Our Changing Land

Revisiting Gender, Class and Identity in Contemporary Wales

Dawn Mannay

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783168866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1

Introduction

DAWN MANNAY

Starting places

In common with most introductory sections, this chapter provides the reader with an insight into the rationale for bringing this edited collection together. It sets out the aims and scope of the volume, as well as providing an overview of the following chapters and the ways in which they connect to the core themes of Welshness and everyday life in contemporary Wales. In this way, it forms a starting place, an opening and a beginning but no commencement is entirely novel – for the present is always embedded in the past; and at the same time oriented to the future. As Berger (1972, p. 370) contends:

The present tense of the verb to be refers only to the present: but nevertheless with the first person singular in front of it, it absorbs the past, which is inseparable from it. ‘I am’ includes all that has made me so. It is more than a statement of immediate fact: it is already biographical.

Throughout Our Changing Land: Revisiting Gender, Class and Identity in Contemporary Wales, there is an emphasis on this temporal positioning as all of the chapters are reflective, contemporary and forward thinking. As Steedman (1986, p. 6) argues, ‘specifity of place and politics has to be reckoned with in making an account of anybody’s life, and their use of their own past’; and this premise holds for studies of the collective, and the nation, as well as understandings of individual biographies and futures.

Definitions of Welshness are never static and each generation passes their memories on to the next: such memories are ‘conditioned by the times in which they lived’ (Beddoe, 2000, p. 3) and they shadow our immediate experience. Consequently, it is important to revisit: and here there are two key, iconic sources that provide the contextualization for the present volume; the edited collection Our Sisters’ Land: The Changing Identities of Women in Wales (1994), edited by Jane Aaron, Teresa Rees, Sandra Betts and Moira Vincentelli, and early editions of the journal Contemporary Wales, previously edited by Paul Chaney and Elin Royles, and published by the University of Wales Press.

Our Sisters’ Land

Our Sisters’ Land: The Changing Identities of Women in Wales argued for a focus on Welsh women because of their increasing importance to the world of paid work, while retaining their roles and responsibilities in the home. The book demonstrated the ways in which women’s lives were characterized by diversity. At the time of its publication, the text addressed an important lacuna for the changing identity of Welsh women as they managed the balance between private and public lives, which had been relatively uncharted. For this reason, the text was groundbreaking in bringing together a collection of interdisciplinary research papers on the changing identity of women in Wales.

The text was introduced to me as a student on the inspirational Women Making a Difference programme run by the contemporary Welsh champion of gender equality, Paula Manley. As part of this programme, I took the course Women into Public Life, where Jan Stephens, of Cardiff University, guided students to a body of inspirational work by Deirdre Beddoe, Jane Pilcher and Teresa Rees; and centralized in this reading list was Our Sisters’ Land. As a Welsh-language learner, Welsh-language sources still remain a closed book for me – a body of work that with greater proficiency I hope to one day explore. However, Our Sisters’ Land allowed an entry point into a richer understanding of the ‘particularities of women’s experience in one minority culture’ (Aaron et al., 1994, p. xv): the culture of Wales.

Our Sisters’ Land was concerned with addressing the absence of minority voices, drawing on the Welsh proverb, nid byd, byd heb wybodaeth, a world without knowledge is no world; the book aimed to address the doubly under-represented world of Welsh women ‘within the dominant English and male-oriented culture’ (Aaron and Rees, 1994, p. 2), which subsumed their existence. Despite shifts in the visibility of women in public life, in the early 1990s women still could be defined by the concept of ‘muted groups’ (Delamont and Duffin, 1978, p. 11) in relation to the dominant group of men in social structure; and Welsh women were in a double bind as residents in a colonized nation within nations, in terms of language, law and social policy. A position that demanded a decolonizing methodology (Smith, 1999) to bring twenty-first-century Welsh women ‘out of the shadows’, as Beddoe (2000) had for twentieth-century Welsh women in her book, which made visible their hidden histories.

