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'The height of its womanhood': Women and genderin Welsh , 1847-1945

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Authors Kreider, Jodie Alysa

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280621 'THE HEIGHT OF ITS WOMANHOOD':

WOMEN AND GENDER IN , 1847-1945

by

Jodie Alysa Kreider

Copyright © Jodie Alysa Kreider 2004

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

In Partia' Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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2004 UMI Number: 3145085

Copyright 2004 by Kreider, Jodie Alysa

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Nationalism. 1S47 -1945"

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation is the culmination of over a decade of study at the University of Arizona. The mentoring and guidance received from a number of people helped guide this project to completion and made my graduate school experiences both challenging and enjoyable. The Department of History at the University of Arizona provided wide- ranging forms of support for this project. Financial support including a number of Travel grants, the Hesketh Scholarship and the Turville Dissertation Completion from the Department of History allowed me to complete my research in Britain and my writing in Arizona. Donna Watson, Pat Alger, Gina Wasson, Cynthia Malbrough and the rest of the office staff have always offered help, guidance, and enjoyable conversation upon request. The faculty of the Department of History have always been supportive. Professor Richard Cc ;grove provided me with excellent opportunities to develop my skills as both a Teaching Assistant, lecturer, and scholar, as well as stepping in to teach my class during an extended family crisis. He and his wife Loretta graciously welcomed me into their home on any number of occasions. Professor Alison Futrell as an instructor challenged me to extend my knowledge both geographically and back into the historical record. She has provided a model of scholarship, teaching, and service, and I aspire to master her balancing of the demands of academia with travel, recreation, and the ability to enjoy her life. Finally I must wholeheartedly thank my mentor and advisor, Professor Laura Tabili. Her unflagging energy, dedication, and challenging support of my work and my career have made my tenure at the University of Arizona a joy to experience I hope to be as excellent a mentor, scholar, and as she in my own career. I must also thank the British Federation of Women Graduates for their Theodora Bosanquet Bursary which supplied me with housing in , and the Phi Alpha Theta national organization for their Doctoral Scholarship. The staffs at the British Library, , the Newspaper Library-Colindale, and National Library of provided me with wonderful service during my research in their institutions. John and Sheila Rowlands provided housing, support, and colleagues to discuss Welsh matters during my stay in . Finally Karl Davies of -The Nationalist Party of Wales granted me access to the Plaid Cymru at the National Library of Wales. Finally I must thank my family, friends and colleagues who have supported me in any number of ways over the past years. My colleagues Meghan Winchell, Jerry Pierce. Laura Shelton, H. Michael Gelfand, Michelle Berry, Sharon Bailey-Glasco, Jeff Glasco and Charles Bccm all provided challenging feedback during classes and support in our dissertators group. My fellow students attended innumerable happy hours at my request where I learned as much from them as I ever did in classes. 1 thank them all for helping me enjoy my graduate career. My family has been incredibly supportive and understanding, especially my Nancy, who did not see this project completed. The rest of my family has made the completion of this project a true memorial to her, and I thank my brother Scot, father Marlin, Uncles, Aunts and cousins for helping me celebrate. For my mother,

Nancy Wenger Kreider

Teacher, feminist, athlete, collector, and traveler

Who always encouraged me to have adventures

and showed me how it was done 6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT 7

INTRODUCTION 8

CHAPTER ONE: 'Ill-educated, dirty, unchaste and potentially Rebellious The Blue Book Book Reports of 1847, Welsh masculinity, and the silenced Welsh woman 25

CHAPTER TWO: Good Wives, Welsh Flannel, and the tall peaked : YGymraes and Welsh nationalist ideology 63

CHAPTER THREE: 'Daughters of , of GwaliaWelsh masculinity and womanhood in Welsh Nationalist Periodicals. 1880-1914 90

CHAPTER FOUR: 'The Backbone of the NationWomen and Gender in Plaid Cymru.1925-1945 159

CONCLUSION: 191

REFERENCES: 197 7

ABSTRACT

This dissertation places gender at the center of multiple articulations of power that constituted the imperial relationship between Wales and , as well as the self- fashioning development of Welsh nationalism between 1847 and 1945. Research in both Welsh and sources and the materials of Plaid Cymru: he

Nationalist Party of Wales reveals that Welsh women, as both ideological symbols and actors, played crucial roles in the formation of Welsh nationalism. This dissertation challenges the notion of a homogenous 'British' identity during the nineteenth century, placing Welsh nationalism firmly within a larger comparative framework of imperial and post-colonial movements, particularly using gender to constituting power relationships between various groups of men. Yet Welsh nationalism differed from other movements in that no major articulation of feminist agendas occurred within the nationalist movement between 1880-1945, particularly within Plaid Cymru. The conservative gender roles disseminated by nationalist groups based itself instead on hegemonic Victorian

English gender roles of the early nineteenth century as outlined in the periodical Y

Gymraes, syncretically combined with an emphasis on Welsh women as primary communicators and representatives of Welsh culture via their weaving and wearing of flannel and the pointed . Both practices sprang from nationalist fervor of Lady

Llanover, often dismissed as a dilettante. These themes dominated nationalist publications and party doctrine until 1945, despite women's contributions of labor and financial support that kept Plaid Cymru viable during its formative decades. 8

INTRODUCTION

Despite the failure of the 1979 referendum on , Welsh nationalism has not gone away, as demonstrated by the founding of the Welsh in

2000. The complexities of both political and cultural Welsh nationalism must be traced back to the imperial debates of 1847 and after in order to understand the present movements towards Welsh autonomy. This study seeks to place gender at the center of the multiple articulations of power that made up the imperial relationship between Wales and England, as well as the self-fashioning development of Welsh nationalism, by examining the participation of numerous Welsh women, both as ideological symbols and as actors within the movement in a context of a post-colonial setting.

This work traces the gendered development of the Welsh nationalist movement, from the response to the publication of the 1847 Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of , through the founding and formative years of Plaid

Cymru, the Nationalist Party of Wales toward the end of the second World War.

Examining the development of the Welsh nationalist movement within both its imperial and post-colonial setting reveals similarities between the 'internal' and 'external' British empires. Controlling women's bodies and representing gender remained integral to both the colonizing process and to the anti-colonial nationalist movement.

Over the past two centuries historical work on Britain has likewise relegated 9

Wales to the periphery of both the larger narrati ve, and the profession as a whole.1

British history has remained overwhelmingly focused on events in England, with a bare minimum of attention paid to and . These two kingdoms found themselves portrayed as the victims of modernity, inevitably and irrevocably absorbed

into the larger, dominant state as it developed into an empire. Wales was rarely discussed, as it had been conquered so early in England's history that by the nineteenth century, the Encyclopaedia Britannica stated the following, "For Wales, see England. "2

This imperial bias continued until recently. The decline of the combined

with the development of the European Union has led historians and others to formulate new questions about the definition of Britain in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The establishment of the Scottish and the Welsh Assembly in 2000

indicated that politically the homogeneity of "British" identity became increasingly untenable in both the post-colonial world and the past.3 Combined with Ireland's obvious success through membership and participation in the European Union, and the continuing strength of nationalism across the globe, the 'Celtic Fringe' has returned to a prominent

'Keith Robbins, "More than a footnote? Wales in British History," North American Journal of Welsh Studies 1, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 20-24.

2Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics 1868-1922 (: Press, 1991 ):8.

3For an excellent discussion of the historiographical developments regarding the new "British History" see Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 10 position in the writing of British history.4 Yet historians making such attempts risk developing their own exclusionary assumptions, creating new problems for future scholars to address.5

Now that scholars have begun examining the 'Celtic Fringe' and the unique contexts in which they have formulated their British as opposed to national identities, other peripheralizations become apparent. Within the field of Welsh history, the study of women and the significance of gender have remained glaringly scarce.6 As scholars study the development of Welsh nationalism as more than just a pale imitation of , patriarchal assumptions about women's roles in society and as citizens

4For an early work that examined different elements in British identity, see , Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale, 1992). Colley looks at the Welsh, English and Scots roles in the forging of Britain as a construct, but acknowledged she ignored Ireland and the Irish population in England in her analysis. See also Hugh Kearney, The : A Histc,y of Four (New : Cambridge, 1989). Frank Welsh, The Four Nations: A History of the (London: Harper Collins, 2002). Both of these authors approach the history of the United Kingdom of attempting to balance the four cultures of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales equally, but noting the dominance of England. This type of analysis has finally percolated into the writing of general survey textbooks, see William Heyck and Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Peoples of the British Isles: A New History 3 volume series. (: Lyceum, 2002). Yet even the creation of representative institutions such as the newly-founded Scots Parliament and the Welsh National Assembly replicates the historically unequal treatment of different regions within the hierarchical power relations of Britain; one is a Parliament, the other a National Assembly with limited power.

5As noted by R. R. Davies, the construct of four nations ignores the presence of other cultures in the British Isles, including those of the , , and the . This configuration also uses artificial divisions to cut across other regional and cultural groupings, including those in border regions. In addition, the tensions and variations within the four privileged cultures are often ignored. See R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093-1343. (: , 2000): 61.

6Ibid. See also Kenneth O. Morgan, The Rebirth of A Nation: Wales, 1880-1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).. For the major work outlining the essence of gender analysis as ever- fluctuating spect um of constructed, relational definitions of masculinity and femininity which signify power between different people, groups, classes, races, and variations thereof, rather than simply adding a few exceptional prominent women to the male-dominated narrative see Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Hew York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 11 continued. Some scholars have acknowledged the great need for the subject of women and gender in Wales to be addressed.7

Scholars have addressed the issue of Wales' position within an imperial relationship, taking advantage of the explosion of recent from the school of the

'New Imperial History' benefitting from the insights provided by Foucault, Derrida, and other post-structuralists of the linguistic turn.8 Yet they too ignore the significant, if not crucial, role of gender in articulating the imperial relationship between England and

Wales within the construct of Britain. Many scholars explain the 1847 Blue Book reports as the originating moment of modern Welsh nationalism, and the outraged response to their publication as a reaction against the colonial subordination of Wales within the

British metropole.9 This work moves beyond that literature by examining the Blue

Books as a gendered imperial discourse used to maintain and expand an asymmetrical relationship of power. This study will use postcolonial approaches to illuminate the

Welsh nationalist movement, while events in Wales challenge our understanding of imperial processes. This relationship between the dominant 'British' colonizers and the

'Angela John ed., Our Mother's Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History 1830-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991). John, Beddoe and others began incorporating women as a subject of study in the early 1990s, opening up the field.

"Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998. Roberts analyzes the language used by the Commissioner* which found its way into the Reports of 1847, finding that the Blue Books themselves reflect the imperial assumptions held by the Commissioners from the beginning. For the significance of gender in the imperial project see the entire volume, but especially the introduction to Claire Midgley, "Introduction: Gender and imperialism: mapping the connections" in Midgley ed., Gender and Imperia ism (: Manchester University Press, 1998): 1- 20; Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood" in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 87.

^Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books. 12 dominated Welsh members of the British empire was articulated by both groups using a dialectical discourse based en difference, that is "the social relations of power and ruling, not as what people intrinsically are, but what they are ascribed as in the context of domination."10 Looking outward from the imperial core to the external periphery of the

British empire, nineteenth century London governments, along with other European imperialists, used gendered language and representations of female bodies and behaviors to evaluate the civility, modernity, and value of different cultures along and across racial lines.11 This dissertation will show that the British state took the same tactics toward their internal empire within the British Isles during the nineteenth century, revealing tensions within the seemingly homogenous imperial core, thus within Eritish identity itself.

This work examines women's centrality as both symbols and actors within the subsequent development of Welsh cultural and political nationalist organizations. To do so requires relocating Wales within the broader comparative historical context of other

l0Himani Bannerji, "Politics and the Writing of History," in Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri with the assistance of Beth McAulay, Nation, Empire, Colony: Histm izing Gender and Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998): 287. For an excellent on he centrality of gender to the bourgeois imperial project as well as the formation of bourgeois identity in the metropole, see Catherine Hall, "Introduction: thinking the postcolonial, thinking the empire" in Catherine Hall ed., Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Routledge, 2000): 1-33.

"See also Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," in Henry Louis Gates ed., Race, Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 223-261. For more discussion on the key role that gender played within imperial discourses, relationships between colonizer and colonized, and also within each culture see Mrinalini Sinha. Colonial Masculinity: The 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' in the late, nineteenth century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). See Mrinilini Sinha, "Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late 19th Century Bengal," in Michael S. Kimmel ed., Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity. (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1987): 217-231. 13 revolutionary and post-colonial movements. Conversely, Welsh nationalism must be

located firmly within its unique historical context, neither treasured against a monolithic model of'the Celtic fringe,'12 nor dismissed as a poor, unsuccessful imitation of Irish

nationalism. Women's role as ideological symbols and peripheral actors bears as much

similarity to Indian and other nationalist discourses and organizations as to other

women's movements in Britain.13

While women remained cast in supporting, complementary roles as in other post-

colonial nationalist movements, this work will show that women and gendered

proscriptions remained central to the process of national identity formation and

nationalist revival.14 While the Welsh agitation greatly resembled the nationalist

development found in other parts of the British empire, Wales is notable for the absence

of a strong feminist movement that requite subordination by the nationalist movement.

This study will assess what difference this made to the Welsh nationalist movement.

Studying the centrality of gender within the development of the nationalist

l2Michael Hechter, Internal : The Celtic fringe in British national development, 1536- 1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Charlotte Aull Davies, Welsh Nationalism in the Twentieth Century The Ethnic Option and the Modern State (Nev York: Praeger, 1989).

l3See Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, and Sinha, "Gender and Imperialism".

"The conflicts between and nationalism within nationalist movements, and the ibordination of the former by nationalist leaders has been well documented. See Dana Hcarnc, "Contesting Positions in Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-lndependence Ireland," in Himani Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab, and Judith Whitehead eds., Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001):85-115; Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1983); Angela Gilliam. "Women's Equality and National Liberation," Evelyne Accad, "Sexuality and Sexual Politics: Conflicts and Contradictions for Contemporary Women in the Middle East," and Nayereh Tohidi, "Gender and Islamic Fundamentalism: Feminist Politics in Iran," in Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 14 movement in Wales also demonstrates that during the height of its nineteenth century empire, Britain itself was far from homogenous. Recent discussions regarding the 'Break

up of Britain' continued to assume the homogeneity of nineteenth and pre-1945 Britain.

They pointed to the integrative function of the industrial economy and the unifying force

of imperial ideology, while downplaying the power disparities inherent in that

relationship, arguing that the English displayed greater sensitivity to the other cultures of

the British Isles than they did to their external empire. Likewise they assume that Welsh,

Irish, Scots, Manx, and Cornishmen all embraced the dominance of England within

Britain.15 This study documents English efforts via the British state to homogenize and

assimilate the and gender relations according to an urban, Victorian

British model, and that a significant proportion of the Welsh opposed such efforts

vehemently.

Moreover, although Welsh nationalists adopted Victorian gender roles as a central

element of their identity, they altered them to suit their own interpretations of Welsh

identity, based firmly in a rural, romanticized, 'traditional' culture. This process of

syncretic construction again reveals the similarities between imperialism and nationalism

l5See Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity. Kumar's formulation of 'missionary nationalism' and its hegemonic role in maintaining a British identity, thereby negating the need for an 'English' nationalism is compelling, as the Welsh maintained feelings of being both Welsh and British at the same time (P. 179). Yet Kumar overemphasizes the degree to which the Celtic economically underdeveloped parts of the participated and influenced and 'British' culture, especially regarding the influence of a few prominent Welshmen, including Kier Hardie and Lloyd George. He accepts that there was a "basic asymmetry in the relation of the people of the British Isles," and argues that the Celtic areas "were always aware that they were junior partners," thus the maintenance of their ethnic identities were 'compensation' for their unequal status. He also downplays the English efforts to homogenize the British Isles, discussed in Chapter One below. 15 in Wales and other parts of the world, as the colonized both subconsciously and consciously adopted the culture of their colonizers, despite attempts to construct themselves in opposition to those very values.16 The use of women's bodies and idealized maternal and cultural roles in their imagined society reveal these tensions and demonstrate the dialectical relationship between colonizer and colonized, and different groups and genders within nationalist movements.

Finally, many scholars have dismissed Welsh nationalism as merely a cultural movement, disregarding its importance because its was not an ideology of national

liberation or separation advocating the use of violence, but rather focused on an

evolutionary, Parliamentary program of cultural recognition and accommodation. While

it is true that the primary of Welsh nationalism resided among the intelligentsia

and elites of Wales, their role in the construction of political and discourse

should not be dismissed. This process is important, as ideological posturing and the

invention of national identity " to visions and definitions which be all we have when

we need them." Thus, the process of invention "puts great power in the hands of those

who do the inventing."17 The efforts of Welsh nationalists to invent and then preserve

their culture within the imperial hegemony of Britain is worthy of analysis. This study

demonstrates that when Welsh nationalism is considered in comparison to other

nationalist movements using criteria other than the advocacy of violence found in Ireland

l6See Homi Bhaba,"Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse" in Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: California, 1997): 152-162.

,7Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, p. 253. 16 and elsewhere, it is similar to most other post-colonial movements and reveals the importance of gender in the formation of new national identities, despite their lack of a

formal, .

"For Wales. See England": The Imperial Setting

Wales in the nineteenth century existed on the geographic, political, economic,

and linguistic periphery of the United . Geographically the

Principality of Wales occupies the western portion of the largest of the British Isles

located off the northwest of . Facing Ireland across the and

Brittany across the English Channel, Wales historically remained more accessible by

water than by road or railroad. The combination of mountainous, agriculturally poor

terrain and high annual rainfall made Wales difficult to traverse by land, especially from

north to south, and limited invasion by military forces. Thus the mountains and valleys of

Wales remained relatively isolated, a haven for those who sought to avoid invading forces

from Rome in the first century C.E., Normandy in the eleventh century, and London

thereafter.18

Unfortunately for those who sought refuge in them, the mountains only slowed the

gradual military and political subordination of Wales to England, culminating in the late

thirteenth century with the military conquest by Edward I and the legal incorporation of

"Gwyn , When Was Wales: A History of the Welsh (London: Penguin, 1985): 2-4; , A History of Wales (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1993): 30; Prys Morgan and David Thomas, Wales: The Shaping of a Nation (London: David & Charles, 1984): 13-31. 17 the of Wales as 13 under Henry VIII in 1536.19 This process did not occur without resistance, including the revolt of the last Welsh ,

Owain Glyndwr between 1400-1410. Glyndwr attempted to set up the apparatus of a

Welsh nation, calling at , creating a civil service, and promulgating ecclesiastical reforms. Although these efforts ended in military defeat by the English crown in 1406-7 and the legal subordination of the Welsh as second-class citizens, they also earned Glyndwr the title, "the father of Welsh nationalism."20

Glyndwr may have been the father, but after the failure of his rebellion, Welsh

identity and nationalist movements turned to the Welsh language as the primary indicator

of difference from the rest of Britain. Despite attempts to Anglicize Wales through the

Church of England, the judicial system, economic dominance and, most recently the

educational system, the Welsh language continued to flourish until the beginning of the

twentieth century.21 The Census of 1891, the first to report on the distribution of the

Welsh language, reported that 54.5 percent of the population spoke Welsh, 30.4 percent

"Ibid., John Davies, 224. Ibid.. Gwyn Williams. 118-120.

:"Morgan and Thomas, Wales: The Shaping of a Nation, 64-69. Glyndwr's status as a national hero of Wales has been rediscovered and gained new public prominence as the original institution being restored by the creation of the new Welsh Assembly in 2000. The village of Machynelleth now features a large museum celebrating Glyndwr, while 2000 also saw a massive year-long exhibit on Glyndwr at the National Library of Wales.

2lIronically, attempts to spread Anglicanism throughout Wales after the Tudor Conquest led to the publication of the in Welsh, an event which revived the language by establishing the literary forms of the language and spreading its use throughout the Principality. 18 of them monoglot speakers with Welsh as their primary language.22 Thus Welsh remained the dominant language of the majority in the Principality, although its strength varied by county. By 1901 these numbers showed a decline, and by 1921, only 37.1 percent of the population spoke the language, the percentage of monoglot speakers having fallen to 16.9 percent.23 Despite the devastating impact of mass English language education and English language popular culture, efforts to prevent further decline in the number of Welsh speakers continue, proving more successful than twentieth century campaigns to rejuvenate Irish or Scots Gaelic. This relatively late decline in the strength of the Welsh language caused difficulties in communication and the need for translators

between the people of the Principality and British visitors, including governmental

inspectors and tourists during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as will be discussed in the chapters below.24 Yet it also provided the basis for the ongoing

construction of Welsh national identity and difference.

Religious confession also separated the Welsh from their English rulers. In

"Geraint H. Jenkins, Gwenfair Parry and Mari A. Williams, "More people speak it than ever before" in Gwenfair Parry and Mari A. Williams eds., The Welsh Language and the 1891 Census (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1999): 455.

"By 1931 the numbers had declined to 36.8 percent of the population speaking Welsh, and only 10.7 remained monoglot speakers, with Welsh as their primary language. By 1971 the percentage of Welsh speakers declined to 20.8 percent. John W. Aitchison and Harold Carter, "The Welsh Language 1921- 1991: A Geolinguistic Perspective" in Geraint H. Jenkins and Mari A. Williams eds., 'Let's Do Our Best for the Ancient TongueThe Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century (Cardiff: Wales, 2000): 34, 44. For an in-depth examination of the Welsh language over the past two centuries see any of the volumes in The Social History of the Welsh Language series from the University of Wales Press.

24English Commissioners investigating the state of education in Wales in 1846-7 hired Welsh speaking assistants when possible, however for the most part they encountered a population speaking a , and found communication difficult, a factor which greatly influenced their Reports and their condemnation of Welsh education and the morality of the Welsh population, especially Welsh women. See Chapter one below. 19 addition to existing on the periphery of Britain both geographically and linguistically, the vast majority of the Welsh remained fervently nonconformist during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The majority of the Welsh working and middle-classes did not subscribe to the beliefs of the of England, the established church of Great Britain, which in Wales remained dominated by wealthy, often English landlords and mine owners. Indeed, nonconformists viewed the Anglican church as an alien institution which they supported financially only through the required tithes. The various nonconformist sects such as the Welsh , Independents, Wesleyan Methodists, and Calvinist

Methodists built and worshiped at a plethora of small chapels across Wales. As will be discussed in Chapter One below, by the 1850s Nonconformity became the most significant element of Welsh national identity, a source of pride that superseded even the

Welsh language. English attacks upon Welsh morality led outraged middle-class

nonconformists to center their defense within the chapels. Led by their ministers, they claimed even greater morality for Welsh women and Welsh society than the English, pointing to chapel attendance as a primary indicator of their unique, specifically Welsh adherence to correct, moral, Christian behavior.

These peculiar differences—the language, the isolation, the mountains and the

people—made popular destination for travelers during the early nineteenth century. English travelers, writers, and artists depicted Wales as a scenic, pre-modern of Britain, inhabited by conquered and pacified, picturesque, and 'peculiar' fanners and possible wearing quaint costumes, playing on the 20 mountainsides, speaking a funny, incomprehensible language, and attending Christian but nonconformist chapels. Altogether Wales became a wonderfully picturesque, quiet, yet exotic place for the increasingly industrialized, urban, officially Anglican, English- speaking population to explore. Wales remained relatively accessible to those with the money and leisure time to travel, particularly as Napoleon's conquests across the of Europe made the traditional Grand Tour in Europe impossible for the children of the aristocracy.25 The widening differences between were of little concern to the British Parliament in London, concerned with other matters

including war with and attempts to stem the impact of revolutionary ideas during

the early years of the century.

