uneven. In this context, both Angela Muir and Simon Jenkins demonstrate the importance of reading prejudicial official or criminal records against the grain in order to glean information about those people who, because of their socio-economic status or racial identity, existed on the margins of society. Muir’s exploration of sex work in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Wales uses evidence in criminal court records collected for crimes where sex work is mentioned incidentally (usually in cases of theft) to obtain information about the lives of these women. Muir’s reading of witness testimonies has allowed her to open new lines of enquiry into the understudied world of makeshift economies, sex work and rural communities. Similarly, Simon Jenkins outlines how historians might read source materials relating to minority ethnic communities that were often made by outsiders and shaped by their perspectives and prejudices. These studies show the potential for studying the lives and experiences of those who have not left their own historical record.

The cultural context of historical sources is, of course, vital for how they are read. As well as the themes discussed already, many of the contributors to this book carefully reflect on the ways in which nation is an appropriate category of analysis for our understanding of gender. Rather than adopting a totalising approach to the nation, the chapters highlight the importance of regional or local frameworks. Situating the nation in a comparative perspective allows us to compare experiences with other national groupings so that the specificities – as well as commonalities – can be identified. Angela Muir’s chapter, for instance, demonstrates how the Welsh context sheds light on sex work in rural and smaller urban areas in general. Her work marks an important shift away from the plethora of studies of the English metropole and major cities that deal with the topic in her period. Furthermore, how the socio-economic structures of different regions shaped culture and society, and, ultimately, gender relations are considered in several chapters. For example, Evans and Jenkins highlight how the physical geography of Wales and its rural, urban and industrial contexts affected women’s political cultures. Increasingly, historians have considered the transnational dimensions to Welsh experiences by examining those women and men whose lives took them beyond national borders yet remained connected to their place of birth.¹⁵ Elaine Titcombe’s chapter contributes to this approach by highlighting how women’s activism did not necessarily have to take place in Wales for it to be shaped by issues relating to Welsh national identity. By adopting different spatial frameworks, therefore, historians are better able to avoid generalisations that can gloss over the nuances of gendered experiences. In her focus on one institution and city, Jay Rees’s chapter demonstrates how fruitful a close analysis of a particular locality can be for teasing out the connections and networks of women across social divides, organisations and class boundaries.

Reflections on the nation and nationality are also apparent through the deconstruction of gendered national imagery. Gendered identities in Wales have been constructed nationally, while the nation itself has been portrayed as feminine in a number of contexts.¹⁶ A recognition of the existence of nested identities – nation, class, race and gender – enrich our understandings of the complexity of lives in the past, much as they are today, and underline the multi-dimensional aspects of identities. Several contributors to this volume deconstruct well-established and often ahistorical tropes and stereotypes, including those of miners’ masculinity and the feminine image of the nation. By locating these in specific times and places, the authors challenge one-dimensional representations of Welsh femininity and masculinity. They show how their meanings were always contested and changed in different historical contexts and places. Where earlier historians focused on the emergence of national representations