The journey for visibility was travelled in twenty-one chapters in the edited collection Our Sisters’ Land. Each chapter was written by a woman in Wales, and the themes of the book were broad and diverse with attention given to home and community; education, training and work; culture and governance; women in rural Wales, material culture, religion, sexuality and the politics of identity. The book established the ways in which women’s lives in Wales were changing and evolving, setting these changes in written testimony, which hoped to increase an understanding of these shifts and ‘mitigate against the possibility of any future erosion of women’s hard won emancipation’ (Aaron and Rees, 1994, p. 14). Setting the evolving worlds of Welsh women on record was a major achievement of this collection; however, how far we can avoid slipping back in terms of the ideologies of feminism will be explored in this new collection. In contemporary Wales, it remains important to centralize the voices of women; but, to engender positive change, it is also important to acknowledge the voices of Welsh men.

Contemporary Wales

The pattern of family life and public life has continued to shift since the seminal publication of Our Sisters’ Land and it has become important to revisit and re-examine the lives of both men and women in Wales. For this reason, Our Changing Land engages with issues emerging from earlier work in the journal Contemporary Wales, allowing for a reflection on gender in a wider sense. Drawing from the work of leading writers and emerging academics, in Welsh history, social policy, education, sociology, psychology and geography, and revisiting two seminal sources allows this edited collection to examine what is distinctive about Wales and Welshness in an interdisciplinary manner, which allows room for multiple voices and narratives of authors in Wales, regardless of their gender.

Contemporary Wales was published annually by the University of Wales Press between 1987 and 2014, and the journal was at the forefront of research into economic, political and social sciences relating to Wales. Its interdisciplinary content featured research on Wales and attracted leading Welsh authors from a wide range of academic fields. It incorporated both academic and practitioner-based articles, annual economic and legal reviews, and book reviews. The journal worked across a range of subject areas including the social sciences, history, law, media and languages and offered academic articles and reviews relating to politics, policy, economics and current affairs.

Previously edited by Paul Chaney, of Cardiff University, and Elin Royles, of Aberystwyth University, Contemporary Wales was arguably the leading journal of modern Welsh public life for almost three decades. The current collection will revisit carefully selected articles published around the early 1990s, with four authors revisiting their original work and four authors revisiting papers in relation to their own contemporary Welsh research. Importantly, the original authors of papers in the journal are both men and women – as are those revisiting the classic articles – providing the multiple insights needed to explore the postcolonial landscape of a devolved and evolving Wales, which forms the geographical, cultural and psychological site that Our Changing Land sets out to revisit, exploring the changes and continuities in the Welsh nation across this temporal space.

Our Changing Land

The last two decades have seen big changes within a small nation, and the distinctiveness of Wales, in terms of its political life and culture, has grown considerably. Nevertheless, beneath the imagery of the definitive nation, Wales remains a complex and divided land (Mackay, 2010), and this collection will explore the themes of continuity, change, unity and division that actively contribute to the making of contemporary Wales. The collection will explore what it means to be Welsh in postcolonial Wales, in a politically devolved and continuingly evolving nation.

Drawing from the work of leading writers and emerging academics, in Welsh history, social policy, education, sociology, psychology and geography, this edited collection examines what is distinctive about Wales and Welshness in an interdisciplinary yet comprehensive manner. Core themes and issues will be 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’.

Wales, Welshness, language and identity

Nation is a powerful concept for drawing distinctions that act to ‘other’ places and people, consecutively constructing, imagining and maintaining a sense of Wales and Welshness (Clarke, 2009). In Wales, rugby illustrates a symbolic, internal source of unified Welsh expression, which powerfully unites a nation divided by gender, language, race and class (Mackay, 2010). However, a sporting game, no matter how beautiful, cannot engender a sense of national identity in isolation, and there are other processes that must be considered, such as nationalism and the Welsh language, literary and cultural imagery, and historical, geographical, gendered ideologies.

This first section of the book explores these themes by returning to previous identity positioning, in earlier Welsh texts, from the standpoint of the present. The section begins with a chapter from Jane Aaron, editor of Our Sisters’ Land, who revisits her seminal chapter ‘Finding a voice in two tongues: gender and colonization’. The original chapter charted the ways in which the pressures that circumscribed Welsh women’s lives were not engendered solely from Welsh culture itself, but from the tensions between Wales and England.