Unfortunately for the British government, circumstances changed. At the behest

of English businessmen and landowners, by mid-centuiy those peculiar Welshmen were

no longer playing their traditional harps on the mountainsides, but digging the major

catalyst of change from underneath the mountains: .26 The need for coal to fuel the

continuing industrial in Britain made events in Wales, particularly in the coal

mining valleys of , no longer peripheral but vital to the larger British

economy and polity. Yet while remained crucial to fueling the furnaces and

ship engines of the dominant industrial and naval power in the world, Wales remained

25George Barrow, Wild Wales; its people, language, and scenery, (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1907). Prys Morgan, "Keeping the Legends Alive" in Tony Curtis ed., Wales the Imagined Nation: Studies in Cultural and National Identity { : Wales Press, 1986): 19-41; R. , "Wales and the English Imagination from the 18"1 to the 20,h Centuries" in Gulliver 31: Britische Regionen oder: Wie einheitlich ist das Konigreich? German English Yearbook, Band 31 (1992): 41.

26 Morgan, Wales in British Politics, pp. 2-8. 21 subordinated within the larger British and imperial economy. Extraction of a single natural resource by local workers for frequently absentee English mine-owners created an unbalanced economic relationship.27 For example, transportation networks facilitated movement from east to west between England and South Wales, but movement from south to north by railroad, which would have facilitated regional economic and cultural unity, was possible only by going back into England before attempting to head back into

Wales. Other industries remained scarce in Wales as the rest of the Principality remained overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. Although important to the British economy overall, Wales's infrastructural needs remained neglected in favor of the infrastructural and industrial demands of Britain.

Moreover the experiences in the coal-mining valleys of the dislocations of industrialization by the 1830s created a disaffected, Welsh-speaking, nonconformist population ripe for revolt.28 Although the British government successfully put down such rebellions, large numbers of workers from the hinterlands of Wales marched to

London in order to publicize their grievances before Parliament alerted British elites, and thus Parliament, to the dangers of this large, unassimilated, potentially dangerous

27For more on the regional inequities of industrialization within a multi-national state see Hechter, Internal Colonialism, especially Chapter 5. Although scholars have dismissed the strict division between Celtic and English elements of the economy as depicted by Hechter, the articulation of the British economy depended on the deliberate underdevelopment of certain areas such as Wales to streamline the extraction of coal and other natural resources. The process was made easier by the cultural and linguistic divide, and the lack of a local middle class or any group with capital for local development of the coal industry. Krishnan Kumar romanticizes the power relationships and exploitation inherent within the articulated British economy. See Kumar The Making of English National Identity, p. 169.

"Examples of their willingness to revolt include the Merthyr Rising of 1831, the Chartist risings of 1839, and the from 1839-1843. 22 population within the heart of an expansive British Empire. Attempting to understand the situation, Parliament commissioned an investigation into the linguistic situation and the state of education in Wales at the behest of several coal-owning members of

Parliament with interests in maintaining a stable workforce,.29 As Chapter One will discuss, the resulting publication of the final 1847 Report of the Commissioners condemned the Welsh population as immoral, uneducated, and in need of Anglicization and civilization. Pursuing this agenda involved creating an English language school system. Educating the young 'correctly' would bring Wales fully into the increasingly homogenous state, society, and culture of Britain.30 At first Welsh leaders welcomed the investigation as a means of improving Welsh education, which they agreed stood in great need of improvement. But the Commissioners' accusations of Welsh women's immorality and deviant behavior provoked a furious, outraged, public response that used mass meetings, published works, periodicals and letters to Parliament to contest the biased findings of the Commissioners and the techniques of their investigation. The foundations of the modern Welsh nationalist movement rested equally in the Welsh response to the accusations of the Commissioners and in Welsh attempts to prove their judgements wrong.31

"'Great Britain. Parliament, Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, Sessional Papers (Commons, 1847, Education General Wales, 1 July 1847).

J0A true universal English-language system was not created until 1870 under the Forster Education Act.

"See Jodie Kreider, "Degraded and Benighted": Gendered Constructions of Wales in the Empire, ca. 1847" North American Journal of Welsh Studies Vol 2, 1 (Winter 2002). http://spruce.flint.umich.edu -ellisis/VolTwo.html and Chapter One below for a more in-depth discussion of 23

The first chapter of this work analyzes the Welsh and English responses to the

1847 publication of the Reports of the Commissioners on the State of Education in Wales, commonly considered the catalyst for modern Welsh nationalism. It will show that this movement was constructed around Welsh women from the beginning. British and Welsh men wielded conflicting constructions of the morality and sexual behavior of Welsh women to first evaluate, and then attack the character and status of the other culture and thus the nation.

Chapter Two examines the efforts of early Welsh nationalists Lady , cultural enthusiast and the Rev. Evan Jones to construct, teach, and defend Welsh women's domestic and moral roles in Welsh society in the period after 1847 using the newly founded periodical Y Gymraes, [The Welshwoman] and various other tracts. This periodical established the central pillars of Welsh nationalist discourse for the century that followed.

Chapter Three traces the role of women, both as ideological symbols and actual participants, in the development of the (Young Wales) political movement during the late nineteenth century. A few prominent women participated in shaping the

Welsh nationalist movement as authors and editors in nationalist publications. Elite women participated in the dissemination and imposition of a limiting gender ideology upon the working class women they hoped to mold into good Welsh mothers.

these events. 24

Chapter Four studies the rise of Plaid Cymru, The Nationalist Party of Wales during the 1920s, focusing on the construction of nationalist gender roles within the

Women's Section under the leadership of and author Kate Roberts and others. The founders of Plaid Cymru sought to differentiate themselves from earlier nationalist organizations, especially those associated with the British Liberal party such as Cymru

Fydd. The formation of the first truly independent nationalist party in Wales presented a new ideologies of nationalism yet did not succeed in divorcing itself from its predecessors in terms of gender ideology. Women's participation in Plaid Cymru took a more physical, vital role than in the intellectual nationalist pressure group o young Wales, as they performed all of the tasks that keep a viable. 25

CHAPTER ONE

"Ill-educated\ dirty, unchaste and potentially Rebellious: The Blue Book Reports of 1847, Welsh masculinity, and the silenced Welsh woman

The furor surrounding the 1847 publication of the Parliamentary Commission's

Reports on the State of Education in Wales acted as one of the key moments of Welsh national identity formation. Parliament and the Commission of 1846-7, contrary to their intention, inadvertently provided the catalyst for a rare instance of Welsh nonconformist unity around the defense of a slandered Welsh nation. This chapter will examine the

Reports of the Commissioners and the resulting explosion of publications challenging their findings. It will expose the overwhelmingly gendered nature of nationalist and imperialist arguments from both sides of the debates. This chapter will illustrate the highly gendered nature of this imperial debate over the immorality of Welsh women and the education of the Welsh population. At the same time it will explore similarities between what occurred in Wales and British imperial discourses about the education and sexuality of Bengali men and women in British , despite Wales's purported position as a member of the European, 'homogenous' core of the Empire. Moreover, while acknowledging the active involvement of a few elite women in challenging the judgements of the Commissioners, the discourses of national and imperial contestation between the British state and Welsh nationalist leaders revealed the vital role that a silenced population of Welsh women played as symbols and political weapons with which both the Commissioners and Welsh nationalists defended their qualifications as 26 masculine national leaders. Imperial and nationalist relationships among Britain, England and Wales were negotiated and contested using gender to signify assertions of dominance and power. Examining the construction of these gendered discourses complicates our understanding of nineteenth-century 'British' identity, of Welsh nationalism, and of the

relationship between 'core' and 'periphery,' and places all of these elements within a

larger comparative context.

The inflammatory contents of the Blue Books have provided a fertile starting

point for Welsh nationalist historiography. While other scholars have briefly

acknowledged that the Commissioners strongly criticized Welsh women's sexual

behavior, they have failed to acknowledge that the Reports also challenged Welsh

masculinity, both as a culture and as individual patriarchs within individual .1

This chapter and dissertation treat the entire process and gendered discourse about both

masculinity nd femininity, as indicative of, and absolutely crucial to, the imperial,

subordinate power relationship between England and Wales within Britain and its

Empire. Although one author recently outlined the imperial power relations revealed in

the Commissioners' use of language in the Blue Book reports, her analysis failed to

'Rosemary Jones, "Separate Spheres'?: Women, Language and Respectability in Victorian Wales," in Geraint H. Jenkins, ed., The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801-1911 (Cardiff: University of Wales, 2000): 177-213, esp. pp. 195-197. See Joan Scott's groundbreaking work for a discussion on the

difference between women's history and the study of t ?nder, in which gender is defined as a construct in which masculinity and femininity exist in relation tc one another. Gender is one of the primary means of signifying power between different people, groups, and cultures, in this case, England and Wales, Britain and India, and between the sexes within each of those cultures in order to maintain the patriarchal, racial, and class hierarchies. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia, 1988). acknowledge the gendered nature of such language.2 Roberts argued that the English

Commissioners could not acknowledge Welsh culture as valuable because to do so, and then decry that culture, would give it viability. In this chapter I assert that the English, as the dominant hegemonic culture within Britain, had no hesitation in acknowledging certain cultures as viable, yet inferior, because within the Darwinian, progressive views of history and society, certain cultures and eventually races had to be inferior and contain

"Othered" qualities to justify relative British superiority and British imperial rule or dominance.3

During the eighteenth century English travel writers repeatedly touted Wales as a romantic, sparsely populated wilderness providing beautiful landscapes for English and

European tourists to visit and enjoy. Implicit in such a description was the pacified submission of an ancient, 'peculiar', pre-modern, and picturesque Welsh population that

2Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998).Roberts examined the language used within the Reports from a linguistic perspective. See also Gwyneth Tyson Roberts 'Under the hatches': English Parliamentary Commissioners' views of the people and language of mid-nineteenth-century Wales," in Bill Schwarz ed., The Expansion of England: Race, ethnicity and cultural history. (London: Routledge, 1996): 171 -197. For more discussion on the key role that gender played within imperial discourses, relationships between colonizer and colonized, and also within each culture see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' in the late nineteenth century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995).

3See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage, 1978), for the basic argument regarding the constructed nature of these views of the 'Orient' from the perspective of the 'Occident.' See also Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (New York: Routledge, 1995) on the use of such ideology to justify the dominance of the elite over the working classes in Britain. See also Joanna De Groot, "'Sex' and 'Race': the Construction of Language and Image in the 19th century," in Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall, eds., Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies in Gender in the I9h century (New York: Routledge, 1989): 89-128. Sander L. Oilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature" in Heniy Louis Gates ed., 'Race'Writingand Difference, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 223-261. 28 avoided spoiling the views of the tourists.4 By the mid-nineteenth century depictions of a pacified pastoral population of farmers, harpists, and druids happy to remain in traditional

' Wild Wales' no longer prevailed.5 The strength of the British industrial economy concentrated large numbers of Welsh-speaking, Nonconformist laborers in the economically vital coal and mining valleys of Wales. Incidents of labor and popular agu ition, such as the Merthyr Rising of 1831, the Chartist risings of 1839 and the

Rebecca Riots between 1839-1843, jarred British elites out of their complacency about the security and homogeneity of their 'white' domestic empire within the British archipelago. This uneasiness led to increased state intervention, similar to that which occurred in the overseas empire after the Indian Mutiny of 1857.6 Fearing more incidents of popular unrest, Parliament, deeming Wales's poor educational system and the

4Prys Morgan, "Keeping the legends alive," in Tony Curtis ed., Wales the Imagined Nation: Studies in Cultural and National Identity ( Springs, PA: Poetry Wales Press, 1986): 19-41; R. Merfyn Jones, "Wales and the English Imagination from the eighteenth to the twentieth Centuries," in Gulliver 31: Britische Regionen oder: Wie einheitlich ist das Konigreich? German English Yearbook, Band 31 (1992): 41. For similar productions of Africa by travel writers, see Mary Louise Pratt, "Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen," in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ed., Race, Writing, and Difference. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 138-162. Here too authors's descriptions of the landscape minimized the human presence, with the author's narrative constructing Africa as a timeless land where the results of human settlement were evident, but not the population itself.

5Prys Morgan, "From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger eds., The Invention of Tradition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 (Reprint 1992): 78, 87, 92.

6William Williams, A Letter to the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, On the Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State of Education in Wales, (London: James Ridgway, 1848); David J. V. Jones, The Last Rising: The Newport Chartist Insurrection of 1839. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Reprinted University of Wales Press, 1999): 200, 224-226. For a discussion of changes in imperial state interference regarding the presence of European women, and the sexual behavior of indigenous women in India and elsewhere after the Mutiny of 1857 see Ann Stoler, "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia," in Micaela di Leonardo ed. Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley: California, 1991): 51-101. 29 prevalence of the Welsh language as the primary cause of the increased agitation and lack of assimilation into English-speaking British society, commissioned an inquiry into the educational and linguistic situation in Wales.

Following the instructions of Parliament, the secretary to the Committee of

Council on Education, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, charged three Commissioners, Ralph

R.W. Lingen, Jelinger C. Symons, H. Vaughan Johnson, and assistants with the duty of visiting and inspecting every school in Wales between 1846 and April 1847 and publishing a report on their findings, along with the supporting evidence.7 The limited amount of time available to visit each school prompted the inspectors to use local

informants to provide additional information regarding the state of education in their local

area. Parliament published the resulting Commissioners' reports which became known as

the "Blue Books" late in 1847.8 The Commissioners presented the final Reports to

Parliament in three volumes, a total of 1181 pages. Each volume included a report by the

Commissioner summarizing the findings for that region, summaries of the school

visits, followed by informants' reports in the Appendices. The Commissioners, their

assistants, and the majority of their informants represented the British establishment, their

homogenous Anglican, elite, educated backgrounds contrasted starkly with the

Nonconformist working class population they examined and evaluated.

7See Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1998).

'Great Britain. Parliament, Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, Sessional Papers (Commons), 1847, Education General Wales, (I July 1847): Volume I, p. I. See also Gareth Elwyn Jones, Modern Wales: A Concise History, 2nd Ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 211. The Blue Book Reports of 1847 on the state of education in Wales reveal the underlying imperial tensions within what is often characterized as an already formed, seemingly homogenous British national identity, nation state, and nationalism.9 The descriptions of the moral, educational, intellectual, and physical condition of the implicitly and explicitly compared them with the Irish, Bengalis, and other colonized societies the British labeled uncivilized. As the Reverend James Denning informed the Commissioners, "from my experience of Ireland ... there is a very great similarity between the lower orders of Welsh and Irish - both are dirty, indolent, bigoted and contented."10 William Williams, the of Parliament who originally proposed the Commission and its agenda in a letter to Sir John Russell, asserted that the Welsh were, "both mentally and morally, the most degraded and benighted of Her Majesty's subjects."11 The Commissioners, all Englishmen, starkly contrasted their findings about

Wales to their own modern, 'civilized', industrial culture and society. The judgments of the English Commissioners reflected the ongoing construction and juxtaposition of their own society as 'civilized' in implicit contrast to others, in addition to their view of an

9Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Press, 1992). Colley argues that a 'British' identity was basically forged and complete by 1837, culturally establishing and building upon the protestant Union of 1707 between Scotland and England.

^Parliamentary Papers, Education General Wales, volume 2 (1 July 1847), p. 59.

"William Williams, A Letter to the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, On the Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State of Education in Wales. (London: James Ridgway, 1848): 5. 31

'uncivilized' and 'backward' Wales.12 The Reports reveal how the Commissioners and their informants built upon an older discourse of the Welsh as outsiders and therefore different to construct a new, negative view of religious, linguistic, and class differences.

The Commissioners argued that the poor state of Welsh education and the prevalence of

Nonconformity had resulted in an immoral, ignorant people who spoke a 'barbaric'

language. Their 'objective'13 findings, presented as the products of modern, scientific

inquiry, justified Wales's pacification and 'civilization' through the creation of a state-

funded, English-language school system and eradicating the Welsh language.

The Commissioners' accusations of Welsh barbarism and lack of 'civilization'

focused in particular on the reported sexual 'deviance' of Welsh women and the majority

of the Welsh people's lack of adherence to correct middle-class gender roles. The

Commissioners argued that the Welsh were immoral, characterizing 1 EIGHT out of every

TEN of the women, above the age of sixteen, UNCHASTE and INSENSIBLE to female

virtue'. Commissioners Lingen, Symons and Johnson labeled the women of Wales the

primary cause of Welsh immorality and deviance; their behavior the most visible signpost of Wales's need for England's imperial, civilizing influence.

This official, imperial civilizing discourse did not go uncontested.

I2tdward Said, Orientalism. (New York: Vintage, 1978). See also Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," in Henry Louis Gates ed., Race, Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 223-261.

l3See Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1998), especially chapters 3 and 4 regarding the linguistic creation of 'official' discourse, and British claims to objectivity based on the collection of massive amounts of data and the distancing of investigator from subject. 32

Nonconformists of all sects and Welsh culture enthusiasts united in an outraged counter­ attack on this condemnation of Welsh morality, civilization, and culture. This attack produced a large number of letters to the editors of various newspapers, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals and letters to the Commissioners. Prominent Welsh men such as

Evan Jones and Roberts and a few Welsh women such as Lady Llanover and

Jane Williams entered the debate and challenged the conclusions of the Commission.14

Although the middle class and elite members of the intelligentsia remained the primary participants, working class Welsh people demonstrated their support for such efforts by attending large mass meetings in a number of Welsh cities,. These self-appointed defenders of Wales, middle-class and mostly male, held up Welsh women as symbols of

Welsh morality whose honor the English had slandered. Indeed, they argued that the

Welsh people, and especially Welsh women, were actually more moral than the English.

This response reified the artificial, binary hierarchies of civilization and power the

English themselves used to condemn the Welsh and justify their dominance not only in

Wales but across the globe.

l4Evan Jones. "leuan " published a number of tracts including The Dissent and Morality of Wales: with two letters to the Right Hon. LordJohn Russell, on the minutes of Council in their Bearing On Wales (London: B.L. Green, 1847). He also remained a frequent contributor of letters to the editors of a number of papers including the Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, .started and edited the newspaper The & South Wales Advertiser,and Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman), the latter in partnership with Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover between 1850-1. Owen Owen Roberts authored a tract on Education in ; A Letter Addressed to H. Vaughan Johnson, Esq. One of Her Majesty's Commissioners for enquiring into the State of Education in the (Carnarvon: James Rees, Herald Office, 1847). Lady Llanover commissioned Jane Williams to write her pamphlet Artegall to refjte the accusations of the Commissioners, and underwrote its publication. 33

Gender and Imperial Authority

The structure of the investigations and the creation of official discourses reflected the construction of imperial ideologies and asymmetrical power relationships between investigators and subjects. Significantly neither the Commissioners, their informants, nor the Welsh intelligentsia responding to the Blue Books represented a cross-section of

English or Welsh society. The Commissioners were all elite Anglican Englishmen educated at Oxford or Cambridge. None spoke Welsh. Parliament gave the

Commissioners letters of introduction to members of the Anglican clergy in Wales, privileging elite, Anglican participation. Eighty percent of the informants providing evidence to the Commissioners by post were also elite Anglicans, usually clergy. Thus the Commissioners operated from a position of class, gender and confessional privilege, as did their informants within Wales. The Welsh speaking, Nonconformist laboring classes, both industrial and rural, the majority of the population, were excluded from the inquiry from the outset except as passive, deviant subjects to be studied by outsiders.

Commissioner Lingen lumped them together in one homogenous cultural group, stating:

It is still the same people. Whether in the country, or among the furnaces, the Welsh element is never found at the top of the social scale, nor in its own body does it exhibit much variety of gradation.... Equally in his new, as in his old, home, his language keeps him under the hatches, being one in which he can neither acquire nor communicate the necessary information. It is a language of old-fashioned agriculture, of theology, and of simple rustic life, while all the world about him is English.15

This deliberate distancing of investigator from subject was not unique to Wales. Similar

''Parliamentary Papers, Education General Wales, volume I (1 July 1847), p. 3. 34 inquiries into the peculiarities of the condition of women in India throughout the nineteenth century depended on a silenced, homogenized 'Indian woman' as a subject of investigation and index of civilization. Distance from the subject under investigation and ignorance of local languages was deemed an indicator of objectivity, as James Mill argued in defense of his 1817 History of British India.™ Mill argued that the status and treatment of women within a culture indicated its level of civilization, with British middle-^'ass domestic ideology as the yardstick against which societies such as India and

Wales were to be measured, not coincidentally, justifying British imperial rule.17 The similarities in these processes show that both Wales and India were located within a similar, although not identical, set of imperial relations.

The results of the inquiry were prefigured by the instructions Parliament issued to the Commissioners. Parliament charged the Commissioners to "form some estimate of the general state of intelligence and information of the poorer classes in Wales, and of the influence which an improved education might be expected to produce, on the general condition of society, and its moral and religious progress.. ."'8 These loaded "objective" instructions assumed that 'all subjects professed to be taught' were not actually being

,6Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1998): 48, 60.

l7Uma Chakravarti, "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past," in Sangari and Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (: Rutgers University Pres, 1990): 27-87. See Mrinilini Sinha, "Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late 19th Century Bengal," in Michael S. Kimmel ed., Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity. (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1987): 217-231.

"Parliamentary Papers, Education General Wales, volume 1 (1 July 1847), iii-iv. 35 taught; that the education available was itself in need of improvement; and that improved education was expected to produce social results in areas such as moral and religious

'progress'. Not only were these Commissioners expected to be experts in education, they

were expected to make judgments about Welsh morality and religious progress at the

same time. Unfortunately, few actually possessed the proper qualifications, for all were

lawyers or preparing to be called to the bar and their qualifications remained limited to

Cieir economic, religious and class background.19 The parliamentary committee no doubt

had the best of intentions, with a sincere desire to remediate the lack of education in

Wales. However their actions in all such investigations reflected the imperial,

exclusionary assumptions within which they operated, reproducing and constructing

ideologies and relations to meet the economic and cultural needs of an imperial state

establishing its dominance within Britain and across the globe.20

The 1847 inquiry regarding Wales advanced the national project of British state-

formation. The strength of nonconformity in Wales, that is the Protestant denominations

l9Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books (Cardiff: Wales, 1998): chapter 5.

20F. Smith, "A New Document Bearing on the Welsh Education Commission of 1846-7," Aberystwyth Studies, Vol. 4. (Aberystwyth: University of Wales Press, 1922): 173-178. Attempts to lay blame for the biases and actions of the Commission were being debated as late as 1913 and 1922. Smith argued that James Kay-Shuttleworth, first Secretary of the Committee of council on Education clearly foresaw the pitfalls connected with the inquiry and strove to avoid them. Smith attempts to lay the blame for the biased Commission on the , whose orders the Commissioners and Shuttleworth were obliged to follow. Actual practice did not live up to the ideal goals outlined in Shuttleworth's early drafts of his instructions to the Commissioners, demonstrating the tension within the changing official discourses about Welsh culture and the British nation at mid-century. Other European nations also used educational systems to establish and centralize state control and national identities throughout a fairly heterogeneous population. See Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. (Stanford: University of California Press, 1976). Education of local elites played a large role in the divide and rule strategy of the British in India and elsewhere, while the education of women to provide wives for the members of the Indian Civil Service and raise Anglicized children played a major role in feminist and imperial discourses within Britain and India. 36 of Baptists, Independents and , had always greatly concerned

British elites who equated stability and strength with a single national established church, that is the with the monarch at its head. The religious fervor indicated by the building of and attendance in Welsh chapels seemed a fairly positive quality during the early nineteenth century. Yet the "theological bent of mind" created by the isolation of the Welsh landscape and what Commissioners interpreted as the 'timeless' nature of

Welsh culture, previously considered quaint, picturesque, and romantic, was recast through the Commissioners' reports of the into a negative, backward, uncivilized, and feminine cultural characteristic, of which Nonconformity was a symptom.

Commissioner Lingen argued that:

Poetical and enthusiastic warmth of religious feeling, careful attendance upon religious services, zealous interest in religious knowledge, the comparative absence of crime, are found side by side with the most unreasoning prejudices or impulses; an utter want of method in thinking and ; and (what is far worse), with a wide-spread disregard of temperance, whenever there are the means of excess, of chastity, of veracity, and of fair dealing.21

This discourse used gendered characteristics to signify relative inferiority and lack of

'civilization.' The Commissioners and their elite, Anglican informants described the

Welsh in general with implicitly feminized qualities of irrationality, emotionality, excess, impulsiveness and lack of control. Emotion was a major element of Evangelical manhood, but ideally unacceptable in the other areas of rational, middle-class idealized culture that emphasized masculine control in opposition to uncontrolled, irrational

2'Pari Papers, Education General Wales, volume I (I July 1847), p. 6. 37 femininity.22 By labeling Welsh culture as more feminine than their own 'masculine'

English culture, the Commissioners and their collaborators mobilized a paternalistic discourse to justify their continued and increased domination within Wales, much as imperial authorities in India justified their continued rule in India upon the effeminacy of certain groups of Indian males and the need for continued moral education.23

The Commissioners' other comparisons between Welsh and English culture were much more explicit, yet just as reliant on gendered language and constructions. The

Reverend R. Harrison testified that, "The Welsh are more deceitful than the English;

though they are full of expression, I cannot rely on them as I should the English."24

Commissioner Symons argued that "the Welsh are peculiarly exempt from the guilt of great crimes... yet there are few where the standard of minor morals is lower."

He then asserted, "Petty , lying, cozening, every species of chicanery, drunkenness .

.. and idleness prevail... among the least educated part of the , who scarcely

regard them in the light of sins."25 Here crime in Wales was deemed petty and feminized,

22Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): 109-113. The idealized middle-class Victorian gender roles against which other societies and cultures were judged and found wanting were in actuality highly contested and difficult to live up to at home. See Leonore Davidoff, "Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick," Feminist Studies 5, No. 1 (1979): 86-141.

23Mrinilini Sinha, "Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral imperialism in Late 19lh century Bengal," in Michael S. Kimmel ed., Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1987) 217-231. See also Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. Sinha argues that certain groups within India, especially Bengali males were depicted as effeminate and thus incapable of self rule.

24Parl. Papers, Education General Wales, volume 2 (1 July 1847), p. 57.

25 Pari. Papers, Education General Wales, volume 2 (1 July 1847), p. 57. 38 rooted in lower morals and a lack of control over impulses and actions, in comparison to the greater, more rational, masculine, and controlled crimes seemingly found elsewhere in

Europe. Welsh society did not measure up to British and European levels of civilization even in the area of criminality.

Parliament and the Commission that state education run by the government in

London rather than Welsh confessional schools was the remedy for all such problems.

The Commission argued that "the Welsh children require [moral training]... more than any other children in the kingdom; and are destitute of it."26 Nonconlormist chapels and

Sunday Schools were not providing the correct education, nor keeping the two sexes separated from each other. Instead they were now identified by the Commissioners and

Anglican clergymen as sites of sexual license and deviancy. Whereas the Welsh people's high degree of chapel attendance had once been admired as a sign of religious devotion, nightly prayer meetings were now denounced as events leading to ' results' as "they are places at which lovers agree to meet, and from which they return at late hours."

Sunday schools were places where "young persons of both sexes are congregated together in great numbers and in close contact."27 According to these men, chapels facilitated contact between the sexes, thus they were condemned as having failed to teach the proper moral separation of the sexes and controlled restraint lacking in Welsh secular society.

Traditions such as courting in bed, known as bundling, or caru yn y gwely, once viewed

26 Pari. Papers, Education General Wales, volume 2 (1 July 1847), p. 26.

27 Pari. Papers, Education General Wales, volume I (I July 1847), p. 21. 39 as a quaint folk custom, were transformed into 'peculiarly' Welsh indicators of immorality and backwardness.28 Farm servants were deemed especially open to corruption through forced contact with the other sex due to "imperfect arrangements in the older farmhouses, which leave the sexes too much together, and this even at night."29

This "revolting habit of herding married and unmarried people of both sexes, often unconnected by relationship, in the same sleeping-rooms, and often in adjoining beds without partition or curtain", was seen as suppressing the "natural modesty" and the

"instinctive delicacy alike in men and women".30 This statement illustrates the changing views of the Welsh peasantry and changing views of propriety embodied in the Blue

Books, as on the one hand they were constructed as beasts needing to be 'herded', yet on the other hand they were credited with exhibiting 'natural modesty' and 'instinctive delicacy'. Such assertions condemned the leadership of social elites, who seemingly had failed to take care of their property by 'herding' their workers like to unsuitable locations. At the same time, the Commissioners argued that Welsh male nonconformists also failed to organize and their society along the correct moral and physical guidelines of civilized, patriarchal, middle class, Victorian British culture. Such assertions implied that Welsh men were not in control of Welsh women, and it was the duty of the British state to step in, educate and civilize them into good British citizens

28 Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books (Cardiff: Wales, 1998): 164-67. Pari. Papers, Education General Wales, volume 2 (I July 1847), p. 57.

29 Pari. Papers, Education General Wales, volume I (I July 1847), p. 217.

30 Pari. Papers, Education General Wales, volume 2 (1 July 1847), p. 57. 40 and patriarchs.

Despite the Commissioners' aforementioned concern with the 'natural modesty' and 'instinctive delicacy' of men as well as women, only women were labeled unchaste.

Women were deemed the ones responsible for immoral relationships, an ancient trope.31

If "unmarried men-servants in the farms range the country at night, it is a known and tolerated practice that they are admitted by the women-servants at the houses to which they come."32 Women did the admitting, were deemed responsible for accepting proposals of an immoral nature, and dared to "ask leave to go out in the evening", where

the men met them at the public houses. What concerned the Commissioners was that

Nonconformist men, parents, and employers permitted such practices. Commissioner

Lingen argued:

Such are some of the circumstances under which the early life of a Welsh peasant-girl is passed? So far from wondering at what is said of them, that they are almost universally unchaste, the wonder would be if they were otherwise. Their offences, however, arise rather from the absence of all checks than from the deliberate infringement of them, and betoken therefore much less depravity than the same conduct in persons more favourably situated.33

According to Lingen, Welsh peasant-girls did not deliberately strive to be immoral and

31 For a general discussion of the double standard see, Renate Bridenthal, Koonz, and Stuard Becoming Visible: Women in European History 2nd edition. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

32 Pari. Papers, Education General Wales, volume 1 (1 July 1847), pp. 21, 394. This story appeared in the Appendix as hearsay reported to David , assistant while visiting . Lewis reported that, "I heard the most revolting anecdotes of the gross and almost bestial indelicacy with which sexual intercourse takes place on these occasions." In the following paragraph Lewis reported that the parochial notes indicated that "the moral character of the population is generally returned by the clergy and others as good." Lingen emphasized negative sexual aspects in his Report.

33 Pari. Papers, Education General Wales, volume 1 (I July 1847), p. 21. 41 unchaste. Indeed, he argued that Welsh peasant-girls were less depraved than girls of higher class status because they did not know any better. In this view, nonconformist, and thus inferior, culture and Welsh fathers failed to control their daughter's sexuality and provide good moral training. The Commissioners used this 'evidence' of Welsh women's unknowing, uncontrolled sexuality to criticize the masculinity of Welsh men, and judged them as less civilized, unable to live up to the ideals of English domestic ideology, both on class and gender lines. Similar criticisms were made against Bengali males in India during the second half of the nineteenth century. In both cases, indigenous men's failure to control indigenous women was used to justify increased imperial control and state intervention.34 The Commissioners recommended that the British state assume this patriarchal role in Wales, thereby rendering the masculinity of Welsh men moot, effectively displacing them until such time as the next generation, educated correctly, learned to run their own society. Of course, Wales' position as economically and politically subordinate to England within Britain implied that the Welsh would never be able to run their country separately, unlike the situations in Bengal and the rest of India.

Despite this focus on the lack of Welsh men's failure to exercise patriarchal control over women's behavior, in the end the blame for Welsh backwardness, immorality, and deviance was laid firmly on the shoulders of Welsh women. In the words of the Commissioners:

34 Mrinilini Sinha, "Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperial, i in Late 19th century Bengal," in Michael S. Kimmel ed., Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1987): 217-231. See also Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' in the late nineteenth centuryiManchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). 42

the want of chastity in the women ... is sufficient to account for all ci.bc, immoralities, for each generation will derive its moral tone in a great degree from the influences imparted by the mothers who reared them. Where these influences are corrupted at their very source, it is vain to expect virtues in the offspring.35

Here the Commissioners asserted that the lower classes acted as "lower animals" with

"almost bestial indelicacy" due to the failure of Welsh Anglican elites, and by the 1840s the Welsh Nonconformist middle class men, to lead and control lower class women.

Commissioners Lingen, Symons, and Vaughan-Johnson deemed Welsh women's behavior and uncontrolled sexuality the primary indicators and causes of Welsh immorality, and thus inferiority. According to the Commissioners, it was the duty of the

British state to educate and civilize the Welsh into exhibiting correct, moral, middle-class

British behavior.

The Welsh Response

Welsh nationalists, primarily Nonconformist members of the intelligentsia, immediately and indignantly responded to the judgements of the Blue Book Reports with a counter-attack of public meetings, pamphlets, debates in various periodicals and letters

35 Pari. Papers, Education General Wales volume 2 (1 July 1847), p. 57. 43 to the Commissioners.36 Again this discourse relied heavily on gendered definitions of cultural, linguistic, religious, political and sexual superiority and inferiority. While most

Welsh people agreed that on the whole they were indeed poorly educated due to an

inadequate school system, they had "not expected to be told that they were drunken, dirty,

superstitious, and sexually promiscuous liars and cheats."37 Indeed, as one "Letter to the

Editor" *ed, "We were willing to acknowledge our deficiencies, and would gladly have

listened to any suggestion for our intellectual improvement."38 Attempting to seize the

moral high ground, in an open letter addressed to Commissioner H. Vaughan Johnson,

Nonconformist Owen Owen Roberts argued that the truly immoral members of Welsh

society were the Anglican clergy, whom he accused of misappropriating school funds,

36These included: Owen Owen Roberts, Education in North Wales: A setter Addressed to H. Vaughan Johnson, Esq. One of Her Majesty's Commissioners for enquiring into the State of Education in the Principality of Wales (Carnarvon: James Rees, Herald Office, 1847). Evan Jones, The Dissent and Morality of Wales: with two letters to the Right Hon. Lord John Russell, on the minutes of Council in their Bearing On Wales (London: B. L. Green, 1847). Jones's tract included a reprinting of four letters to the editor from the Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian and the periodical in response to other letters published in support of the Blue Books by a clergyman under the pen name 'Cambro Sacerdo'. Evan Jones cites evidence from Mr. Moir Crane, of , that at a meeting of his workmen convened for the purpose of considering evidence that he supplied to the Commissioners, that it was not a fair exposition of their social and moral conditions in Evan Jones, Facts, Figures, and Statements, in Illustration of the Dissent and Morality of Wales: An Appeal to the (London: Benjamin L. Green, 1849): 29. See also Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books, pp. 211 -215 for a list of other contemporary periodicals. For the public meetings see The Monmouthshire Merlin and South Wales Advertiser 19, no. 977 ( 4, 1848); no. 980 (March 25, 1848).

"Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books, pp. 209-211. See also "Letter from J.J. 10 the Editor of the Monmouthshire Merlin," The Monmouthshire Merlin and South Wales Advertiser 19, no. 980 (March 25, 1848).

38 "Letter from J.J. to the Editor of the Monmouthshire Merlin" The Monmouthshire Merlin and South Wales Advertiser 19, no. 980 (March 25, 1848). 44 and res! sting extension of popular nondenominational education in Wales.39 Indeed he felt that,

Instruction in the English language, unconnected with sectarian dogma, would confer upon the poor inhabitants of Wales, benefits that no one can too highly estimate. It would introduce them, as it were into a new world- it would open to them the richest fountains of light and knowledge- it would multiply and enhance, beyond measure, their social and domestic comforts- it would put them upon their guard against the snares of wily ecclesiastics and unprincipled politicians- and it would be the means of enabling and encouraging them to walk erect airong their fellow-subjects, as well-informed, independent men, who can appreciate the matchless institutions of their country, and stand forth on every occasion as the friends and the protectors of civil and religious freedom.40

Here Roberts acknowledged that Welsh men did not feel able to 'walk erect' among their fellow Britons, thus implicitly accepting the label of 'effeminate' assigned by the

Commissioners. According to Roberts, it was not the Welsh peasantry's fault if they

were uneducated and living in immoral conditions. The responsibility, he argued, lay

with the Welsh Anglican owners of houses and proprietors of estates who made no provision for the separation of the sexes or other matters of common decency.41 As a result, the "ill-contrived internal arrangements of the houses and " destroyed

"female delicacy" and thus "facilitated and encouraged prostitution." Roberts cited a number of bastardy cases from Bangor and the Vale of in which such

' 'Owen Owen Roberts, Education in North Wales: A Letter Addressed to H. Vaughan Johnson, Esq. One of Her Majesty's Commissioners for enquiring into the State of Education in the Principality of Wales (Carnarvon: James Rees, Herald Office, 1847): 3, 5-9. National Library of Wales. NLW MS W.b.6208. Roberts argued that the Anglican Clergy only wanted to spread the dogma of the Established , rather than educate the poor.

"•"National Library of Wales. NLW MS W.b.6208. Owen Owen Roberts p. 34.

4lO. O. Roberts, 24-25. 45 arrangements in his view caused this immoral behavior.

Echoing the Blue Books, Roberts implied that women chose to become prostitutes, and chose to accept immoral advances and have illegitimate children, or both.

Leading Nonconformist Welshmen such as Roberts, despite their attempts to defend the

reputation of Wales, agreed with the Commission that identified women as the cause of

Welsh immorality. While Roberts accepted the Commissioners' judgements he contested

the cause. Referring to one case of bastardy, Roberts noted that, "The servant girl had to

sleep in the same room... in which was a bed constantly occupied by a male inmate."

Based on this example he argued that, "When such things are allowed to exist, it requires

the assistance of a priest to palm upon the credulity of any great landed proprietor the

notion that the immoralities of the peasantry of Wales are to be ascribed to the prevalence

of Dissent."42 In short he accused English landowners of causing these problems, not

nonconformity. He asserted that the "Dissenting bodies alone in Wales have taken any

pains, or made any active exertion, to check them." He argued that,

Had such disgusting disclosures been made, and such utter neglect of domestic supervision been manifested, in a family connected with any other religious community than that of the Church of England, the head of the family would have been publicly called to account, before the members of his own sect, and would have been severely reprimanded. If he could not produce some strong exculpatory evidence in his favour, he would have been expelled from their community.43

Throughout these debates, Welsh women were identified by both English and Welsh,

420.0. Roberts, p. 27.

43Owen Owen Roberts. Education in North Wales: A Letter Addressed to, p. 29. 46

Anglican and Dissenting middle-class men as a source of immorality to be restrained and controlled by the men of their families and nation. Their only disagreement lay in which men were best equipped to act as disciplining patriarchs.

While the Commissioners and Roberts agreed on women's undisciplined and uncontrolled sexuality and thus their responsibility for the immorality of the Welsh population, Evan Jones who used the pen-name 'Ieuan Gwynedd',44 a leading

Independent minister from and fervent supporter of voluntary, chapel-run schools, argued that the Commissioners and their informants had insulted the Women of

Wales.45 Jones challenged one leading Anglican clergyman, a prominent defender of the

Blue Books, to a public debate, calling him "the insulter of the women of Wales", an

"infamous traitor of his fatherland and the heartless defamer of his countrywomen".46

Jones attacked the evidence cited by the Commissioners and his opponent, all of whom asserted that 80 percent of women in Wales over the age of sixteen were unchaste. Using facts and figures from the Blue Book Reports themselves, he accounted for the growing number of illegitimate births by noting that this was understandable as the rate of bastardy had increased in equal ratio to the increase of the population.47 Yet at the same time,

""Prominent literary figures among the Welsh intelligentsia linked themselves to the 'bardic' Welsh past by using Welsh pen-names based in the or other . This tradition continued well into the . Thus Evan Jones was more prominently known in literary and political circles as 'Icuan Gwynedd'.

45Evan Jones, The Dissent and Morality of Wales: with two letters to the Right Hon. Lord John Russell, on the minutes of Council in their Bearing On Wales (London: B.L. Green, 1847).

46Ibid., pp. 8-9.

47Evan Jones, "WELSH DISSENT: Letter to the editor of the Monmouthshire MerlinMay 29, 1847. National Library of Wales. NLW MS. 2758B. Vol. 1, ff. 57-58. 47

Jones implicitly accepted the truth of the accusations regarding illegitimacy in Wales, arguing that it was more acceptable than the "open and systematic prostitution of

England."48 Both Jones and Roberts thus accepted the analytical standard of idealized

English Victorian domestic ideology, using rates of illegitimacy and the behavior of women as valid measurements of civilization and morality.

In repudiating the Commissioners' Reports, Jones attempted to use the same categories of analysis and standards of morality to criticize the English. William

Williams, the former Minister of Parliament who had started the entire process by asking

Parliament to commission the inquiry, defended the resulting Blue Book Reports. Based on the Commissioners' findings, he argued that the Welsh "must inevitably continue as ..

. the most degraded and benighted of Her Majesty's subjects ... unless they are rescued by the fostering hand of Government."49 Evan Jones responded to Williams's plea to

"wipe out without delay, this national stain," publishing a number of tracts and letters in which he argued that the Welsh were actually more moral than the English and thus there was no reason for Parliament to pass a special measure in regard to Wales. Jones asserted that the labouring population of Wales were much more intelligent and moral than the same class in England: "the daughters of Cambria need not blush, when their reputation

48Evan Jones, The Dissent and Morality of Wales: with two letters to the Right Hon. Lord John Russell, on the minutes of Council in their Bearing On Wales (London: B.L. Green, 1847): 11.

49William Williams, A Letter to the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire Into the State of Education in Wales (London: James Ridgway, 1848): 5. 48 is measured with that of their -Saxon sisters."50 Jones used evidence from the Blue

Book Appendices and the Sixth Annual Report of the Registrar General to argue that prostitution and illegitimacy were more prevalent in England than in Wales:

that we find evident proof, that the number of illegitimate children in England are understated, and that prostitution is carried on in the Metropolis and other large to a fearful extent... we are forced to the conclusion that Wales is superior - far superior- to England in regard to female virtue. If these remarks are not conclusive, we must advance another proof in favour of our countiy-women. In 1830, the proportion of illegitimate births in England was as one to twenty, whilst the proportion in Wales was as one to thirteen. Thus in the course of twelve years we find that illegitimacy had increased two per cent in England, and decreased one percent in Wales.51

Thus even Jones, in defending Welsh women and Welshmen's national honor, failed to challenge the use of women's bodies, 'virtue' and especially prostitution rates as objects of comparison and yardsticks of'morality. Jones thus implicitly accepted those criteria of judging and ranking cultures. Like O. O. Roberts, Jones inverted the Commissioners'

findings, arguing that English and Anglican influences had corrupted natural Welsh morality. He argued in several tracts that the "most Anglicized in Wales have the greatest number of illegitimate children born in them," and that "As the Welsh language and national feeling recedes, immorality increases.''''52 According to Jones, not only were

50Evan Jones, A Vindication of the Educational and Moral Condition of Wales, In Reply to William Williams, Esq. Late M.P.for (: William Rees; London: Longman & Co., 1848): 2,9.

5l"Letter to the Editor" Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian. 7 March 1848. Clipping in National Library of Wales. National Library of Wales. NLW MS 2724B.

"Evan Jones, A Vindication., p. 13. See also Evan Jones, Facts, Figures, and Statements, in Illustration of Dissent and Morality of Wales: An Appeal to the English People (London: Benjamin L. Green, 1849). 49 the English less moral than the Welsh, the English spread immorality throughout Wales.

Jones asserted, "Wales is superior-far superior-to England in regard to female virtue."53

Thus Jones and the other Welsh nationalists sought to direct the 'Othering' discourse against the hegemonic culture of the English, not only were they not inferior to England, they were actually superior and needed no help from Parliament or the Church of

England. They were entirely capable of running and educating their society, using their own superior methods, pulpits, and language. Regarding the custom of bundling, Jones asserted defensively that, "Individually and collectively, in private and in public, from the pulpit and from , Dissenting ministers have raised, and do raise, their voices against the degrading habit, wherever it exists." They did not need the Anglican English to tell them it was wrong, or help eradicate its occurrence.54 "Without any deviation

from truth, [I] affirm that I have done a little more than the Vicar of for the

suppression of immorality in Wales."55 Thus despite all his vocal indignation Jones,

whose writing desk bore the inscription, Y Gwiryn Derbyny Byd. Anrheg Merched

Tredegar I leuan Gwynedd am ei Amdiffyniad o Ddiweirdeb Merched Cymru, Ionawr 10,

"Evan Jones, "A Letter to the Editor of the Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian 7 March 1848" National Library of Wales. MS 2724B. Evan Jones Clippings re: Blue Books. Jones also viewed Wales as "superior to England in morals and religion, in sobriety and chastity...."

S4Evan Jones, "Letter to the Editor of the Monmouthshire Merlin" May 29, 1847. National Library of Wales. NLW MS 2758B.Vol 1. Ff. 57-58.

"Evan Jones, "Letter to the Editor of the Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian 7 March 1848" National Library of Wales. NLW MS 2724B. The Vicar of Aberdare, a leading Anglican supporter of the Blue Books, penned several tracts under the pen names 'Ordovicis' and 'Cambro SacerdoSee also, Evan Jones, The Dissent and Morality of Wales for more of the debate between the two men in the press. 50

1848, accepted the validity of English definitions and measurements of'civilization.'56

The "staunchest defender of the Women of Wales" never questioned the correctness of measuring a society by the behavior of its women, but rather questioned which society should be so judged and found wanting. Indeed, he spent the last years of his life publishing the first Welsh-language periodical aimed solely at Welsh women, Y Gymraes

(The Welshwoman), which emphasized the importance of self-restraint, control, and correct behavior for Welsh women.57 The defensive indignation of the Welsh ministers and the accusations of the English Commissioners reflected the importance of masculine control of women in both cultures.

Welsh women were doubly marginalized within this imperial discourse. The

English Commissioners and their assistants, all of them men, gathered descriptions of women's behavior from an Anglican Welsh male elite, most of it based upon second­ hand accounts and hearsay. Few had any acquaintance with working-class life in Wales.