‘Finding a voice in two tongues: gender and colonization’ returned to the Victorian era by exploring the moral imperative to adopt an English middle-class model of femininity put forward in the English 1847 Report of the Commissions of Inquiry, which was central in placing Welsh women, and the Welsh language, as inferior, dirty and immoral (Aaron, 1994). The branding of the Welsh woman as lawless and licentious in regard to their sexual conduct and the consequent moral imperative of purity rendered these ‘colonised others’ voiceless (Smith, 1999), culturally and linguistically. The chapter moved from this starting point to explore the journey of ‘finding a voice’ through literature, poetry and in social and political movements including Welsh Women’s Aid, Greenham Common and Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg – the Welsh Language Society.

Aaron’s writing was rich and evocative: it painted a history of Wales that I had not seen before and made a lasting impression. My reading of the chapter was re-evoked as I encountered the legacies of this history and its pervasive influence over the communities that I work with in Wales. In this new chapter, ‘Devolved voices: Welsh women’s writing post 1999’, Aaron focuses on the work of contemporary Welsh women writers post-devolution, exploring how women’s greater representation in constitutional government, through the Welsh Government, has affected women writers’ lives and their sense of Welsh identity. The chapter examines the pervasiveness of the divisive elements of class, ethnic, linguistic and sexual difference in Welsh life, and revisits the traditional role of the ‘Welsh Mam’ in relation to discourses of feminism and nationalism through the literary activism of ‘finding a voice in two tongues’.

The theme of ‘finding a voice in two tongues’ is carried forward in the following chapter by the emerging author Non Geraint, who I was privileged to supervise in her undergraduate degree research dissertation. As Sapir contends, ‘common speech serves as a peculiarly potent symbol of the social solidarity of those who speak the language’ (cited in Davies, 2010, p. 162): language then can be a powerful expression of collective identity and belonging. However, the Act of Union 1536 banned Welsh from official use and the 1847 Report into the State of Education in Wales further marginalized the language by forbidding its use in schools (Davies, 2010). Consequently, Welsh declined and distinctions developed between regions leading to the linguistic tensions.

Children and young people are imperative in nation building, and Heini Gruffudd’s (1997) article ‘Young people’s use of Welsh: the influence of home and community’, published in Contemporary Wales, explored these linguistic tensions by documenting young people’s relationship with the Welsh language. Gruffudd reported an equal balance between English and Welsh language when young people spoke about school and education; however, in conversations around popular culture, music and visual entertainment, English became the dominant mode of communication. English was also seen as transitionally fashionable among young people, where adopting the English language engendered a level of kudos in youth subcultures – an association that was seen to negatively impact on their everyday use of Welsh. Gruffudd (1997, p. 217) argued that Welsh media and youth provision needed to create new opportunities for Welsh young people to have ‘their own means of cultural expression and identity’.

Geraint’s chapter, ‘Only inside the classroom? Young people’s use of the Welsh language in the school, the community and the peer group’ revisits Gruffudd’s article. The chapter explores the continuities and changes in the use of Welsh and attitudes towards the language amongst bilingual and monolingual children, in relation to their subjective feelings of national identity. Drawing on findings from a research study conducted with children aged 12 to 13 in a dual-stream bilingual school in mid Wales the chapter argues that at this age, Welsh-speaking children have a stronger sense of Welsh identity, based on their stronger negative attitudes towards the ‘British’ label and its association with England. However, the chapter also provides evidence that suggests that children view the Welsh language as an important commodity and advantage for future employment rather than as the language of social life, with Welsh-speaking children often assimilating to English due to peer influences. Geraint contends that government initiatives to create a ‘bilingual nation’ through education may limit the language to the educational and occupational domain rather than creating a bilingual nation more widely.