None actually asked women about what they wanted for their children, how they felt about the crowded living conditions, or what they thought about traditions such as bundling. Although 'feminine virtue' and female chastity were the most frequently condemned element of Welsh society, not one Commissioner actually cited or quoted a

""'The Truth Against the World. Presented by the Women of Tredegar to Ieuan Gwynedd for his defense of Welsh Women's chastity, January 10, 1848." National Library of Wales. NLW Rolls 287.

"Jane Aaron, "Finding a voice in two tongues: gender and colonization," in Jane Aaron, Teresa Rees et al., Our Sisters' Land: The Changing Identities of Women in IVaies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994): 186-188. For a more detailed discussion see, Sian Williams, "The True 'Cymraes': Images of Women in Women's Nineteenth-Century Welsh Periodicals," in Angela V. John Ed., Our Mothers' Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History 1830-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991): 69-91. 51 female voice in his Report.

The men on the Welsh side of the debate were no better. They too made women and their behavior central to arguments against the English. However, they also never cited or consulted any women. Responding to the Blue Books, as husbands, fathers, sons and brothers, e.g. male protectors the periodicals Yr Amserau and Principality, the latter under the editorship of Reverend Evan Jones 'Ieuan Gwynedd', organized a Memorial to

the Queen which stated,

That, among the many injurious and slanderous allegations made against the Welsh people by the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, your Majesty's memorialists, as husbands, as fathers, as sons, and as brothers, would first most respectfully complain of the imputation so rashly cast upon the general moral character of the women of Wales, in defiance at once of history, of official statistics, and of that deeply felt domestic testimony which your Majesty's memorialists, urged alike by a sense of justice, of duty, and of true respect for those exemplary virtues which hallow and gladden their homes, would herein spontaneously and most heartily offer, and your Majesty's memorialists (whom the Commissioners themselves admit to be nationally "exempt from great crimes," to be "free from seditious tendencies," and also to be "warm-hearted, kindly and loyal") would gratefully acknowledge that they owe all their best and noblest principles to the precepts, example, and influence of the virtuous, though calumniated, women of Wales.58

Here too the women of Wales remained voiceless objects around which this debate

operated. As Jones stated on the request for signatures, "It was suggested at first that the

memorial be signed by women, but upon further consideration it has been thought

advisable to confine it to men." Thus he sought 200,000 honest Welshmen, "to affix their

signatures to this noble and patriotic protest against the wrong done to their wives,

'"National Library of Wales. NLW MS 2724B. See also, W. Gareth Evans, Education and Female Emancipation: The Welsh Experience 1847-1914 (CardiflF: University of Wales Press, 1990): 48. 52 mothers and sisters.. ."59 Those who did not sign, he chided, "stand by idly, and take no for the vindication of their national honour"; by implication they were not good

Welsh patriots or Welshmen.60 Elsewhere Evan Jones speculated that, "We may fancy that the female parishioners of Aberdar are not over grateful for the compliment that some 2,500 of their number are no better than prostitutes."61 However Jones never asked any one of them if that were true. Refuting the accusations of unchastity and

insensibility to female virtue Jones asked, "With what feelings can this atrocious assertion be perused by the fathers, brothers, and husbands of Wales.. ?"62 In Jones's

view it was not actually the women of Wales who were insulted, but the honor of Welsh

men and the Welsh nation. Women figured in these debates only as idealized symbols of

tarnished male national honor and yardsticks for measuring degrees of civilization.

Welsh women and their femininity were central to this imperial discourse, but women

were marginalized as participants, and as members of the Welsh nation.

59Ibid.

""Ibid. National Library of Wales. NLW MS. 2724B. EVAN JONES, ('IEUAN GWYNEDD') CLIPPINGS RE: BLUE BOOKS. Jones also challenged the masculinity of men such as Henry Griffiths who were not opposed to government intervention and support of education. Regarding Griffiths, Jones stated, "We have watched his mean, unmanly, and Jesuitical intrigues, to connect the present with Government." ; Ibid.

61 Evan Jones, The Dissent and Morality of Wales: with two letters to the Right Hon. Lord John Russell, on the minutes of Council in their Bearing on Wales (London: B.L. Green, 1847): 31.

62J ones. The Dissent and Morality of Wales: with two letters to the Right Hon. Lord John Russell, on the minutes of Council in their B< aring on Wales (London: B.L. Green, 1847): 24. 53

WELSH WOMEN SPEAK

While Welsh men such as Evan Jones or Owen Owen Roberts may not have asked the women of Wales what they thought about the Reports of the Commissioners, this did not prevent two women from speaking out against them. Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover, occupied a prominent place in Welsh literary and political circles through her participation in Eisteddfodau and invention of the 'traditional' Welsh national costume

for women, often using her , 'Gwenynen \63 Although she was a prominent member of the Church of England in Wales, Lady Llanover responded to the

Blue Books with outrage, asking her good friend and fellow Welsh literary figure Jane

Williams to write a tract refuting them.64 In a letter dated January 10,1848, Lady

Llanover wrote:

My dear Miss Williams, You are the person who of all others is most eminently calculated for the task you so cleverly have suggested as the best means of doing justice to Wales through the very means intended for her destruction: vis. By a careful review of the Reports, and exacting therefrom the glaring contradictions so as to prove that by their own words the people are all that is good or bad! consequently their report is not worth anything and the nation cannot be judged by it. I have ordered these vile calumnies to be sent you from London, and I earnestly hope you will

63Lady Hall was a frequent sponsor of prizes at Eisteddfodau (Welsh Language Poetry and Music ), as well as a patron of harpists and other 'Welsh crafts.' As a young woman she authored the Prize Essay of the Gwent and Royal of 1834. See Gwenynen Gwent, The Prize Essay on the advantages resulting from the preservation of the Welsh Language and National Costumes of Wales. (Condon: Longman & Co., 1836). NLW XPB 2117.HI7. Her role in the years after 1847 will be discussed in Chapter Two below.

64 Lady Hall continued to support the spread of the Welsh language, and continually agitated for the appointment of Welsh-speaking in letters to Prime Minister Gladstone until her death in 1896. See British Library. Gladstone Papers. ADD MS. 44423 ff. 97, 118. ADD MS. 44424 ff. 65, 111, 166, 191. ADD MS. 44425, ADD MS. 44478, ADD MS. 444337 ff. 335, 357, 363-366. Basic details on the life of Jane Williams are found in The Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940. (London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1959): 1044-5. 54

put your wonderful brains to work to procure proofs (such as we require) to neutraliz. • e poison circulated by unprincipled Commrs .. .So dear Miss Wms set your mind to this work.65

Lady Hall believed that the Welsh nation and culture had been targeted and slandered by the Commissioners' Reports. She clearly feared that the Commission itself intended to destroy the Welsh language, which she identified as the central element of Welsh culture, and thus the Welsh nation.

Jane Williams proceeded to write her response in March of 1848, producing the pamphlet Artegall, or Remarks on the Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the

State of Education in Wales. Lady Llanover provided Williams with copies of the

Reports to work from and underwrote the costs of publication. Williams challenged the

Commissioners' use of evidence and choice of informants, stating that they "were sent forth with instruction to make out a case, and they have diligently and faithfully laboured to accomplish it." She asserted that because of the Commissioners' instructions, and their lack of familiarity with Wales and the Welsh language, "They have brought an abstract principle, a transcendental notion of what education and condition ought to be, mercilessly and directly to bear upon the people of the Principality." In doing so, "They have condemned their customs, and conduct by it, without the slightest reference to

"British Library MS. 8365.bbb.48.( I) Tractates and Letters. "Introductory Remarks" p. 3. 1855. Attached to Jane Williams, Artegall, or Remarks on the Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales. 55 comparative merit as regards those of England and other countries.'** Williams argued that Lingen and the others chose the most negative evidence provided by people unfamiliar with the situations they were discussing, primarily members of the Anglican clergy. She charged that where the providers of evidence were familiar with the area, their evidence was usually positive. For example, in answer to the question about,

"Position, character, and influence of females among them, and how far the duties of mothers and wives are adequately understood and fulfilled", T.W. Booker, Esq. informed the Commission:

Position kindly, tenderly, and respectfully regarded. Character, chaste, but confiding, honest and industrious. Influence, great, and on great emergencies powerfully exerted. The duties of wife and mother, naturally and well understood and fulfilled.

Williams argued that positive answers such as these were left in the Appendices, while the negative opinions were unfairly emphasized in the Reports; thus the Commissioners, despite their efforts to gather as much evidence as possible, did not interpret it correctly.67

In addition to challenging the Commissioners' "objective" use of evidence,

Williams appealed to the ego of the English public, pointing out the political nature of the entire project, which was based upon fear of popular discontent. She noted that,

"although England has been startled by one or tvo ''regular outbursts of Welsh energy,

66 Artegall, or Remarks on ti.d Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales (London: Longman & Co., 1848): 5-6. Lady Hall continued to act as patron to Jane Williams, ensuring that a later rebuttal, "Artegall's Vindication" was published in in December, 1848. See letters between Jane Williams and Lady Hall, National Library of Wales. Kyrle Fletcher Papers, Group ill, Box III.

67 Williams, Artegall, pp. 8-15. 56 surely her own national spirit is too noble, and too generous to suffer her hostile standard to be unfurled against Welsh , and to allow the use of the reproachful watch­ words, Merthyr, Newport, and Rebecca."68 Several months later Williams continued this theme of the Welsh as a peaceful people while defending her work in The Times. There she asserted that "The real feeling of the whole, ever loyal, Welsh community would be far more truly represented by the desire of a pious, intelligent, and happy family to use and to enjoy in unmolested quiet its own pleasant language, paternal customs, and innocent opinions."69 Yet in adopting this rhetorical strategy, Jane Williams defended

Welsh nationality against an attack by English Commissioners, without challenging the subordinate position of Wales within Britain. As she remarked in December of 1848,

"our point is gained, i.e. spreading the praise of the Cymry as wide y through the world as the Commissioners did their defamation."70 As the primary woman engaged in the debate over the Blue Book Reports, Williams challenged the Commissioners and their informants, both for their use of evidence and their distorted view of conditions in

68Williams, Artegall, 16. Others had also noted the illogical fear of in Wales. One man noted the prevalence of Chartism in England, and argued "Yet we hear no cant of moral degradation there!" "Letter from J.J. to the Editor of the Monmouthshire Merlin" The Monmouthshire Merlin and South Wales Advertiser Vol.XlX, No. 980 (March 25, 1848). Notably, the periodical Punch, or The London Charivari (London) Volume XV, 1848 included articles on "The Chartist Heroes" and "How to Treat the Female Chartists" with no mention of Wales. Clearly this was a concern in London, and not a specifically Welsh threat.

69 "The Church in Wales: To the Editor of the Times" The Times (London): 26 December 1848. Clipping in National Library of Wales. NLW MS 2758 B., ff 75-81.

'"Letter from Jane Williams to Lady Hall, December 10, 1848.National Library of Wales. NLW. Kyrle Fletcher Papers. Group III, Box III. 57

Wales, "the national topic"71 of culture and language. Williams did not defend the reputations of Welsh women. Indeed, Williams published Artegall anonymously, rather than under her own name, or her relatively well-known bardic name iYsgafell' under which she was already published.72 Thus both Lady Hall and Jane Williams participated in these debates from a relatively silenced position, in which their gender was of no benefit, if not a hindrance, to their argument. Their relative silence was necessary to avoid rousing male Welsh nationalists, whose arguments were predicated on a silenced population of Welsh women so that they could to represent the honor of the Welsh nation within the imperial relationships of Great Britain.

Such imperial and nationalist debates and discourses surrounding male control of women's bodies and sexuality were not limited to either London as the metropolitan center of the empire, or the peripheries of Wales, India, and the rest of the Empire, but were constructed in dialogue between them. The debate about the Blue Books was another among a number of public debates throughout the nineteenth century where women's sexuality played a large role, yet in which women had no voice. These took

"Letter from Jane Williams to Mrs. Waddington I January, 1849. National Library of Wales. NLW. Kyrle Fletcher papers Group III, Box III. Artegall, was well received by nationalists such as Evan Jones, who gave it excellent and supportive reviews in The Principality 1, no. 30. (March 28, 1848), pp 472-3.

72Under the pen-name 'Ysgafell' Miss Williams edited the '"Literary Remains' of Carnhuanawc" and as late as 1883 was esteemed for her "vigour of criticism and masculine scholarship with confirm her reputation as one of the most able literary workers in the field of "according to , in Charles Wilkins, "Notable Women of Wales: Miss Williams, Aberpergwm" The : The National Magazine of Wales. 3, (January-June) 1883: 482. Wilkins juxtaposed the masculine, not "puerile or sketchy" work of Miss Jane Williams with the "Lady Bountiful, whose coming into a homestead was like a ray of sunshine", non 'blue-stocking' qualities of her namesake Maria Jane Williams, lady of Aperpergwm, collector of legends. 58 place in both Britain and India, including investigations into sati (widow burning) during the late and the resulting legislation banning such practices; the efforts to repeal the

Contagious Disease Acts, and the debates leading to the Age of Consent Act of 1891. All

occurred without the participation of the women whose bodies and were "in need

of protection."73 The bodies of indigenous women became contested ground between two

or more competing gender systems, in which defensive constructions of masculinity and

national identity were just as valued, if not more, than the actual experiences of

indigenous women. Indeed, such debates required the silencing of women, as Indian or in

this case Welsh, nationalist male elites on one hand, and British elites on the other,

sought to extend their control and make claims to cultural superiority, identity and rights

to leadership. All groups of elite men, as well as elite British women, acknowledged

indigenous women only as symbols and objects to be manipulated to serve various

agendas.74 Women of the imperial periphery were doubly marginalized in all sites of

these debates, by the indigenous nationalist men of their own societies, as well as the

"See Uma Chakravarti, Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past," in Sangari and Vaid, eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990): 27-87; Dagmar Engels, The Age of Consent Act of 1891: Colonial Ideology in Bengal (South Asia Research 3 1983): 207-231; Mrinilini Sinha, "Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late 19th century Bengal," in Michael S. Kimmel ed., Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1987): 217-231. Judith Walkowitz, "The making of an outcast group: prostitutes and working women in and Southhampton," in Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, class and the state (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980 reprinted 1988): 192-213.

74 Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Antoinette Burton, "The White Woman's Burden: British Feminists and the Indian Woman, 1865-1915," in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel eds. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992): 137-157. And especially, Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 59 imperial efforts by British elites.

At the same time, Welsh nationalist men such as Evan Jones derided other Welsh men who did not defend their nation. In an editorial in his paper, The Principality, Jones called for Welshmen to defend and embrace their language and thus their nation and its future. He asserted that, "Our character, as a nation, is now simply maintained by our language. Deny it, and we perish from the scale of nations."75 Those who chose English over Welsh, or masked their Welsh accents were effeminate and less manly:

Fatherland! Why should we be ashamed of it? Why take immense pain to correct a Welsh accent, or to overcome the peculiarities of a Welsh idiom? Brother Taffy, a man is neither made nor discovered by such effeminate accomplishments. Remember that"mind is the standard of the man," and remember also that our venerable language is one of the best in the world to produce a good mental development. Our brethren, John Bull, Jonathan, Sandy, and Paddy, are not ashamed of their national peculiarities. Confound the silliness! Brother arise! assert thy manliness, proclaim thy strength! If brother John Bull, with the officiousness which sometimes attributed to him, will tell thee that his notions of elegance in all matters corporeal, mental, and moral, are the only true standards of propriety, tell him that there exists such a feeling as national self-esteem; and you may courteously inform him in addition, that he is supposed to entertain it by his brethren, Jonathan, Paddy, and Sandy, each of whom has his own standard. Learn to respect thyself, and then you may be quite sure that our beloved brother John will speedily become reconciled to thee.. .76

Jones argued that Welsh men needed to develop a sense of pride in their language and country before they could expect their fellow subjects of Great Britain, the Irish, Scots and especially the English , to respect them as men, as Wales, and as an equal nation.

"Evan Jones 'leuan Gwynedd' "Fatherland", The Principality (January 4, 1848), 280-81.

76Ibid. 60

According to Jones, the best way to develop this 'national self-esteem' involved speaking

Welsh and adhering to the tenets of Nonconformist Welsh society, ironically modeled on idealized middle-class Victorian masculine behavior. After challenging the masculinity of those who abandoned the Welsh language and Welsh values in the previous paragraph,

Jones continued by challenging his fellow Welsh men to defend the Welsh nation:

And now, brother Taffy, our counsel to thee is, set to work. Labour alone can save thee, darling. Thy position is one of imminent danger, but in self- reliance and self-respect thou wilt be more than safe- thou wilt be triumphant. Thou hast a noble country-tarnish not her fame.. Do this, and we promise thee that in a few years, if we live, and if the PRINCIPALITY live, ...that clergymen will cease to malign thee-that Government will not dare to send three paid to get up a case against thy language, morality, and religion, in order to support a worthless Church, thine everlasting incubus, -and that the English Parliament will treat thee with becoming respect.77

Despite his vehement outrage against the Commissioners, this statement suggests that

Jones seemed to accept implicitly the judgements and condemnations of the

Commissioners regarding the lack of correct masculine behavior within Welsh society: he simply defined his categories differently. Where the English Commissioners labeled speaking Welsh as an indicator of'unmanly', 'uncivilized' and 'uncontrolled' masculinity, Jones asserted that speaking Welsh or English with a Welsh accent was manly, to do otherwise was effeminate. Welsh speakers were expected to work hard for

their nation, and exhibit correct moral behavior under the Nonconformist leadership of

Jones and his periodicals. As one outraged author challenged his fellow Welshmen:

77lbid. 61

the question here is, whether you will allow this Report to go forth to the world as a faithful and correct representation of the state of education, morality, and religion among you! If this be true, you are in a worse state of barbarism than the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, before the landing of the French: if this Report gives a wrong representation, say so.78

The author, known only as "T", encouraged all Welshmen to write letters and sign a petition that he designed. Thus while the Blue Books themselves were an imperial project of inclusion and subordination, aimed at fully incorporating Wales into Britain, the Welsh nationalist response created its own hierarchies of exclusion at Welsh women's expense.

Jones and others implicitly defined and excluded from national membership those who failed to adopt the idealized characteristics of "Brother Taffy" as effeminate, less- patriotic, and less 'Welsh'. He judged his fellow Welshmen just as the English

Commissioners judged their fellow British citizens in Wales.

CONCLUSION:

The Blue Book Reports on the State of Education in Wales, and the responses to them illuminate both nationalism and imperialism as highly gendered power relationships and discourses in constant states of construction and reification. Parliament and the

Commissioners alike sought to continue the process of British imperial state-building by creating a more homogenous, and therefore less fractious, population at home in the imperial metropole through education and the imposition of a single language. Prominent members of the Welsh intelligentsia, primarily male and Nonconformist, sought to

'""Letter to the Editor: Mr. Lingen's Report Dec 29th 1847."77ie Principality 1, No. 18.(Jan 4, 1848), p. 278. 62 reinforce their own claims to leadership of the Welsh population by affirming their right to be different, yet remaining loyal citizens of Great Britain and its empire. Evan Jones and others defended their right to remain in control of the 'civilizing' process within

Wales, and thus assert their masculinity. This process of defending themselves against the perceived 'slander' of the English, predominately within the press, facilitated these men's imagination of the Welsh population as a single national community and culture.79

This critical moment in the long process of national identity formation was dominated by gendered constructions of national citizens and communities, the discursive definition of ideal women and ideal men, both on the British and the Welsh sides. Moreover, the gendered constructions of Welsh national identity emphasizing the morality and educational zeal of the Welsh population, as well as the emphasis on the importance of the Welsh language continued to dominate Welsh nationalist discourses throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, as will be discussed in later chapters. Even within the

British imperial metropole, indigenous Welsh women continued to be central to both imperial and nationalist discourses from multiple viewpoints. Comparisons with similar debates and discourses regarding India and the empire help place the asymmetrical relationships within Britain back into their imperial context and complicate notions of a homogenous British national and imperial identity.

79 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983, rev. ed 1991). For a critique of Benedict Anderson's neglect of gender's role in this process see Ruth Roach Pierson, "Nations: Gendered, Racialized, Crossed with Empire," in Blom, Hagemann and Hall eds., Gendered Nations: and Gender Order in the Long 19th Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000): 41-61. 63

CHAPTER TWO

Good Wives, Welsh Flannel, and the tall peaked hat: Y Gymraes and Welsh nationalist ideology

Gender was integral to the creation of nineteenth century Welsh national identity.

Wales, especially Nonconformist Wales, reacted in outrage to the Commissioners' condemnations of Welsh women's immorality and Welsh Nonconformist culture.1 This chapter will explore the relationship between morality, the Welsh language, and Welsh national identity disseminated in the pages of Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman), the first periodical aimed solely at a female audience, under the editorship of Evan Jones (Ieuan

Gwynedd) and his patroness Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover (Gwenynen Gwent) between

1850-1. In taking up the challenge of their English accusers and attempting to demonstrate the superior morality of Welsh women and thus the Welsh nation, Jones,

Llanover, nonconformists, and nationalists implicitly and explicitly accepted the imperial criteria used to judge and then condemn the Welsh culture. For the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries various Welsh nationalists used periodicals to assert the difference and unique nature of their own culture within the imperial relationship, yet continued to view themselves through the judgmental and imperial eyes of their colonizers, while trying and failing to live up to their standards. Moreover, this marriage of morality, domestic ideology, and emphasis on the role of Welsh women as the

'Jane Aaron, "Finding a voice in two tongues: gender and colonization," in Aaron, Teresa Rees, Sandra Betts & Moira Vincentelli eds., Our Sisters' Land: The Changing Identities of Women in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994): 186. As Aaron noted, "Nonconformist Wales up in outrage against these accusations, showing itself more passionate in the defence of its religion than of its language." 64 transmitters of Welsh traditions, the Welsh language, and thus Welsh national identity down to current and which originated in these periodicals framed nationalist debates through the mid-twentieth century and the publications of Plaid

Cymru.

As discussed in the previous chapter, following the publication of the Reports of the Commissioners on the State of Education in Wales (1847), popularly referred to as the

Blue Books. The campaign of protest against the judgements of the Commissioners centered around the heated defense of the morality of Welsh women, and the condemnation of English morality using the relative disparity in prostitution rates between the two nations. The Reverend Evan Jones led the campaign to defend the reputation of Welsh women.2 Thus concerned about Welsh women's behavior, Jones founded the first periodical for Welsh women, Y Gymraes in 1850. He acted as editor and contributor for two years, until the magazine ceased publication upon his death in

1851. While Jones acted as editor, he published Y Gymraes under the financial and social of another prominent author and defender of Welsh culture, Augusta Hall,

Lady Llanover, who adopted the pen name Gwenynen Gwent.3

2See chapter one above.

'Lady Llanover is listed as patroness on the cover every issue of the periodical. A champion of various causes, including the right of the Welsh people to have religious services in their own tongue, especially Anglican services, Augusta Hall, born Augusta Waddington in 1802, at the age of 32 won the prize for her essay at the Cardiff Eisteddfod in which she presented her arguments in support of the Welsh language and the importance of supporting the Welsh flannel industry. She eventually invented a "Welsh national costume" which used homespun flannel as its primary elements. See Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover [Gwenynen Gwent], The Prize Essay on the Advantages resulting from the preservation of The Welsh Language and National Costumes of Wales-Gwent & DyJ'ed Royal Eisteddfod, 1834 (London: Longman, Rees, Ortne, Brown, Green & Longman; & William Bird, Cardiff, 1836). 65

Lady Lianover, The Bee of Gwent and Evan Jones, the Defender of Welsh Womanhood

During the uproar following the publication of the Blue Books, few women found venues from which to voice their opinions regarding the accusations of the English

Commissioners and those of their male Welsh defenders. Augusta Hall, Lady Lianover, the most prominent, influential of these women, used her connections and financial resources to sponsor the publication of an anonymous response to the accusations.

Lady Lianover occupied a highly visible position within the Welsh cultural scene throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.4 Born Augusta Waddington in 1802, she became Lady Lianover after marrying her husband Benjamin Hall in 1823, a marriage which united two large estates in Monmouthshire, Wales. She learned Welsh under the tutelage of historian, antiquary and Anglican vicar Thomas Price5

(Carnhuanawc) and became active in local Welsh cultural circles. While learning Welsh

4Lady Lianover is also one of the few individual women visible in Welsh historiography, although until recently her activism regarding the preservation of the Welsh language and the invention of the Welsh national costume for women held little significance for many scholars. Yet the images of women in Welsh costume continue to appear on St. David's Day every year, as well as throughout the tourist industry of Wales. Lady Lianover currently remains one of the few Welsh women to be mentioned in the Dictionary of Welsh National Biography Down to 1940, albeit only under the listing for her husband Benjamin Hall. She has recently become the subject of interest under the cultural revival resulting from the creation of the Welsh National Assembly, (Sianel Pedwar Cymru) the Welsh language channel of the BBC. Lady Lianover is the subject of a short available on the Internet at http://www.worldwidewales.tv/index2.php?mid=:434 and the Lady Lianover Society (Cymdeithas (Jwenynen CJwent) found at http://www.ladvllanover.orti.uk founded in 2002 in honor of her 200,h birthday.

'Thomas Price, (1787-1848), pen name Carnhuanawc, published frequently in a number of Welsh periodicals during the first half of the nineteenth century. He, along with Lady Lianover, was an active participant in provincial eisteddfodau after 1819, where he won several prizes. He founded and participated in a number of Welsh cultural organizations among the gentry of Wales, including a Welsh school, a literary society, and well as a school for blind harpists at and shared his interest in the Welsh triple with Lady Lianover, his mentee. His interests in home-produced materials and clothing also greatly influenced her. See the Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940, pp. 791-2. 66 she attended eisteddfodau from 1819 on, and eventually won a prize at the Cardiff eisteddfod in 1834, after which she adopted the pen name Gwenynen Gwent, and was often referred to as the "Bee of Gwent" because of her constant activities on behalf of the

Welsh language and culture.6 These included the patronage of the Welsh Manuscripts

Society, and the annual Cymmrodorion eisteddfodau from 1834-1853.7

She also supported the use of the 'traditional' Welsh at her home at Llanover, and abroad.8 She sought to organize her home at Llanover along 'traditional Welsh lines' by giving her servants Welsh , and requiring them to wear Welsh costume, and speak

Welsh.9 Indeed, she herself constructed this 'traditional' Welsh costume for women by examining local rural dress and using her own imagination, eventually creating official

6Her essay was published several years later, in both English and Welsh. See Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover [Gwenynen Gwent], The Prize Essay on the Advantages resulting from the preservation of The Welsh Language and National Costumes of Wales-Gwent & Dyfed Royal Eisteddfod, 1834 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman; & William Bird, Cardiff, 1836). On Lady Llanover's attendance at eisteddfodau, see D. Gareth Evans, A History of Wales 1815-1906 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1989): 227.

'John Davies, A History of Wales (London: Allen Lane- The Penguin Press, 1993):387.

"National Library of Wales. Aberpergwm Letters and MSS. Nos. 212, 215, & 1856. Correspondence from this collection between Lady Llanover and a variety of individuals reveals the constant patronage of Lady Llanover in support of the Welsh Triple Harp. In 1870 she welcomed a famous Swedish harpist visiting Llanover Hall from London specifically to learn about the Welsh Harp. She sent Gruffydd, a welsh resident at her estate to represent Wales at a held in , October 13-19, 1863, also referred to as the ' Eisteddfod.' Reports of the Congress clearly identified Gruffydd as one who "belongs to the establishment of Lady Llanover." Significantly, the Welsh triple harp preserved and disseminated as 'traditionally' Welsh was in fact a relatively recent innovation, with the Triple Harp having replaced the use of a simpler Welsh harp during the 17lh century. See Prys Morgan, "The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period," in Hobsbawm & Ranger eds.. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Canto, 1992):51.

'Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940, p. 334. See also Deborah C. Fisher, Who's Who in Welsh History (: Davies (Publishers) Inc., 1997): 84. 67 costume variants for each county and region.10 By the time the Blue Books were published in 1847, Lady Llanover was established as a prominent member of the

Anglican Welsh gentry and as a cultural activist. Although she commissioned a female- authored response to the accusations of the Commissioners, her activism focused mainly on the preservation of the Welsh language and the encouragement of Welsh women to wear their 'native' costume. Her activism emphasized these themes until her death in

1896.

Lady Llanover's partner in efforts to teach the younger generations how to be good, moral, Welsh women was Reverend Evan Jones (leuan Gwynedd) editor of Y

Gymraes. Born in 1820, Evan Jones suffered from illness throughout his life until his death at the young age of 32. Yet he packed a remarkable amount of activity into those short years as an Independent minister and journalist. Independent minister and journalist, Jones earned respect in Wales for his efforts in the campaign for non-Anglican, voluntary schools. That issue soon fell by the wayside after the publication of the Blue

Book Reports in 1847. Jones acted as the mouthpiece for Welsh anger against the condemnations of the Anglican, English Commissioners through public meetings, letters to the editor, and newspaper columns, countering the facts cited in the Reports.11 Jones

l0See Lady Llanover, Cambrian Costumes, printed by the National Library of Wales, 1970. National Library of Wales. Department of Pictures and Maps, Llyfrau Ffoto 1724 A. See also Prys Morgan, "The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1983, reprinted 1995): 81-82.

"The Census of Religious Worship in I8S1 demonstrated the strength of nonconformity, with 2,770 Welsh nonconformist chapels for 611,000 people, 70 percent of church seats for the population of 1,152,000 in the Principality. For a more detailed discussion of the strength of nonconformity in Wales and its correlation with the Welsh language see Brinley Thomas, "A Cauldron of Rebirth: Population and the argued that the Commissioners "most wantonly caricature and most grossly libel the social and moral condition of our country... deprecate our language, traduce our men, defame our women, and despise our religion."12 He republished a number of his articles as separate pamphlets in defense of the moral behavior of Welsh women.13 The women of Tredegar later presented him with a desk for defending their chastity and reputation in recognition of his actions in defense of Welsh honor and Welsh womanhood14 Editor of

The Principality for a short time in 1848, Jones contributed to and edited a number of

publications before taking up the position late in 1849 of editor of Y Gymraes, the first

periodical aimed at a Welsh female audience, under the patronage of Lady Llanover.15

Welsh Language in the Nineteenth Century," Welsh History Review 13, no. 4 (December 1987):418-431, especially 426-7.

l2Evan Jones, "Correspondence: To the People of Wales," The Principality: Independent Organ of Welsh Culture and Opinion 1, No., 31 (April 7, 1848):486.

13See Chapter One above more a more in-depth discussion of Jones' arguments against the Blue Book Reports. Evan Jones, Facts, Figures, and Statements in Illustration of the Dissent and Morality of Wales: An Appeal to the English People (1849); A Vindication of the Educational and Moral Condition of Wales in reply to William Williams, Esq., Late M. P. for Coventry (Llandovery, 1848); and others. See also his papers at the National Library of Wales. NLW MS. 2756 C. leuan Gwynedd Prose Works.

14 Y Gwiryn Derbyny Byd. Anrheg Merched Tredegar / leuan Gwynedd am ei Amdiffyniad o Ddiweirdeb Merched Cymru, fonawr 10, 1848. "The Truth Against the World. Presented by the Women of Tredegar to leuan Gwynedd for his defense of Welsh Women's chastity, January 10, 1848." National Library of Wales. NLW Rolls 287.

"Jones resigned as editor of the Principality in September, 1848. Earlier that year the paper had a circulation of one thousand copies weekly. See NLW MS. 2725 B. Jones also contributed a large number of articles, frequently re-issued as pamphlets, to the pages of Yr Amserau, The Nonconformist, John Bull, and the Monmouthshire Merlin. See the entry for Evan Jones, Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940,460-1. 69

A Welsh Women's Periodical

Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman), although similar, did not simply imitate English middle-class women's periodical literature.16 Although The Welshwoman's pages presented instructions on the finer points of cooking, domestic tranquility, marriage, and other aspects of an idealized and 'foreign', i.e. English domestic Victorian ideology, the

Reverend Evan Jones also used the periodical as a pulpit to give voice to Nonconformist

Wales's newly dominant centrality to Welsh national identity. Thus the periodical contradictorily merged English Victorian mores adopted in response to the Blue Book

Reports, and newly emerging assertions of Welsh nationalism into an influential vision of

Welsh society that dominated Welsh nationalist ideology for the rest of the nineteenth and early twentieth centi! ,ts. Jones and his contributors instructed Welsh women about correct moral behavior for themselves and their daughters. That Nonconformist message took on a specifically Welsh cast under the influence and direction of staunch Anglican

Lady Llanover, who used Y Gymraes to disseminate her message regarding the importance of the Welsh language and Welsh costume, two themes which permeated the pages of her pet project. While historian Jane Aaron correctly noted that the columns of

Y Gymraes acted as a pulpit from which to "provide exemplary lessons for Welsh women

who still needed them in the type of conduct they were now expected to adopt...part of an

"•Rosemary Jones, '"Separate Spheres'?: Women, Language and Respectability in Victorian Wales,"in Geraint H. Jenkins ed.. The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801-1911 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000): 178-182. 70 intensive cultural project," she does not acknowledge the centrality of the Welsh language within that project.17 Historians have dismissed Lady Llanover's contributions to this cultural project, focusing briefly on her invention of the Welsh costume for women rather than her emphasis on the importance of Welsh language for Welsh women.18 The

"spontaneous upsurge of Welsh-speaking among the mass of the people from the 1850s to the 1890s" which thwarted the efforts of English schoolmasters to Anglicize the

Principality of Wales was in fact the result of the deliberate efforts of cultural activists such as Lady Llanover and Evan Jones, and the wide number of periodicals during that period that kept the Welsh language dominant until the late nineteenth century.19 The marriage of Victorian domestic ideology, the concern about women's moral behavior in order to demonstrate Welsh modernity and civilization according to the British model, and the emphasis on Lady Llanover's construction of Welsh culture in the pages of Y

Gymraes outlined the primary pillars of Welsh nationalist discourse as it developed over the course of the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.

Although Evan Jones remained 's monthly editor, Lady Llanover's influence must not be underestimated. Lady Llanover was no stranger to acting as patron

l7Jane A .ron, "Finding a voice in two tongues: gender and colonization," in Aaron, Teresa Rees, Sandra Betts & Moira Vincentelli eds., Our Sisters' Land: The Changing Identities of Women in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994): 186.

'"See Prys Morgan, "The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period," p. 81. John Davies, A History of Wales (Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, 1993):387. Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998): 15-16. Jane Aaron, "A Review of the Contribution of Women to Welsh Life and Prospects for the Future," Transactiosn of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 2001, New Series, Vol. 8, (2002), 197 n. 26.

l9Brinley Thomas, "A Cauldron of Rebirth: Population and the Welsh Language in the Nineteenth Century," Welsh History Review 13, No. 4 (December 1987):429. 71 to publications. During the furor over the Blue Books two years previously in 1848 Lady

Llanover commissioned historian Jane Williams, writing under the pen-name Ysgafell to counter the arguments of the English Commissioners using logic, reason, and the evidence presented in the Reports themselves.20 Lady Llanover published the pamphlet and a later rebuttal to the responses Artegall generated in The Times, December 1848.21

Lady Llanover did not impose her ideas upon Jane Williams' manuscript in any way, but allowed her present her own well-crafted arguments. Lady Llanover knew how to act as a silent patron of the written word, yet took a very different role in her relationship with

Evan Jones and Y Gymraes. Lady Llanover's patronage became highly visible and influential as the ideas that she outlined in her 1834 Prize Essay and supported at various eisteddfodau reappeared on the pages of Y Gymraes in 1850.

The Prize Essay

An English woman who adopted Welsh as her second language, Lady Llanover argued fervently that the Welsh language acted as the central element of Welsh identity and culture. A devoted participant in the early nineteenth century glorification of nationality and folk culture, she derided any arguments outlining the benefits that resulted

20British Library 8365.bbb.48.( 1) Cambrian Tractates and Letters. "Introductory Remarks" 1855. Attached to Jane Williams, Artegall, or Remarks on the Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales. (London: Longman & Co., 1848). For biographical information on Jane Williams see also Maxwell Fraser, "Jane Williams (Ysgafell) 1806-1885" (Journal of the Brecknock Society) 7 (1961): 100.

21 For more on the relationship between Jane Williams and Lady Hall see the National Library of Wales. Kyrle Fletcher Papers, Group III, Box III. 72 from the adoption of the English language met with derision. As she argued in her prize winning essay,

.. supposing for an instant the possibility of Anglicising Wales, what result could be expected? Instead of the zealous and efficient soldiers and subjects it now produces, we should have a broken spirited, or a brutalized race, deprived of their natural and legitimate objects of attachment, their language and customs, they would either be callous, stupid and indifferent, or they would become as remarkable for crime, as they are now justly celebrated for the reverse."22

She argued that rather than being a positive force of modernity, morality, and lawful behavior, the spread of the English language brought with it the evils of modernity such as industrialization, immorality, crime, and urban fashions manufactured out of non- native fabrics. Significantly, the English stereotype of the Welsh in the figure of Taffy, as found in the saying ", Taffy was a thief' and in the Welsh characters found in Shakespeare, Lady Llanover argued that it was the English that had spread crime into the Principality, and that the Welsh were 'justly celebrated' for their lack of criminality.23 Indeed:

But amongst the various "advantages" which have resulted to the Principality from "the preservation of the Welsh language," we must by no means overlook the firm and hitherto impassable barrier it has presented to the progress of sedition and infidelity, and if its exclusiveness (which we much doubt) has been productive of any serious inconvenience in commercial transactions, it must be admitted that more than sufficient compensation is afforded by the exclusion of those infidel principles which have of late been so successfully disseminated through the medium

22Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover [Gwenynen Gwent], The Prize Essay, p. 7.

"For more on stereotypes of the Welsh from the English perspective see Prys Morgan, "Keeping the legends alive," in Tony Curtis ed., Wales the Imagined Nation: Studies in Cultural and National Identity (Chester Springs, PA: Poetry Wales Press, 1986): 19-41. 73

of the English press,.. .which have been still more fatally sown in France, and against which our Breton brethren like ourselves have been defended by their language...

Thus she argued that the Welsh language acted as a barrier to the spread of crime and immorality which rode on the heels of the English language.

remark, to the honour of our country, that numerous as are the literary and scientific men that Wales has produced, and various as are the subjects on which their pens have been employed, in their native language, we are not aware of a solitary instance where it has been perverted by being made use of in any work of an immoral tendency, which has proceeded either as an original or from the Welsh press- a press which has given to the world works on every science, and continues to teem with moral, useful and enlightened periodical publications.24

In her view, it was impossible to produce any immoral works in or translated from the

Welsh language. If a Welshmen wrote an 'immoral work', he did so in English. Thus in her view the Welsh language was inherently moral. The modern 'infidel' principles spread by the modern press threatened not just Welsh morality, language and culture.

According to Lady Llanover, their fellow in Brittany, the found themselves engaged on the losing side of the same battle against the evil, modern 'foreign' influence of the French, which she presented as a warning for the future of Wales.

Lady Llanover argued that those same foreign, modern influences attacked the other bulwark of traditional culture, the 'Costumes of the Principality.' This was a bad thing for a number of reasons, and the responsibility for this decline she laid firmly on one short-sighted, regretful group:

the advantages resulting from the preservation of the Costumes of the

21 Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover, Prize Essay, p. 8. 74

Principality, which of late years have fallen greatly into dis-use through the discouragement they have met with from the higher orders, who, nevertheless, at the present time are frequently known to lament this circumstance, and to regret and deprecate the introduction of foreign luxuries in articles of dress.25

She paternalistically asserted that poor leadership in disseminating foreign standards regarding behavior and fashion led to the peasantry imitating the elites. Such behavior thus led to a decline in the native attire, which she argued was necessary for the performance of domestic duties:

"Naturally active and , the Welshwomen of the last generation were taught from their earliest years, as well under the roof of the freeholder, as in the of the labourer, that proper pride which is derived from the practical knowledge and exercise of every variety of occupation, and they considered that health and strength should constitute the sole limits of domestic industry, and be the only boundaries to domestic usefulness... but of late years a false standard of respectability has been established, which has in a great many instances effected such a change of costume, as is utterly incompatible with a proper discharge of household and agricultural duties ...26

Thus according to Lady Llanover, working Welshwomen could not perfor i t^r domestic duties in foreign costume, i.e. wearing manufactured cotton gowns, corsets and bustles, small bonnets and other English imports. As a member of the gentry, surrounded by servants, she had never attempted to perform the heavy tasks of domestic servitude in a heavy, layered Welsh flannel or woolen garment. She ignored the possibility that women's choicc of garments reflected pragmatic concerns including ease of care and acquisition, i.e. that it was easier to purchase cotton cloth for sewing than to weave one's

"Ibid., p. 9.

2'1bid.,p. 10. 75 own, and easier to wash and dry it due to its light weight. Rather she simply dismissed working women's choices as blind imitation of social elites and fashion.

Not only did Welsh women of the lower classes make poor, blind, and impractical choices in their clothing, they trampled on the honor of their family, culture, and previous generations in doing so. She argued that:

...it is to the tyranny offashion that their recent decline is to be attributed . . .There was a time when the garment of home made manufacture formed the boast of the wearer, and was allowed to reflect honour on the house and family in which it was fabricated, but of late years, how are circumstances changed!! How frequently do we now see the hale and robust mother of fifty, and even grandmother of eighty, returning from church or market secure from the storm, under the protection of the warm woollen gown, and comfortable cloak or whittle of Gwent or Dyfed, with a neat and serviceable hat, and black woollen stockings, pursuing her homeward path unobstructed by the influence of cold or wet, while the delicate and cotton clad daughter or grand-daughter, with perhaps the symptoms of consumption on her cheek, is shivering in the rain, seeking the precarious shelter of the nearest hedge, or shifting her station from tree to tree, to avoid the soaking of the shower, while her flimsy straw , saturated with water, and dyed like a by the many coloured streams descending from its numerous and once gaudy ribbons, is presenting a deplorable example of the sad effects resulting from that absurd abandonment of ancient and wise habits which forms the subject of our present lamentation.27

Thus she argued that women wearing the products of their households reflected well on the family, and indicated respect to the previous generations. In this passage she essentially chastised the younger generations for imitating the wrong group of women,

Englishwomen rather than their grandmothers, thus breaking their link with the Welsh past. She warned against the dangers that the adoption of fashionable cotton represented

27lbid., pp. 10-11. 76 to the health, both physical and financial, of the women and families of Wales, and thus the health and morals of the peasantry, including future generations of its citizens shivering in the Welsh rain.

Lady Llanover also appealed to the paternalist nature of the Welsh gentry and small middle class regarding the need to help the peasantry manage their finances and avoid the financial folly of pursuing fashionable clothing. She argued that:

While this foolish and perverse system operates so perniciously with regard to the health and morals of the peasantry, its effects are no less detrimental to the pecuniary interests of the people at large The prosperity of the principality must of necessity be better forwarded by the home consumption of her native produce, than by any importations however cheap and attractive, and the inhabitants will always be found poorer and more indolent, in proportion as straw bonnets, ribbons, frills, capes, ringlets, and all the caprices of fashion flourish among us.

She argued that it was not logical for women to spend so much on fashion, for:

What a fund of comforts might not thus be laid by against the demands of sickness, or of a young family? instead of the want we daily witness among servant maids without money, or any stores for household use, married to labourers, after having passed eight or nine years in service, and spent eight or ten pounds annually in changing the fashion of their clothes?28

Women thus endangered their families in a variety of ways by wearing new dresses and bonnets, and failed to fulfil their primary functions as mothers and wives.

Not only was fashion dangerous to local families due to wearing this new clothing, but the production process itself endangered the family, the health and the

2"lbid., page 18, note H. 77 morals of Welsh girls:

There is a story of an old woman who put the Devil to flight with her distaff, and we have great faith in the efficiency of that weapon, and should wish to see every Welsh female continue capable of wielding it! We often have regretted that crowds of innocent peasant girls are annually transported from the active and healthy labours of the farm house, to the close and foetid atmosphere of a narrow room to pine for two or three years, as milliners' apprentices, and to add to a class already more than sufficient for the fashionable wants of the inhabitants of a country , many of whom return home with a profitless trade, a broken , and corrupted morals!

This passage reveals Lady Llanover's limited view of women's role within the Welsh culture and economy. Despite the fact that sewing and millinery skills fit into the domestic role for women that she sought to encourage among the working classes of

Wales, Lady Llanover ultimately disagreed with women working outside the home, especially in the better-paying, although scarce, industrial jobs. She approved only of jobs as poorly paid domestic servants, and presumably only prior to marriage.29

Yet women's domestic role, no matter what class background, gave women authority and power to influence others, both male and female. Thus Lady Llanover felt that she was engaged in her proper social role as a member of the gentry, mother, and wife when years later she later instructed the Women of Wales how to be proper Welsh women using the pages of Y Gymraes.

Let us then endeavour to impress on the minds of those whose characters and stations in life enable them to extend their influence over their fellow-

MFor more on Lady Llanover's attitudes towards women's work outside the home see Sian Rhiannon Williams, "The True 'Cymraes': Images of Women in Women's Nineteenth-Century Welsh Periodicals," in Angela V. John ed., Our Mothers' Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History 1830-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991): 76-77. 78

countrymen, the necessity of making use of the invaluable privileges which they possess for the benefit of the community at large. Nor is it to the rich or the noble that we alone address ourselves- it is also to the small freeholder, the farmer and the labourer- to , to tenants and to servants, each and every one of whom in their separate rank can influence, through the means of interest or attachment. Every body we believe exerts some power over the minds and actions of others-There can scarcely be a person in existence who has neither child or cousin, brother or sister, nephew, niece or friend over whom they have some controul [sic] ! - and if such beings there be, let them in their own persons at least set an example that will have a beneficial effect on those who behold it.30

Lady Llanover clearly felt that patronage and patriarchal, hierarchical gender roles were valuable tools to use in the construction of a moral, Welsh speaking, Welsh flannel- costumed population of Welsh women, and thus the Welsh nation. Moreover, just as women, their behavior and treatment by men indicated the degree of civilization of a country and culture according to English standards, and then Welsh standards in response, their costumed presence indicated a healthy, happy, picturesque and prosperous nation. The pacified countryside would once again be available to receive English visitors to the timeless hills of Wales. She argued that:

We have not enlarged upon the loss Artists would experience by the destruction of the costumes of Wales, or on their value to the traveller. after the Picturesque, or on their forming one of the most characteristic and ornamental features of the principality. We feel that our arguments for their support are better founded on the firm basis of health and industry, which are the first steps to happiness and prosperity, and the best preventatives of poverty and immorality.