Following on from Geraint’s chapter, the focus on identity shifts from the Welsh language to issues of gender and class. My own contribution to the collection is ‘Who should do the dishes now? Revisiting gender and housework in contemporary urban south Wales’. This chapter revisits Jane Pilcher’s (1994) important chapter from Our Sisters’ Land – ‘Who should do the dishes? Three generations of Welsh women talking about men and housework’. Pilcher’s chapter was based on research with grandmothers, daughters and granddaughters that examined the legacy of the myth of the ‘Welsh Mam’ (Beddoe, 1989; Mannay, 2013) in maintaining acceptable feminine identities. Despite intergeneration shifts in relation to ideologies of egalitarianism in women’s talk, Pilcher found that the actual domestic arrangements acted to counter this rhetoric of gender equality.

Two decades on from the original study, my chapter looks again at the cultural legacy of the ideology ‘Welsh Mam’ on women’s everyday lives, and explores this question in contemporary south Wales by drawing upon data generated in a study of mothers and daughters residing in a Welsh, marginalized, urban housing area. The chapter argues that in contemporary Wales, the domestic sphere remains a site of inequality, where women are negotiating the impossibility of being both in full-time employment and meeting the ideological tenets of the ‘Welsh Mam’. Furthermore, the work of women and the accompanying expectations have moved from being peripheral to becoming central, and the chapter suggests that this places women in a psychological impasse where they identify themselves as ‘lazy’ when they cannot simultaneously fulfil these roles to the unreachable standards of the new respectable working-class femininity.

In the final chapter of the section, Michael Ward shifts the discussion focus from working-class femininities to the complexities of working-class masculinities. While the work on men, masculinities and gender identities has exploded across the social sciences since the late 1980s, very little of this work has looked at masculinities and what it means to be a young man in a Welsh context. This chapter revisits a seminal paper, ‘Boys from nowhere’, published at the end of the millennium in Contemporary Wales by Jonathan Scourfield and Mark Drakeford, which argued that to understand Wales there was a need to understand its inhabitants, both those with and without power. They suggested that by analysing Welsh men it would be possible to critically explore the social process of the construction, production and reproduction of masculinities within the nation. However, research has been slow to develop in this area, arguably because of the diversity of masculinities within the nation, in terms of linguistic divisions, social-class dynamics and the north/south/urban/rural divide.

To gain a nuanced understanding of Welsh men, Ward suggests that research must appreciate the separate historical and geographical contexts, within the social construction of gender and specific localities. In this chapter, ‘“Placing young men”: the performance of young working-class masculinities in the south Wales valleys’, Ward draws on an ethnographic study with a group of young working-class men in a post-industrial community to explore how young masculinities are performed across a variety of educational and leisure spaces, and to illustrate the ways in which social, economic and cultural processes impact on the formation of self. Ward argues that expectations and transitions to adulthood are continually framed through geographically and historically shaped class and gender codes.

Education, labour markets and gender in Wales

Between 1945 and 1980 the income differential between individuals in Wales narrowed; however, since 1980 the gap between rich and poor has widened (Evans, 2010). This section argues that the increase in social polarization makes it increasingly difficult for marginalized working-class individuals in Wales to succeed in the labour market. However, the workplace is preceded by the education system and social mobility is intrinsically linked with Bourdieu’s (1984) concepts of social and cultural capital so that those born into poverty do not have the resources and connections that are inherited by middle-class children. Furthermore, according to the historian Deidre Beddoe (2000), the lives of Welsh women have been shaped by nonconformity, religion, industrialization and a virulent strain of patriarchy, which have meant that in Wales, more than other parts of Britain, women have been denied access to the public sphere, which has arguably engendered a legacy of gendered inequalities.

In this section, gendered patterns of social mobility in the Welsh education system are revisited by Melanie Morgan, who draws on her own psychosocial study to make compariso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations, Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• I. Wales, Welshness, Language and Identity Hybrid Identity by KAOS – Song Lyrics
• II. Education, Labour Markets and Gender in Wales Beautiful by Tasha Harvey – Song Lyrics
• III. Welsh Public Life, Social Policy, Class and Inequality Politricks by Jamie Feeney aka Sapien – Song Lyrics
• Notes
• References