To conclude, we can only express our sincere and fervent hopes that our posterity, clad in the manufactures of their country, may emulate the simple and industrious habits of their ancestors, and that the inhabitants of Cambria may ever give utterance to their pious and loyal sentiments, in the

MIbid., Prize Essay, p. 11-12. 79

pure native accents of their forefathers, and continue to prove that the language of Wales is co-equal with the duration of the world.31

She pleaded with her readers to maintain the traditions of dress, habit, and language as links to the past; to avoid the temptations of modernity as seen in cotton clothing, fancy hairdos, the English language, and modern, urban jobs as milliners. The Welsh language and costume linked an idealized Welsh past, present and future using the bodies o. Welsh women, especially mothers. However this idealized view of the Welsh past and traditional society became fraught with tension after the Reports of 1847, tensions that revealed themselves in the influential pages of Y Gymraes, and laid the foundation of late nineteenth and twentieth century nationalism.

Y Gymraes: The Welshwoman

Various scholars have acknowledged a shift towards a Nonconformist-dominated culture after the Blue Book Reports of 184732, and others briefly acknowledged the role of

Lady Llanover in the invention of the Welsh national costume for women. In the years after 1847 the combination of the Nonconformist domestic ideology of Evan Jones and the Anglican paternalist emphasis on the Welsh language and Welsh costume of Lady

Llanover created a periodical riddled with tensions over the role of women in Welsh culture and society.

"Lady Llanover, Prize Essay, p. 18.

,2Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales? A History oj the Welsh (London: Penguin, 1985, reprinted 1991 ):205-6. 80

These tensions developed as the rhetoric of Lady Llanover and Evan Jones focused on the defense and preservation of Welsh women's morality, using the pages of the periodical to instruct Welsh women how to behave. In reaction against the Blue Book reports Y Gymraes shifted from solely reporting Lady Llanover's cultural interests to a new focus on motherhood as the primary function of Welsh women. Thus Lady

Llanover's disapproval of working women took on a new dimension. The periodical Y

Gymraes disapproved of rural female farm servants, whom it represented as "flighty, irresponsible young girls who spent much of their time courting and committing 'sinful" acts at fairs and in haylofts." This disapproval of the activities of rural women demonstrates the domestic, middle class emphasis of the periodical. Yet despite the influence of this periodical on later constructions of Welsh identity, by the 1920s the columns of Plaid Cymru periodicals lauded the rural Welsh farm and home as the central element of Welsh identity.

Mothers of Wales! Speak Welsh with your child. You are guilty of neglect, a betrayal of your heart/womb is the cause, if your descendants falter to pronounce their first words in the language God gifted to their ancestors in the beginning of life. From you (and not their fathers) they learn to love God, their language, & them selves. On the other hand, if you neglect your duty, through you comes the motley-sort of offspring, this not claimed by anyone but ignored by everybody, known once to be a nation, and language, but the mothers "sell their birth privileges for a meal of " ...the destiny of your sons and daughters rests in your hands. Mothers of Wales, do not leave them learn the foreign easy language, until they are able to know their difficult language, their land, themselves; and then, if an earthly occasion demands the English, a few weeks will be enough to master it. But it will be the language of the home, and religious language, is the destiny assigned by God to the Welsh, and so long as she preserves that, dread not being the target and shield in the plot against Satan. Form the minds of your child, and encourage 81

your men, resolve to defend the Welsh language. Do not lead yourself astray by empty-pride, and do not persuade them to imitate the English.... But favor your undeniable right that God gave your ancestors- to speak the language taught to you by God- and above all to worship Him in your language your selves; this, to those who follow, you and your child will be the bulwark of strength against the evil and corrupt attacks on custom.33

In addition to her exhortation to the women of Wales to act as a Welsh speaking bulwark against Anglicization in language, Lady Llanover begged the readers of Y Gymraes to not

"forget our national attire" of Welsh flannel, which she argued was superior it protecting

its wearer from the rain and moisture of the Welsh climate.34 Indeed, she chided mothers

who dressed their babies in cotton rather than flannel clothing for looking foolish in their

pride, because the cotton was suitable only for the inhabitants of India.35 Lady Llanover

33Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover (Gwenllian Gwent), "Anerchiad I Cymruesau Cymru" Y Gymraes I (January, 1850): 10. (Famau Cymru ! siaradwch Gymraeg wrth eich plant. Eich esgeulusdod beius chwi, a brad eich calon fydd yr achols, os na bydd i'ch hiliogaeth floesg swnio eu geiriau cyntaf yn yr iaith a roddodd Duw i'n henafiaid yn moreu y byd. Oddwrthych chwi (ac nid eu tadau) y dysgant garu Duw yn eu hiaith eu hunain. Ar y law arall, os esgeuluswch chwi eich dyledswydd, drwyddoch chwi y deuant yn epil gymysg-ryw, yr hon na arddelir gan neb, ond a ddiystyrir gan bawb, a wyddent fod iddynt unwaith genedl, ac iaith, ond i'w mamau "wergthu eu genedigaeth fraint am saig o gawl." ...ag y mae tynged eich meibion a'ch merched yn eich Haw chwi, Famau Cymru, naadewch iddynt ddysgu iaith hawdd yr estron, hyd nes y medront iaith anhawdd eu eu hunain; ac yna, os bydd amgylchiadau bydol yn gofyn y Saisonaeg, bydd ychydig wythnosau yn ddigon i'w meistroli. Ond bydded iaith yr aelwyd, ac iaith crefydd, yr hon o osododd Duw yn rhan i'r Cymry, a chyhyd ag y cadwont hi, ni raid iddynt ofiii na bydd iddynt darian ac astalch yn erbyn Satan a'i gynllwynion. Ffurfiwch yn meddyliau eich plant, a chefhogwch yn eich gwyr, bendertyniad i amddiflyn iaith Cymru. Nac arweinier chwi ar gyfeiliorn gan wag-falchder, ac na chymhellwch hwy I ddynwared eu bod yn Saison. Gwerthfawrogwch eich cymydogion Seisonig am yr hyn sy dda ynddynt, a gochelwch y drwg. Ond cedwch eich hawl ddiymwad I fod yr hyn y gwnaeth Duw chwi-l siarad yr iaith a ddysgwyd I chwi gan Dduw-ac uwchlaw y cyfan i'w addoli Ef yn eich iaith eich hunain; yr hon, yn nesaf at hyny, sydd I chwi ac i'ch plant yn rhagfur o gadernid yn erbyn ymosodiad arferion drwg a llygredigaethau.)

"Lady Llanover, "Anerchiad..." Y Gymraes I, (January, 1850): 10. ("... arferwch eich GWLANENI CENEDLAETHOL, y rhai sydd wedi bod er amser anghofiadwy yn wisgoedd ein cenedl. Diau fod yr arferiad o honynt wedi ei chadw am y meddant gynifer o ragoriaethau. Diogelant y corph rhag efTeithiau niweidiol lleithder a gwlaw.)

" Y Gymraes, 1 (January, 1850): 10. 82 referenced the 'venerable' poet Carnhuanawc to support her point. Notably, he was a prominent male in the Welsh cultural group in which she participated, and in referring to his opinion, Lady Llanover gained male approval to legitimate her arguments.

In her view, it was the 'harmless babies' that suffered, and in fact died, for the folly of their mothers' folly in adopting cotton clothing.36 Returning to the themes of her

Prize Essay from fifteen years earlier. Lady Llanover, the wife of a prominent Minister of

Parliament and landowner Benjamin Hall, continued to ignore the pragmatic reasons why mothers may have adopted cotton clothing, including cost, ease of drying in a damp climate, and lack of bulk in comparison to homespun Welsh flannel. Not only was the choice of cloth a matter of national interest, both economically and culturally, but a matter of life and death for their children, and an indicator of Welsh women's capability as mothers. Clothing acted as a highly visible indicator that could be evaluated by others with ease, allowing Welsh women to be judged both maternally and culturally, according to their use of traditional garments.

Lady Llanover's arguments recurred time and time again throughout the run of the magazine. Editor Evan Jones summarized Lady Llanover's Prize Essay, just one month after the periodical was founded, continuing an address to the readers from January 1850.

The February issue of that year contained the article, "Welsh Flannel" [Gwlaneni Cymru]

"TUymraes I (January, 1850): 10-11. ( Ni chlywsom son erioed am faban mewn dillad gwlanen wedi llosgi I farwolaeth, ond pa gynifer o famau a adawsant i'w plant drengu, o herwydd eu balchcder ffol, yn eu dilladu mewn cottwm gwael cottwm y gymalwst. fel y galwai yr hybarch CARNHUANAWC ef, a'r hwn nid yw yn addas ond I drigolion yr India am y tybient fod hyny yn foeswych. Fel hun y mae mamau wedi talu am eu fToledd ar eu haelwydydd eu hunain a bywydau y mabanod diniwed a ymddiriedwyd i'w gofalj 83 by Evan Jones.37 Clearly Jones accepted Lady Llanover's conceptions of women's role

within Wales, both the importance of wearing Welsh costume and speak ; in Welsh, to

preserve the morality and innocence of Welsh women and thus Welsh cuitare against the

evils of modern, .

These arguments resonated among some of the readers of Y Gymraes. A letter to

the editor from 'A Welshwoman in " agreed that it was up to Welsh women

"for the sake of our language, our land, and our nation, teach our children in the old, dear

language" of Welsh, even if not living in Wales.38 She argued that "If you speak Welsh,

you will be Welsh; if you speak English, English."3'' Again it was up to Welsh women to

preserve the language, and thus the culture. One woman agreed with Lady Llanover's

arguments regarding the importance of Welsh costume, and seconded her argument

regarding the frivolity of following the fashions of town, when it was important to focus

on the fashions of the home, for "she that rocks the cradle rules the world."40 'Susanna'

contributed an article on her mother's life and death in "Bedd Fy Mam" in September of

1850, and one titled "My Sister" the following month.41 Thus many Welsh women in

"Evan Jones. "Gwlaneni Cymru," Y Gymraes I, No. 2 (Chwefror, 1850): 40-42.

"(A gydded I ni, er mwyn ein hiaith, ein gwlad, a'n cenedl, ddysgu ein plant yn yr hen iaith anwyl.) "Cymraes yn Birmingham, "Cymraeg i'r Cymry: At y Cymruesau," YGymraes I, Rhif. 3 (Mawrth, 1850): 81.

w("Os siarad Cymraeg, bydded Gymraeg; os Saesonaeg. Saesonaeg,) Y Gymraes I, No. 3 (Mawrth, 1850): 81.

4"'Merch ei Mam,' "Merched Cymru-Pa Beth sydd yn y Ffasiwn?" YGymraes Cyf. I, Rhif. 4 (Ebrill, 1850): 108-109.

41 'Susanna', "Bedd Fy Mam," Y Gymraes Cyf. 1, Rhif. 9 (Medi, 1850):274-5 "Fy Chwaer" Y Gymraes Cyf. I, Rhif. 10 (Hydref 1850):305-6. 84 addition to Lady Llanover participated in the construction of Y Gymraes' message to other women, although most of the authors remained men.

Despite the sporadic contributions of many women in the forms of poetry, letters to the editor, and articles, in reality the primary contributors to the pages of Y Gymraes remained nonconformist, middle-class, male religious authorities.42 For example

Benjamin Price authored a story warning against the perils of drinking, titled "Gwenllian

Jones, the Drunken Wife" [Gwraigy Meddwyn] under the pen-name 'Cymro Bach' beginning in April of 1850.43 Price continued to contribute throughout the run o. she periodical, as did other men such as William Williams 'Caledfyn' and David Howell

'Llawdden' in addition to Evan Jones 'leuan C ynedd'.44 With highly esteemed religious authorities from both the nonconformist sects and Church of England contributing advice for Welsh women to follow, Y Gymraes could not be simply dismissed as simply a magazine for women, full of frivolous material. As the number of

a brief discussion of this matter see Sian Rhiannon Williams, "The True 'Cymraes': Images of Women in Women's Nineteenth-Century Welsh Periodicals," in Angela John ed., Our Mothers' Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History, 1830-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991):'77.

43 Benjamin Price c.v.Cymro Bach, "Gwenllian Jones, -Gwraid Y Meddwyn," Y Gymraes Cyf. I, Rhif. 4 (Ebrill, 1850): 100-102. Continued in Y Gymraes (Mai. 1850): 129-131, (Mehefin, 1850): 161-164; und so on.. Benjamin Price (1792-1854) was a Baptis* minister along with an author. He acted as superintendent for Wales of the Baptist Missionary Society, in addition to publishing a number of essays including Y Cymro Bach, 1855, and it'.ctu. es to the Working Classes, 1851. See the Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940, p. 783.

44Sian Rhiannon Williams, "The True 'Cymraes,"' p. 77. William Williams (1801-1869) was a Congregational minister, poet and critic, who published a number of works on the Welsh language, including a Grammar, a guide to reading and writing We! h, and others. In addition to his varied contributions to Y Gymraes he was a scathing critic at eisteddfoddau. David Howell was the son of an active literary figure and Calvinistic Methodist elder, who eventually became dean of St. Anglican church in Wales. A poet, speaker and author, he published a number of pamphlets in addition to his contributions to Y Gymraes which occurred .vhen he was a relatively young man. See the Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940, pp. 366 and 1082-3 respectively. 85 subscribers increased monthly, the number of men reading the periodical also increased.

Indeed, the majority of the readers were men, a point of frustration for the editor.45 Yet this makes the periodical's influence and significance in the historical development of

Welsh nationalism that much greater.46

According to Jones and these other, primarily male authors, Welshwomen's important, if not crucial role in the preservation of a moral Welsh society was to take place within the domestic sphere of the home. Moreover, it did not come naturally to

women to act correctly, and thus they needed instruction from the moral leaders of Welsh society, the Nonconformist clergy. In a section on The Home, the editor issued advice to women, including sections on "Warnings to young women" which instructed young

women on how to be ladies, and presented "Suggestions for Wives" in which the female readers were instructed on how to keep a peaceful home. For example, Jones warned the

women readers that 'if men are reluctant to come home, or come home feeling unhappy,

wives should stop showering their husbands with questions, especially if their husband is

"silent and disinclined to speak." They should leave their husbands alone, to "read, sew,

or something rather than to disturb their husbands... preparing their shirts for the next

week by sewing buttons and straightening collars."47 Clearly editor Evan Jones used Y

4

46 Jones thanked his new subscribers, both quarterly and monthly in the magazine every month. In April 1850 he included the initials and hometown of 53 new subscribers, 36 in May, and 49 in July of that year.

47"Yr Aelwyd: Rhybydd I Ferched leuanc," & "Awgiymau I Wragedd,", Y Gymraes 1, Rhif. 3 (Mawrth, 1850): 95. (Os dygwydd i'ch gwr ddyfod adref yn lied anhwylus, peidiwch a gwneud gwynepryd brawychus a gofyn iddo, "beth yw y mater amoch?" Peidiwch a'i syfrdanu; os bydd eisiau I chwi wybod, 86

Gymraes to disseminate middle-class domestic ideology similar to that being communicated by women's magazines in England and the rest of the British Isles.

Yet rather than assuming that Jones simply parroted Victorian domestic ideology to a middle-class readership, these arguments must be viewed in 01 Jones' and

others' concerns about the behavior of Welsh women of the working classes due to the

previous uproar over the Blue Books, which accused Nonconformist leaders and sects of

encouraging immoral behavior. In response to the Blue Books' images of the sexual

courting practices and immorality of the Welsh working classes, Evan Jones defended

the morality of those same groups and challenged the right of the English Commissioners

to make such accusations, pointing to the high prostitution rates in England.48 His

column "Merched Cymru" included a recurring article on "Welsh unchastity" beginning

in April 1850, along with a discussion of recipes and instructions on how to cook rice.49

The middle classes of Wales remained relatively small until much later in the nineteenth

century. Thus Jones and Llanover used their periodical to address the working class

bydd yn sicr o ddywedyd wrthych. Peidiwch a siarad digrifwch fel cawod o genllysg, o amgylch ei glustiau yn barhaus. Peidiwch a meddw! os byd yn ddistaw a diawydd I siarad, mai chwi yw yr achos o hyny. Gadewch lonydd iddo nes y bydd yn barod I ymddiddan a chwi. Os bydd ef yn darllen, peidiwch a siarad ar ei draws yn awr a phryd arall. Darllenwch, gwniwch. neu rywbeth yn hytrsch na'i aflonyddu. Peidiwch a gadael iddo gael allan fod coler ei grys heb fottwm bob wythnos. Y mae hyn yn mynych gynhyrfu tymhestloedd teuluaidd. Peidiwch a rhoddi un crys byth o'ch I law heb weled fod y bottymau yn eu He, a'i fod yn barod i'w wisgo. Gwnewch y coleri mor gymhwys ac y byddo modd, ac os na byddant yn ei hollol foddloni, cofiwch fod caniatad I ddynion rwgnach am goleri eu crysau.)

4*For more on this discussion, please see Chapter One above. The statistics on prostitution in England were high, especially in comparison with Wales which had an extremely low rate of prostitution due to a variety of factors including the strength of religious nonconformity, lack of middle class men to act as customers, and ihe constant outflow of single girls to England where they quickly found work as domestic servants.

4y"Merched Cymru. -Anniweirdeb Cymru" Y Gymraes, Cyf. I, Rhif. 4, (Ebrill, 1850): 103. population of Wales. The domestic emphasis of these articles contained a specifically

Welsh element, an emphasis on the importance of the Welsh language in maintaining the true Welsh home and society, and the moral reputation of Wales' women and culture.

Welsh women reading Y Gymraes thus found themselves in a contradictory position. As their religious leaders emphasized the need for Welsh women to maintain the traditional homes of Wales, they also decried the traditional practice of courting in bed [caru yn y gwely] and other 'immoral' habits. At the same time Jones, Llanover, amd the other contributors to the periodical asked Welsh women to adopt an outfit no longer being worn, in fact turning back the clock to early seventeenth century rural clothing while decrying the adoption of modern, industrial, convenient clothing made from cotton and other fabrics. These demands accompanied articles recommending that girls be educated in schools, yet they were not supposed to use that education to pursue any type of career but domestic servant, wife and mother. Even more significantly, and based primarily on the arguments of Lady Llanover, Welsh women were supposed to transmit the traditional of culture from their past (albeit often an invented one) to their children using the increasingly unwieldy medium of the Welsh language. Thus the pages of Y

Gymraes convinced its readers that women were central to the maintenance of Welsh language, culture, traditions, and moral reputations.

This message found a wider audience than that of the periodical itself. After a period of two short years the publication of Y Gymraes eventually became financially untenable. Its editor, Evan Jones grew too sick to manage its affairs, and Y Gymraes 88 eventually 'united in matrimony' with Y Tywysydd (The Guide) a monthly penny periodical aimed at young people, reinvented as Y Tywysydd a 'r Gymraes in January

1852. Although not aimed specifically at a female audience or addressing specifically female issues, the periodical continued many of the themes of its 'mother'.50

Lady Llanover continued her activities on behalf of the Welsh language and her shaping of Welsh culture. She authored a cookbook in 1869 based on 'traditional' Welsh recipes, in which a male Welsh hermit instructed a young Englishman on the benefits of the traditional lifestyle of Wales, and the folly of modern English society.

Conclusion

The pages of Y Gymraes forged the foundations of a new invented Welsh identity of the nineteenth century, a time when national identities, customs, and languages were in the process of rediscovery, revival, or fabrication across Europe. Combining the romantic, Anglican, sentimental emphasis on women's centrality to the maintenance of

'traditions' promoted by Lady Llanover, the tacit, participatory approval of the Dean of

St. Davids, the conscious efforts of prominent nonconformist clergy to rescue the reputation of Welsh women, and thus Welsh men and Wales itself, with the editorial and other skills of Evan Jones, Y Gymraes consciously constructed a new Welsh identity in which Welsh women's flannel-clad bodies acted as literal transmitters of traditional culture, their behavior signaling the level of civilization of the nation. Indeed, the women

Welsh women exerting their power through financial and cultural patronage. Lady

Llanover and Evan Jones didn't necessarily succeed in ingraining the correct behavior among the mass population of working class Welsh women, or the Welsh church, however they did succeed in setting the parameters, pillars, and framework of discourse for the Welsh nationalist movement for the next century. Although Welsh culture of the nineteenth century became dominated by the nonconformist majority, the efforts of

Anglican Lady Llanover to impose the necessity and habits of speaking Welsh and wearing Welsh costume on the women of Wales merged into that nonconformist culture, and reappeared in the periodicals of the late nineteenth century, and eventually the party literature of Plaid Cymru in the twentieth century. 90

CHAPTER THREE

'Daughters of Cambria, Mothers ofGwalia Welsh masculinity and womanhood in Welsh Nationalist Periodicals, 1880-1914.

The development of Welsh nationalism, like other nationalist movements, must be viewed as a fundamentally gendered process of imagination, construction and negotiation.1 Within this process, major Welsh nationalist periodicals of the long nineteenth century exemplify the tensions and conflicting messages disseminated within nationalist cultural and political discourses.2 Analysis of their content reveals that Welsh nationalists did not simply reiterate and impose English Victorian middle class patriarchal ideology upon Wales.3 Rather the authors and editors used these periodicals to add

'E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, , reality 2nd ed. Rev. (London: Verso, 1991). See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991) on the subject of imagined communities based on print culture. Anderson's insights ignore the role that gender plays in the imagination of common community and identity across large amounts of space and time. For a more gender inclusive discussion of nationalist historiography see Anne McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family," Feminist Review T o. 44 ( 1993): 61-80, and Sita Ranchod- Nilsson and Mary Ann Tetreault, "Gender and nationalism: Moving beyond fragmented conversations," in Ranchod-Nilsson and Tetreault. eds., Women, States, and Nationalism: At Home in the nation? (London: Routledge, 2000): 1-17.

2The late 19th century was "undoubtedly the heyday of both English- and Welsh-language titles in Wales" under the 'editor-proprietor form of ownership' which largely disappeared by the interwar period of the 20lh century. See Robert Smith, "Journalism and the Welsh Language," in Geraint Jenkins and Mari A. Williams eds.,1 Let's Do Our Best for the Ancient Tongue': The Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000): 279 (276-309). See also Aled Gruflydd Jones, Press, Politics and Society: A History of Journalism in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993).

3Sian Rhiannon Williams, "The True 'Cymraes': Images of Women in Women's Nineteenth- Century Welsh Periodicals," Angela V. John, ed., Our Mothers' Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History 1830-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991): 69-91. See also Sian Rhiannon Williams, "Y Frythones: Portread Cyfnodolion Merchcd y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg o Gymraes yr Oes," Llafur: The Journal of History IV, No. I (1984): 43-56. Williams argues that women's periodicals emphasized the need to reform Welsh moral standards and religious behavior, creating the ideal Victorian domestic 'angel of the hearth' as a model for Welsh women to emulate, echoing similar English women's periodicals. 91

Welsh nationalist interpretations in which Welsh women were doubly limited to the home for both patriarchal and national reasons, as a necessary condition to asserting Welsh men's masculinity within the British imperial system. Moreover, the nationalist emphasis on domesticity and Welsh cultural practices evolved from the earlier mid-century publications such as Y Gymraes as outlined in the previous chapters. As a result, Welsh emphasis on Victorian gender roles within a nationalist, backward-looking, "traditional" framework developed in reaction to the subordinate position of Wales within Britain. As

Welsh nationalists sought to assert themselves within Britain, their assertion of Victorian gender roles combined with nonconformity during the last decades of the nineteenth century marked them as "backward" in comparison to England where Victorian domesticity found itself challenged and in a state of transition. Welsh nationalists found themselves torn between their desires to be truly equal members of the British Empire while also gaining national recognition of their cultural differences. Both agendas required the subordination of Welsh women's cultural labor, morality, and maternity under the firm control of Welsh men as a symbol of their patriarchal dominance. Using gender analysis will significantly revise current scholarly understanding of the Welsh nationalist movement and the formation of British identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although historians have acknowledged the resurgence of Welsh national feeling during the 1880s through the beginning of the First World War, scholars have dismissed

Welsh nationalism as a 'passive' and 'mysterious' reaction to the economic exploitation 92 of the Celtic periphery by the English core,4 a pale imitation of Irish and Scottish nationalisms,5 or simply a cultural and thus ineffectual movement. Most assume a homogenous Welsh nationalist movement, removed from its imperial and colonial context within Britain, and most Welsh nationalists sought to create the same. Yet analysis of Welsh nationalist publications makes it clear that Welsh nationalism, like similar nationalist movements across the globe, was riven with linguistic and regional divisions, tensions, and hierarchies based on gendered roles and categories. Examining

Welsh nationalist periodicals shows that within Britain, gender remained the primary means of signifying the power differential between Wales and England alike. The significant use of gender roles, i.e. evaluations of relative cultural masculinity and femininity, can be compared to other imperial relationships and nationalist movements such as those in India and elsewhere.

Although Welsh and English-language periodicals were primarily authored and published by men, a number of Welsh women wrote articles and fiction for them. Much of the writing by these women largely emphasized the rural, 'traditional', domestic, and maternal, depicting the ideal '' as one who labored at home and sacrificed, scrimping and saving her pennies, for the future of her sons, (not her daughters) and thus

4Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley: California, 1975): II.

''Murray G.H. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1999). 93 the future of the Welsh nation/' As this chapter will show, however, this idealized role did not reflect the authors' own participation in the intellectual and public project of constructing Welsh nationalism.

In addition, Welsh men faced conflicting messages about the benefits and significance of cultural difference in relation to their masculinity and their individual, cultural, and Welsh national identities. As a result Welsh nationalists became increasingly conservative and reactionary in response to any challenge to their promotion of "traditional" but actually mid-Victorian gender roles. This conservative advocacy of

"separate spheres" ideology allowed Welsh men, insecure about their 'Celtic' nature, to defensively assert Welsh men's, and thus the Welsh nation's, manhood, as determined by their dominant role as cool, controlled and rational patriarchs based on the English ideal.

The gendered qualities of the Welsh nation itself, as 'Mam Cymru,' remained fluid in relation to the rest of Britain and to Victorian culture. As reflected in both Welsh and

English- language periodical literature, Welsh nationalism took shape through a unique and conscious process of construction in which nationalists of both genders struggled to define and then assert the masculine and feminine qualities of the Celtic Welsh nation,

"Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions." in Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger eds.. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Canto, 1983): 1-14, and rest of volume. See Lewis Hywel, "Great Welshmen," in J. Hugh Edwards ed., Wales: A National Magazine 1, No. 6 (Octobcr, 1911): 301, for a description of the role of Welsh mothers in the raising of male Welsh patriots and statesmen. According to the author, the great actions of Welsh men were inspired by their mothers who encouraged them to attend Sunday School, imbued them with the sense of , encouraged them, and abstained from luxuries and often "the necessities of life in order that their sons should have the benefit of an education." As a result the author attributed the progress made by these men "to the memory of the greatest heroine that can ever be-a Welshman's mother." See also J. Hugh Edwards, "Wales: A Historical Aspect," Young Wales: a National Periodical for Wales X. No. 114 (July 1904): 131 -136., in which the editor also credits the importance of men's mothers in creating Welsh heroes. 94 educate and unite its population in the invented traditions and , and thus outline the roles and duties of for the future.

Femininity

The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an outburst of Welsh national expression in which concern about proper feminine attitudes and behavior remained a central topic of discussion by both male and female authors. Concerned about the rapid decline of the Welsh language and culture in the face of British-imposed

English- language schools, a number of Welsh including Owen M. Edwards,

Sarah Jane Rees, and J. Hugh Edwards, began editing and publishing Welsh and English- language periodicals for a Welsh audience. These periodicals provided a venue in which editors and their academic, primarily male, peers defined and represented 'Welsh culture', a construct shaped by their class and gender status. The editors of these periodicals sought to unite the Welsh people both politically and culturally within the parameters of a newly created Welsh national identity and imagined community imposed from the top levels of society downward.7 Periodicals such as Y Frythones (The Female

Briton) and Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman). Cymru (Wales), Cymru Fydd (Young

Wales), Young Wales, Wales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of

'Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism 2nd ed. Rev. (London: Verso, 1991 )• See also E.J. Hobsbawni, Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality. 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 10. Here Hobsbawni asserts that nations are 'dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analyzed from below, that is in term;. of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist." Hobsbawm critiques Ernest Gellner regarding his 'preferred perspective of modernization from above.' 95

Wales, and Wales: A National Magazine provided the media through which editors and contributors educated an increasingly literate population about acting as proper

Welshmen and Welshwomen. In contrast to previous decades, readers of these nationalist periodicals were confronted with increasingly contradictory and contested messages about what those 'Welsh' roles actually were.

All the editors of these periodicals aimed at educating the Welsh people in what it meant to be Welsh; however they emphasized different paths to that goal. Founded in

1895 and edited by J. Hugh Edwards, Young Wales acted as the English-language organ of the nationalist political movement Cymru Fydd (Yo>mg Wales). Its stated goals included supporting pro-Welsh legislation and "obtaining a national system of self government for Wales."8 Yet this was not only a political, Parliament-oriented movement. The magazine and the movement also emphasized the importance of Welsh language, literature, art, music, libraries and other Welsh cultural and historical institutions.'' Thomas E. Ellis. M.P. and founder of the Cymru Fydd (Young Wales)

Welsh movement, asserted that "Wales, by strenuous labor for national unity, will fit itself for enterprise among the nations."10 National unity and fitness would be

8J. Hugh Edwards, "Salutatory," Young Wales Volume 1, No. I. (January 1895): 1-2. "The 'Cymru Fydd' Movement," Young Wales Volume I, No. 1. (January 1895): 73.

"Ibid., p. 2.

'"Thomas Edward Ellis (1859-99) was Minister ot Parliament for Merioneth from 1886-1899 and chief Liberal Whip between 1894-1895. A graduate of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and New College, Oxford, Ellis championed Welsh interests during his tenure in Parliament, and along with George founded Cymru Fydd, in 1890. Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940 (London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1959): 214. See also Thomas E. Ellis, "The National Unity of Wales" Young Wales 11(1896): 155. For a general biography see Wyn Jones, Thomas Edward Ellis IS59-IS99 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986). 96 developed through education, a dominant theme in Welsh nationalism through the second

World War. R. D. Roberts elaborated upon this theme when he emphasized education as the path to institutional strength in the first issue of Owen M. Edwards's cultural publication Wales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales."

Roberts argued that it was time for Wales as a nation, personified as a mother, to begin

"educating her people to the highest pitch, not only intellectually, but morally and physically; Wales training her sons and daughters for the duties of citizenship and so developing her institutions to the highest possible state of efficiency."12 Gwilym O.

Griffith agreed, and argued that once educated, the population of Wales must perform identical duties to the nation, for "if Wales is to make headway as she ought, she must not try to row with one oar, she must have an enfranchised democracy of men and women. And she must have Self-Government."13 The editors of these periodicals, politicians and academics, focused on creating a culturally, physically, and politically educated electorate capable of running its own country, either within the structure of

Great Britain or on its own. Young Wales emphasized both the political and cultural in

11 Robert Davies Roberts, (1851-1911) advocated the importance of adult education throughout his career as a graduate of University College, London, and Clare College, Cambridge and as a lecturer at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and Cambridge University extension. He put these beliefs into practice by organizing 'summer schools/ and worked to establish public libraries and eventually the University of Wales. Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940, (London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1959): 878.

"Implicitly, mother Wales had not been doing her job correctly. R. D. Roberts, "A Welsh Movement," O.M. Edwards ed. Wales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales Volume I, No I. (May 1894): 5-8.

" Gwylim O Griffith, "Principles of Welsh National Idealism: Some Suggestions," Wales: A National Magazine Vol. 2, No. 9, (): 481. 97 its Welsh nationalist educational efforts.

In contrast, other periodicals emphasized cultural over political nationalism. In the first issue of Wales: A National Magazine, J. Hugh Edwards outlined his new periodical's cultural mission, seeking "to deepen our sense of nationality" but, in doing so , to

"acknowledge neither sect nor party" and devote itself to national unity.14 Writing seventeen years later in 1911, Edwards asserted that the British Parliament, had recognized the 'national individuality of the Welsh people,' by creating new Welsh institutions such as the University of Wales in 1893, and through the ceremonial

Investiture of the later that year. Edwards argued that these events showed that the 'dreary march through the wilderness is over,' that Wales had ceased being an ignored, peripheral, and subordinated population within the United Kingdom.15

The focus of his work and his publications aimed at sweeping aside geographic, linguistic, and artificial divisions within the Welsh popi lation in order to educate the citizenry about their culture, heritage and national duties within the British state.16

Edwards supported a Welsh nationalism that simply augmented a

l4J. Hugh Edwards ed. "The Month in Wales," Wales: A National Magazine. Volume I, No. 1, (May 1911): 50.

"Ibid. Also J. Hugh Edwards, "Salutory" Young Wales. Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1895): 1.

"'Indeed, that same year he wrote the following about the coming Investiture of the Prince of Wales and Royal visit to the Principality: "There is no part of the British Empire where there is a greater diffusion of democratic sentiment than in the Principality of Wales, nor is there a portion of the King's realm where loyalty to the is deeper or more fervid." J. Hugh Edwards, "The Month in Wales," Wales: A National Magazine Vol I, No. 2,(June 1911): 103. Even writing in 1901, Edwards had asserted that "In no part of the empire are their subjects so loyal and so law-biding as in the Principality of Wales. Her sons are to be found in the very front ranks in the varied realms of religion, education, literature, politics, commerce, and industry, - all contributing very materially to the welfare of the country and to the fabric of the empire." J. Hugh Edwards, "Wales Month by Month," Young Wales Vol. 7, No. 73 (): 24. 98 once the British state acknowledged the principles of Home Rule for its constituent parts.

He was not a separatist, hut a supporter of Home Rule for Wales.17 Thus, because the development of the British school system in Wales required Anglicizatior, English and

Welsh-speaking nationalist intellectuals sought to combat that process by addressing

newly-literate English-speaking residents of Wales who wished to overcome their

"backwardness." He argued that the Welsh people should be proud of the age and, newly

acknowledged by the British government, significance of their Welsh language and

culture. They should read his periodical which sought to teach them about their own

heritage, put aside petty differences between north and south, industrialized and rural, in

order to assert their differences from English culture and take their place as equal partners

within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Echoing this theme, Owen M. Edwards, editor of Wales: A National Magazine for

the English Speaking Parts of Wales, argued that his non-political magazine could "foster

i e literary awakening which is evidently spreading to English Wales" and thereby "bring

the influence of Welsh literature to act upon the thought of English Wales."18 According

17 John Hugh Edwards and others hoped to benefit from the agitatior of the Irish regarding the acquisition of Gladstone to the principle of Home Rule, and thus follow in the footsteps of the Irish once it was granted to Ireland. Throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century the Irish Parliamentary Party under Isaac Butt ?.nd then Charles Stewart Parnell, used their block of votes to convince a government to support the passing of a Home Rule Bill in Parliament. Liberal Prime Minister converted to supporting the principle of Home rtule, splitting the Liberal Party. A number of Home Rule bills were submitted to Parliament during the following decades, but did not pass due to a number of factors until 1912. The outbreak o> the first World War in 1914 delayed the implementation of the Bill until after the War.

l8Owen M. Edwards, "Introduction to Volume One," O.M. Edwards ed. '.Vales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales Volume 1, No 1. (May 1894): iii-iv. Edwards intended to "give English Wales of best Welsh prose works." Edwards was already editor of the Welsh language periodical Cymru, the source of these prose works in Welsh. By the end of the Wales's run in 1897, he had made serious progress toward his goal. Edwards (1858-1920) published several other 99 to Edwards, Welsh-speaking, agricultural, lower-class but literature-loving 'Welsh

Wales' provided a model for all Welsh citizens to emulate. Edwards, fellow of Lincoln

College, Oxford, asserted that the Welsh people were divided into two classes, those striving to educate their countrymen, and those striving to acquire that education.

Notably Edwards's construction of the Welsh people idealized everyone in Wales as both active and united in mobilizing around their Welsh identity and culture. He identified the

"educators" as belonging to "the enlightened aristocracy and squirearchy, clergymen and ministers of religion, doctors, bankers, the leaders of the various industries, tradesmen who travel." In this class, Edwards asserted, there was "no difference between English and Welsh Wales ... all these know English, most of them know Welsh, all take an

interest in Welsh literature.'"9 In contrast the "educatees," primarily from the lower class, according to Edwards, was "composed of Welshmen who are confined by their occupations to one place, and who see little of the world, - farmers, farm labourers,

quarrymen, tin-platemen, small tradesmen, artisans and colliers." In his eyes this latter

class of laborers demonstrated the "greatest difference between the English and the Welsh

parts of Wales" because despite the higher class status of English speaking Wales, "as far

as culture and thoughtfulness are concerned ... English Wales is at least half a century

periodicals including Y Lienor, Heddyw, and Cymru V Plant, the last for children. In addition to his publishing work, Edwards sat as Minister of Parliament for Merioneth between 1899-1900, and was appointed the first chief inspector of schools under the new Welsh Education Department in 1907. He was knighted in !916, and died in 1920.

l9Owen M. Edwards, "Introduction to Volume 1," Wales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales 1, No. 1 (May 1894): iii-iv. 100 behind Welsh Wales."20 His assertion of lower class cultural "superiority" was based on

Edwards's contact with the Welsh- literate public through the publication of his Welsh- language publication Cymru. He argued that Welsh working men, the 'rustic' men of letters, demanded longer and more thoughtful articles on history and literature:

in English Wales this thoughtful lower class is most entirely wanting. The peasant poet, the agricultural labourer with a well-stocked library, the farmer who writes local history as if he had been trained in a Modern History school, the stone-breaker who knows how much Islwyn owes to Wordsworth, and Glasynys to Byron, - these are all in Welsh Wales.21

Edwards constructed an idealized "Welsh Wales," identified as a male, lower class, isolated, home-bound, Welsh- reading, public as the core of the Welsh nation and inheritors of its Welsh culture.22

As editors, J. Hugh Edwards and Owen M. Edwards intended their English

language periodicals to educate 'English Wales' in Welsh history and culture, and thus

make them equal to the idealized, romanticized levels of'Welsh Wales.' 'Welsh Wales' constituted a fairly gender hierarchy in which Welsh women represented the

'traditional' and Welsh men maintained control over their Welsh women as a sign of their

level of 'civilization' and worthiness to participate in the British Empire. These constructions of "Welsh Wales" presented in these periodicals would bring the

"influence of Welsh literature to act upon the thought of English Wales ... a purifying.

20Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22Owen M. Edwards, "Introduction to Volume 1," Wales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales 1, no 1. (May 1894): iii-iv. 101 ennobling, strengthening influence."23 That literature, and its accompanying editorial content, emphasized They sought to combat the Anglophone and "modern" influence of the 1870 English-language school system, which had increased and upward mobility for many young Welshmen, but in their view had distanced the population from the Welsh language and culture. Thus the articles in their publications repeatedly represented a happy, virtuous, patriarchal, working-class Welsh populace, unaffected by modern industrial woes, desirous of education, and eager to read their own literature in their own language.24 These representations were intended to unify the newly literate, but regionally and economically disparate Welsh population, both English and Welsh- speaking, within an imagined community based on a 'characteristically Welsh' literature.

Although these periodicals disseminated that culture via the English language, they espoused the hope that the process at least kept Welsh culture and literature alive amongst the entire population. The Welsh language could be learned later.25 As O.M. Edwards stated,

2,J. , "Quarrying at Bethesda," O.M. Edwards ed. Wales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales I, no. 4 ( 1894): 166.

24Ibid. In this article on the history of the Slate quarries over 150 years the author J. Owen Jones from Bala, argued that "It is difficult to find any working man who has more leisure time than the quarrymen of Carnarvonshire... He spends his leisure hours on the whole to good profit. You may, here and there find a number lounging lazily, , thinking about nothing, or engaged in a conversation which could not in any way redound to their credit either intellectually or morally. But these are exceptions. Oftener you may find half-a-dozen, more or less, eagerly engaged in singing, preparing for some musical contest at an Eisteddfod, or from mere fondness for music. But let us enter one of the cabins in which the men eat. Dinner being over, a man says he had the Genedl [Nation], and passes it on to Mr. So and So, who is par excellence the reader in that cabin. Another day Yr Herald, Y Faner, or Y Celt may be the paper; and in some huts, the reader happens to be conversant enough with English to read off an English article into fairly good Welsh."

:sIndeed, the first Welsh language primary school after 1870 was founded by the son of Owen M. Edwards, Ifan ap Owen Edwards (1895-1970) in Aberystwyth, but not until 1939. 102

It is to be hoped that, some day, the farmer will be as fond of reading as the Lleyn farmer, the working man of the Montgomery borders will be as intelligent as the working man of Cardigan or Merioneth, that the peasant of eastern will be as intelligent as the peasant of Arvon or the Vale of Towy. Why should the land of and George Herbert be less fond of literature than the land of Islwyn and Ceiriog?26

According to Edwards, once reading of Welsh literature and familiarity with Welsh culture had benefitted the male population of English Wales, Welsh literature could then benefit England and the rest of the world. Edwards argued that "To give the best thought of Wales to either nation [England and the World] is a noble work." Rather than blind imitation, Edwards asserted that Wales should make its own unique contribution to

English literature following the example of Scotland and America, that "Our aim should be higher, to give to the world a Sir Walter Scott or a Nathaniel Hawthorne."27 Rather than feel insecure about Welsh culture in the face of the overwhelmingly hegemonic within Britain, Edwards called on the Welsh people to take pride in their difference and make their own unique cultural contributions to the world.

While many Welsh people might have appreciated such sentiments, many others found these messages unrelated to the social and economic realities of their lives.

Staving off the influx of the English language and the resulting decline in monoglot

Welsh speakers meant little to the tradespeople who needed to speak English in order to find jobs in the increasingly popular seaside resorts of Aberystwyth and on the

:"Owen M. Edwards. "Introduction to Volume I," Wales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales 1, no. I (May 1894): iii-iv.

27lbid. 103

Cambrian coast during the late nineteenth century. Maids, railway workers and hoteliers remained indifferent to cultural preservation issues, and became fluent in English as soon as they arrived in such areas.28 By the 1890s inhabitants of Cardiff, considered the , found themselves in 'a town where the monoglot Welshman is practically unknown.'29 Repeated influxes of English and other foreign immigrants speakers into the economically booming coal mining valleys of South Wales overwhelmed the cohesive communities of the Welsh speaking core of the Cardiff.

Welsh speakers had little opportunity to use Welsh in daily communication, nor did it hold any real prestige. In many areas people considered that speaking Welsh ensured low social mobility.30 Edwards and others' rhapsodies about their 'rustic men of letters' in the agricultural, Welsh-speaking heartland had little relevance to the situation in industrial South Wales .

Tensions

In spite of their rhetoric of cultural homogeneity, the periodicals in question remained far from monolithic or homogenous in their representations of Welsh culture.31

28Geraint H. Jenkins, Gwenfair Parry and Mari A. Williams, "More people speak it than ever before," in Gwenfair Parry and Mari A. Williams ed„ The Welsh Language and the 1891 Census (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999): 454-482.

29Western Mail (14 April 1891) as cited in fii 73, Ibid. p. 481.

30Jbid. See also Geraint H. Jenkins, "The Historical Background to the 1891 Census," in the same volume, p. 19 (1-30).

"Rev. Richard , B. A. "Our ,'illages," Young Wales 1, No. 1 (January 1895): 5-8. For example, the villages and inhabitants of Welsh Wales so idealized by O.M. Edwards were discussed by the Reverend Richard Hughes in Young Wales as 'wretched, unhealthy dwelling places' which could only be 104

Even the same periodical often presented conflicting assertions and models of behavior for Welsh men and women to emulate. Tensions within and between these periodicals emerge most obviously when examining their discourses about gender. Although primarily authored and published by men, Young Wales featured regular columns aimed at different categories of women including "Notes on the Work of Welsh Liberal

Women," '"Progress of Women in Wales," and "The Women of Wales Circle".32 Often these columns were edited by women, including Mrs. Wynford Philipps and Miss Alis M.

Williams,33 whom editor J. Hugh Edwards in 1901 charged with responsibility for a "new feature, which will be devoted to the review and advocacy of all such matters as appertain to the activities and welfare of the women of Wales."34 In addition to these regular columns by women, special articles by male authors but aimed at women appeared frequently.35 Because of its political mission, Young Wales addressed contemporary debates about women's suffrage and equal rights of citizenship for women more directly

improved by 'the slow growth in habits of thrift and cleanliness, by the spread of a fuller knowledge of sanitary laws, and by a feeling of deeper sympathy and help between different classes of the community'

32 Young Wales, Volumes 1-lX, 1895-1903.

"Miss Alice Mailt Williams (1867-1950) in addition to being a novelist, was an early feminist and supporter of Plaid Cymru. She wrote two major novels including One of the royal Celts (1889) and A Maid of Cymru (1901) in partnership with her sister Gwenfireda under the pen name, "The Dau Wynne," Deborah C. Fisher ed., Who's Who in Welsh History (Swansea: Christopher Davies, 1997): 154.

34J. Hugh Edwards, "Wales: Month by Month,"Young Wales 7, no. 73 (January 1901): 23-24.

" Examples of the former include: 'Un o'r Ddu Wynne,' "Patriotism and the Women of Cymru," Young Wales 4, no. 39 (March 1898): 115.; "Women's Place in Fiction," Young Wales 3, no. 34 (October 1897): 232-33. "Work of Women Guardians in Wales," Young Wales 2 (1896): 115-118. Articles by men aimed at women include K. Lentzner, Ph.D. "Woman or Man? Which is Woman to Be?," Young Wales III (December 1897): 232-233. 105 than other periodicals under discussion.36 In the opening volume Mrs. Wynford Philipps stated that, "the leading women of Wales" committed themselves to "obtaining] better laws for women" and persuading all women to take advantage of "opportunities for education and ennobling social service which had opened to them by the Pioneers." She encouraged Welsh women to serve on Boards of Guardians, relief agencies, and County and Parish Councils.37 Later columns reported on the conventions of the Women's

Liberal Association and Cymru Fydd Society (Future Wales), the campaign for

Disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales, and Women as Poor Law Guardians, as well as raising a question and inviting readers join an open discussion regarding "In what special departments the attention of women is particularly needed."38 The need to educate all women, preparing them for the duties of citizenship and life, remained a dominant theme in Young Wales throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth * centuries. One columnist reported that:

The world is ready, if somewhat reluctantly, to acquiesce in the fact that there are exceptional women, but it must also accept the fact that there are average women, and on the average woman depends the welfare of the world- just as far as she chooses to support the higher ideal to which some more far-seeing sister has uplifted...39

16"Mrs. Wynford Philipps and Miss Elisabeth Philipps eds., "Progress of Women in Wales: News of the Suffrage Movement," Young Wales 2, no. 24 (December 1896): 294-295. In this column the editors reported on several speakers from the U.S.A. speaking in Birmingham, as well as events in and elsewhere. Notably, no delegates represented Wales at the Birmingham meeting, and the column ended with Mrs. Phillips asking the women of Wales and England to awake and assert themselves regarding suffrage.

"Mrs. Wynford Philipps, "Notes on the Work of Welsh Liberal Women," Young Wales 1 no. 1, (January 1895): 17-19.

38"Work of Women Guardians in Wales," Young Wales 2 (1896): 115-118.

""Progress of Women in Wales," Young Wales 2. (1896): 66-67. 106

Thus the elite women of Young Wales called their elite sisters to their duty, the duty to lead their less-enlightened, working-class sisters into full citizenship of Wales and the world. Their definition of citizenship, however, did not imply suffrage, which they continued to equate with property ownership and householder status. Increasingly, they argued, the duties of citizenship took place in the home as mothers prepared sons to be future male heads of households.40

Some authors, however, felt that citizenship for women also required economic equality. As one 1897 columnist stated, "If I were asked what is our duty in life to-day, my answer would be - to teach our women the necessity of being able to do at least some one thing well." Acknowledging that women were unprepared for citizenship, the author argued that, "We send our boys out into the world fully equipped to fight the battle of life, but we allow our girls to be brought up in as helpless a manner as knowing a little about half a dozen things can possibly make them." In one of the most radical statements found

in any of these magazines, the anonymous author argued, "Let us not rest content until every girl holds in her own hand a bread winning weapon, for the economic position of women must attain its proper level before it is possible for them to take their places on that high platform we would fair see them occupy."41 This call for middle-class women to become breadwinners equal to men acknowledged the economic realities of life for

^"Angela V. John and Claire Eustance, "Shared histories - differing identities: introducing masculinities, male support and women's suffrage," in John and Eustance eds., The Men's Share? Masculinities, Male Support and Women's Suffrage in Britain, 1890-1920 (London: Routledge, 1997): 1- 37.

4'"Progress of Women in Wales," Young Wales 3, No. 25 (January 1897): 19-20. 107 most women in poor or industrial Wales, and the financial dependence embodied within

Victorian gender roles in which proper women were isolated within the home. It ignored, however, the realities that most Welsh women were not helpless and unable to earn their own bread, even though Welsh women participated in the formal labor market at significantly lower rates than .42 At the same time, the author's use of the term 'high platform' indicates that the notion of placing middle-class women on a pedestal was not rejected, despite women's possible earning power and the sense of collective identity and self created in the workplace, whatever that might be. Calling for change she argued that, "It is then, and only then, that there will dawn the new, and better era for the womanhood, and let me add, the manhood of our country .. ."43 As this statement reflects, women columnists did not simply reiterate Victorian middle class domesticity; instead they reinforced the use of women's status as a yardstick to judge alleged 'inferior' societies' levels of civilization and the manliness of their men.44 The

42Angela John, "Introduction," in Angela V. John ed., Our Mothers' Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History 1830-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1991): 1 (1-16); L. J. Williams, Dot Jones, "Women at work in nineteenth century Wales", Llafur, 3, No. 3 (1982): 23. On the ability of working-class women to support themselves through the "informal" labor market, and the use of neighborhood support networks not reliant on men see Ellen Ross, '"Fierce Questions and Taunts': Married Life in Working-Class London," Feminist Studies 8 (Fall 1982); Ellen Ross, '"Survival Networks: Women's Neighbourhood Sharing in London before ," History Workshop 15 (Spring 1983); and Ellen Ross, Love & Toil: Motherhood in Gutcast London, 1870-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History Workshop V (Spring 1978): 9-66; Leonore DavidofT, "Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick," Feminist Studies V., No. 1 (1979): 86-141.

""Progress of Women in Wales," Young Wales 3, no. 25 (January 1897): 19-20.

'"See Chapter 1 above, also see Jodie Kreider, "Degraded and Benighted": Gendered Constructions of Wales in the Empire, ca. 1847," North American Journal of Welsh Studies Volume 2, No. 1 (Winter 2002): Online at http://spruce.flint.umich.edu/~ellisis/VolTwo.html Uma Chakravarti, "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past," in Sangari and Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in h.dian Colonial History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Pres, 108 column called to women, "Let us be ourselves, but not living for ourselves, but rather for the good that we can do."45 A few Welsh women thus encouraged other Welsh women to transgress hegemonic Victorian gender roles, to educate themselves, develop marketable skills and become 'bread winners' specifically to advance Welsh men, Welsh nationalism, and eventually the Welsh nation. Yet only the nationalist cause, and not women's autonomy or liberation justified such actions.

Yet the same periodical presented conflicting advice to Welsh women. While many authors, both men and women, acknowledged that women's service and activism benefitted the nation, and thus sought to mobilize them, these authors limited where that activism should take place. R.D. Roberts argued that "Wales must educate her people to the highest pitch, not only intellectually, but morally and physically; Wales training her sons and daughters for the duties of citizenship ..." Here again an author personified Wales as an incompetent mother who needed to be taught how to raise her children correctly. This education remained highly gender-specific. For example, another author outlined ideas for a hypothetical meeting to "call forth the best energies of

Welshmen and Welshwomen all the world over" based on the need to "focus and stimulate national aspirations." The proposed program for men included five lectures each on Welsh history, science, education, and religion. It also mentioned "special talks

1990): 27-87. See Mrinalini Sinha, "Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late 19th Century Bengal," in Michael S. Kimmel ed., Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity. (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1987): 217-231; and Mrinilini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' in the late nineteenth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

45Progress of Women in Wales," Young Wales 3, no. 25 (January 1897): 19-20. 109

(rather than formal lectures) for women on subjects such as sanitation, cookery, health, nursing etc.," thus segregating women from participating in the larger formally political issues most considered central to Welsh nation building and culture.46 Notably choral and travel narratives were to be open to both sexes.

Welsh women too relegated women's participation to the domestic sphere. An

1897 letter from Mrs. John Davies of asserted that while there were "numerous opportunities of a public nature, where women could render more effective service than men," she strongly disapproved of women speaking in public, and most especially from the Church pulpit. Mrs. Davies, however, argued that ability rather than social position or family connections should be used to assign opportunities for "women's special work."47 She felt all women had a duty to contribute to Welsh society on an equal footing with other women but not men. Mrs Davies's emphasis on difference and on difference-based feminism was almost universally shared within the nationalist press as the century turned.48 In 1897 Mr. K. Lentzner, Ph.D., argued that "It is only family life and higher civilization that have emancipated women." He asserted that "Progress requires constant differentiation, and the line of demarcation is the development of each

46R.D. Roberts, "A Welsh Movement," O.M. Roberts ed. Wale:,: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales 1, no. I (May 1894): 7.

47Mrs. S. M. Saunders ed. "The Women of Wales' Circle," Young Wales 3 (1897): 90-91.

48Difference-based feminism originated prior to, but rose to prominence after the First World War. One of the main advocates of this version of feminism, Eleanor Rathbone based the search for 'real equality' of women around sexual difference, arguing that women had different needs than men and thus needed reforms aiding women as mothers. This was a reaction against earlier proponents of women seeking to make women equal with men, at least in terms of opportunity and based on the concept of a common humanity of me and women. See Harold L. Smith, "British Feminism in the 1920s," in Harold L. Smith ed., British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990): 47-65. 110 sex in its special functions, each being true to the highest ideal for itself, which is not that the woman should be a man, or the man a woman."49 Lentzner's emphasis on greater differentiation between gender roles as an indication of higher levels of civilization and development echoed prominent thinkers such as James Mill who earlier in the nineteenth century used Victorian separation of the domestic and public sphere to judge other civilizations such as those in India wanting; its absence helped justify British imperial rule in the sub-continent.50 Lentzer implied that increasing this differentiation on the

English model would help legitimize Wales as a nation alongside others. As the years passed the pages of Young Wales increasingly defined and located women's role as Welsh citizens firmly within the home, as mothers and the keepers of tradition, moving away from earlier claims to female suffrage and economic equality.

Yet this emphasis on Welsh women's domestic duties was often contradicted by the presence of unmarried women writing articles and stories to contribute to these magazines. Writers such as Miss Alis Mailt Williams, Miss Gladdish, and others were usually elite, educated, and unmarried, although extremely active in nationalist circles.

Indeed, as a member, Miss Alis Mailt Williams continued to publicly and financially support The Welsh Nationalist Party well into the interwar period.51 Moreover in their

49K. Lentzner, Ph.D., "Woman or Man? Which is Woman to Be?" Young Wales 2, no. 36 (December 1897): 232-33.

50James Mill, The History of British India in Six Volumes. 3rd ed. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, & Joy, 1826). See also Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity (Manchester: Manchester University Pi sss, 1995) for a discussion of the use of women's status to judge the nature, and the masculinity of other cultures and nations in comparison to that of Britain in the nineteenth century.

5lJane Aaron, "A national seduction: Wales in nineteenth-century women's writing," New Welsh Review 7/8 No. 27 (Winter 1994-1995): 38. See also NLW Archif Plaid Cymru; and footnote 29 above. Ill roles as editors, these women occasionally featured in their columns articles on exemplary women who did not focus on domestic patriotic roles. For example a 1901 article on Miss L. Gwendoline Williams identified her as the "descendant of an family settled for generations in ." Having established Miss Williams's lineage as "authentically" Welsh, the author ignored the contradictory implications of Miss

Williams having trained at Wimbledon Art college and the School of Art, South

Kensington, London where she won medals for her sculpture. The column then reported that "Miss Williams has been settled now for a few years in a studio of her own in that home of London artists- Holland Park"52 Miss Williams deviated substantially from

Welsh women's prescribed domestic role, living alone as an unmarried woman in a

London suburb rather than living in rural Wales as a mother, busy taking care of her home. As late as 1914 J. Hugh Edwards, editor of Wales: A National Magazine writing about the proclamation of the upcoming National Eisteddfod, noted that:

one of the most interesting features ... was the presence of Cranogwen (Miss Rees), who was one of the successful competitors at the Eisteddfod held at Aberystwyth just fifty years ago. Her presence, after a lapse of half a century, was not only an interesting and even unique link with memories of the past, but was also welcome evidence of the continued virility and vitality of one who has been the most active and gifted of the fair daughters of Wales.53

"Miss Alis Williams, "The Women of Wales' Circle." Young Wales 7, no. 78 (June 1901): 137.

5}J. Hugh Edwards, "The Month in Wales," Wales: A National Magazine 6, no. 39 (JuJy 1914): 277-80. 112

Here Edwards imbued Jane Rees54 with masculine qualities of virility and vitality which justified her status as a prominent figure, yet at the same time her body and presence was itself represented as a link between past and present. Miss Williams, Sarah

Jane Rees as "Cranogwen," and other women who contributed to these periodicals did not

fil Hie mold that they nought to impose on other women. Still unmarried, engaged in

lite, lry activities at various eisteddofoddau, writing articles, editing periodicals, their pictures in magazines, these women became semi-public figures rather than limiting themselves, or allowing themselves to be limited to, the domestic household and the demands of matrimony and motherhood. Male editors did not hesitate in allowing them to participate in these periodicals, perhaps because the message they disseminated within

their public activities remained so conservative and domestic. Their own nationalist activities however, allowed them to transgress the hegemonic gender roles they sought to

impose on others, notably their fellow Welsh women.55

54Sarah Jane Rees, pen-name Cranogwen, (1839-1916), won her first notable success as a poet at the Aberystwyth national eisteddfod, 1865, winning against Islwyn and Ceiriog. Also a public speaker, lecturer, and preacher, between 1878-1891 Cranogwen began and edited Y Frythones, a Welsh journal intended to be devoted to the interests of women, but in fact became the mouthpiece of the Welsh Temperan"; movement. In 1901 she founded "Undeb Dirwestol Merched y De\ the South Wales Women's Temperance Movement. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940 (London: HonouraLi. Society of Cymmrodorion, 1959): 829. See also Sian Rhiannon Williams, "The True 'Cymraes': Images of Women in Women's Nineteenth-Century Welsh Periodicals," in Angela V. John, ed., Our Mothers' Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History 1830-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991): 69-91.

"Such contradictions between the reality of women advocating the separation of spheres and women's domestic role in the home yet not observing that role themselves occurred in a number of nationalist movements. The nationalist movement inevitably reacted against their presence as threatening to the nationalist cause and removed them from the public sphere. See Claudia Koonz, "The Competition for a Women's Lebensraum 1928-1934," in Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985):218-19; Margaret Ward, Unmanageable revolutionaries: Women and Irish nationalism (London: Pluto, 1983): 2, 248-249. 113

This freedom of action on the part of elite nationalist women did not last. By the turn of the century, new emphasis on tradition and the Welsh language supplanted political activities and discussions in the women's sections of Young Wales. The article announcing the marriage of T. E. Ellis, M.P. and founder of Cymru Fydd, emphasized the

'Cymric' nature of the marriage, including invitations and ceremony in Welsh and a wedding ring of Welsh . The bride's name was never mentioned; instead of a person or activist on her own merits, in this periodical she represented only a symbol of

'Welshness' in relation to her husband and other male relatives. Rather than discuss her personally, the author emphasized the bride's lineage as a descendant of three prominent

Welsh Calvinistic Methodist preachers, stating, "Those who know Mrs. Ellis know how thoroughly in touch she is with the noble traditions of her distinguished ancestors and with the aspirations and ideals of our nation."56 As the early political emphasis of

Young Wales eroded in the late 1890s, Welsh nationalists, both male and female, represented Welsh women less as active agents and potential citizens, and increasingly as the symbolic link between the idealized past and the anticipated future of the Welsh nation. Many female Welsh authors argued that women should not pursue individual aspirations, but the good of the nation and its future male citizens.

Welsh women writing in Young Wales increasingly accused each other of selfishness and failure to use their influence for their 'country's weal.' Prominent Welsh women authors of Welsh and English fiction, sisters Alis Mailt and Gwenffredda

56"The Marriage of Mr. T. E. Ellis, M.P.," Young Wales 4, no. 42 (June 1898): 143. 114

Williams, writing under the pen name 'The Dau Wynne' addressed this issue in their article, "Patriotism and the Women of Cymru."57 They argued that the time was appropriate to revive the old traditional, complementary, and domestic occupations for women, the spinning and weaving of Welsh flannels, "knitting, carving, and any other home work." This would keep them busy, and teach Welshwomen the basis and virtues of patriotism, which the authors asserted that most Welsh women had not learned or cultivated. Recommendations such as these illustrate the class status disparity between the authors and their readers. This was not a call for Welsh women to enter the economic workforce, but to occupy themselves, unwaged, within the domestic sphere. The authors accused Welshwomen of having, "banished an ancient Celtic tongue - their mother- tongue - the tongue of saints and heroes and , from the drawing-room, the school­ room, and the nursery."58 Not only did Welsh women bring up their children in "perfect ignorance of the history, poetry, and legends of their own country," they had "allowed the picturesque national dress to die out, though ladies at foreign courts take pride in wearing their national dress on gala days."59 These accusations by the Wynne sisters

"'Uno'r Ddau Wynne', "Patriotism and the Women of Cymru," Young Wales 4, no. 39 (March 1898): 115. For more discussion of the Wynne sisters see, Jane Aaron, "A national seduction: Wales in nineteenth-century women's writing. The 1994 Lecture," New Welsh Review 17, Number 27 (Winter '94-95): 31-38.

58'Uno'r Ddau Wynne', "Patriotism and the Women of Cymru" Young Wales 4, no. 39 (March 1898): 115.

59Ibid. See also "Welsh Holiday Resorts: Aberystwyth," Wales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales 2, no. 18 (October 1895): 457-60. Women's 'national* clothing continued to signify cultural difference throughout a number of periodicals. One author writing about the resort and university town of Aberystwyth noted that its's streets held "a throng of country people whose smiling faces and vivacious demeanour strike the English tourist as something entirely foreign... If you ask me where most Welsh characteristics are seen, - religious fervor, good Welsh, sincere hospitality, even the tall women's hat, -1 would answer that they are best seen at Aberystwyth." This was true not only in Wales. 115 echoed the arguments of Lady Llanover from half a century earlier discouraging women from following the fashion trends, which she argued endangered the health of their family, and thus the Welsh nation.60 Moreover, not only had Welsh women allowed their

"'picturesque national dress" to die out, but this meant that they did not live up to the example set by the women of other countries, i.e. they were not true patriots, they were apathetic, and had no national pride! The authors then called for the "Wives and daughters of Cymru! - of the pure, native blood" to "shake off the apathy of an inglorious past, and show the world of to-day - the future, that the heroic virtue is not dead in you, has only been asleep." They recommended that Welsh women demonstrate pride in their culture, language, and nation rather than accept the judgements of those who deemed the population immoral, the language dead, and the nation conquered, subordinated, and impossible to revive within the hegemonic state of Britain. Even female authors increasingly identified and judged other Welshwomen only as inadequate and unpatriotic wives, daughters and mothers rather than as equal Welsh citizens.

Working-class Welshwomen who wanted their children to be educated in English, and thus become upwardly mobile, and middle class mothers who regarded English as the

language of 'civility', were chastised by the nationalist intelligentsia for their unpatriotic

Sixteen years later Breton women and their clothing continued to represent signposts of cultural difference, unlike Breton men. An article originally published in the Celtic Review and reprinted by J.H. Edwards noted that during a visit to a 'picturesque Breton Village" each of the region had its own distinct for women. Thus each villager could tell each women's district by her cap. See Wales: A National Magazine I, No. 5 (September 1911): 225.

6

Fifty years previously the editor of Y Gymraes had begged Welsh women, "Mothers of

Wales! speak Welsh to your children. It is your careless neglect, and your heart's betrayal that will be the cause if your inarticulate progeny do not utter their first words in the language which God gave our forefathers when the world was young."63 As discussed in the previous chapter, such arguments resulted from the furor over the publication of the

Blue Book Reports of 1847, and the passionate arguments of Lady Llanover, based primarily on the importance of the Welsh language as the language of religion, morality, and women's role as the preservers of the past.

By the 1890s this focus on the need to preserve the Welsh language featured strongly in constructions of Welsh nationalist identity as different from that of the

English, and permeated the periodicals of the time. This occurred in large part due to an

61 This was occurring later in the 20lh century as well. See Mari A. Williams, "Women and the Welsh Language in the Industrial Valleys of South Wales 1914-1945," in Geraint H. Jenkins and Mari A. Williams eds. 'Let's Do Our Best for the Ancient TongueThe Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000): 137-180.

62Ibid„ 148-153.

w"Famau Cymru! siaradwch Gymraeg wrth eich plant. Eich esgeulusdod beius chwi, a brad eich calon fydd yr achos, osna bydd i'ch hiliogaeth floesg swnio eu geiriau cyntaf yn yr iaith a roddodd Duw i'n henfiaid yn moreu y byd." 'Gwenllian Gwent' in YGymraes Vol I. No. 1 (1850): 10. See Chapter 2 above for a discussion of the 1850-51 periodical Y Gymraes ( The Welshwoman) and the role of Lady Llanover in asserting a specific view of'Welsh' behavior for women based on Welsh 'traditions' she invented herself. See also Rosemary Jones, 'Separate Spheres'?: Women, Language and Respectability in Victorian Wales," in Geraint H. Jenkins, ed. The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801-1911 (Cardiff: Wales, 2000): 198. 117 increased awareness of the decline of the language and the trend towards Anglicization felt throughout the valleys of South Wales in the later nineteenth century. This also resulted in the creation of a large number of societies devoted to the preservation and strengthening of the language.64 Scholars of the time continually reported the degree of decline in Welsh-speaking in the home.65 Miss Alis Williams, editor of the "Women of

Wales' Circle" after 1901, informed her readers that "the burning question of the day for us, daughters of Wales, is the language question.''''66 Arguing that the only way for the

Welsh nation to preserve its individuality among its neighbors was through its language, she stated that, "Woman is paramount in the home ... sadly, it must be confessed that in the past the Welshwoman of culture and refinement systematically tabooed her hen iaith

[old language]" Miss Williams noted that women's unpatriotic refusal to speak Welsh and teach it to their children continued and needed to end. She entreated readers to "Let the modern Welshwoman spare some of that superabundant energy.. .to the raising of the grand old mother-tongue to its ancient place of honour and affection in the home."67

According to the women columnists of Young Wales, Welshwomen did not act' Welshy'

MFor an in depth discussion of the various Welsh language societies of the early twentieth century see Marion Loftier, "The Welsh Language Movement in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: An Exercise in Quiet ," in Geraint H. Jenkins and Mari A. Williams eds., 'Let's Do Our Best for the Ancient TongueThe Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century (Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2000): 181-215.

65See Mari A. Williams, "Women and the Welsh Language in the Industrial Valleys of South Wales 1914-1945," in Geraint H. Jenkins and Mari A. Williams eds., 'Let's Do Our Best for the Ancient Tongue': The Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000): 153-55.

^Miss Alis M. Williams, "The Women of Wales' Circle," Young Wales 7, no. 78 (June 1901): 137.

67lbid. 118 enough; it was time for them to adopt the Welsh language and a proper domestic nationalist outlook as defined by Lady Llanover half a century previously and revived in the pages of Young Wales, Cymru, and other publications in the late nineteenth century.

They were not just charged with the responsibility of maintaining the past; the future of their sons and the nation depended upon them.

By the early years of the 20th century Welshwomen's participation in the publication of Young Wales lessened, while the journal's message becoming increasingly conservative, focused on women's role within the home. Despite its origins as the voice of a political nationalist movement in support of women's suffrage, by the end of its print run in 1904 Young Wales generally abandoned its support of equal political rights for half of the Welsh nation. Citizens became synonymous with male heads of households, despite the set by the Isle of Man which had extended the parliamentary franchise to female propertied householders in 1881.68 Significantly Welsh women authors participated in this process of jettisoning women's suffrage by constructing and representing women's active public role in the Welsh nation as destructive. Instead they asserted the need for women to become devoted mothers raising their children with the proper language skills and nationalist outlook. Women were entreated to serve the Welsh nation publicly in traditional feminine roles as educators, nurses, Temperance Workers and in maintaining Welsh traditions. When, in 1903 Miss C. M. Gladdish took over the column "The Interests of Women in Wales", her list of Welsh Women's public interests

68Angela V. John and Claire Eustace, "Shared histories-differing identities: Introducing masculinities, male support and women's suffrage," in The Men's Share? Masculinities. Male Support and Women's Suffrage in Britain, 1890-1920 (London: Routledge, 1997): 8-9. 119 included no mention of the suffrage issue.69 Aimed at "those whose lives do not bring them much into contact with their fellow-countrymen" while seeking to stimulate greater effort in those already active in the public weal of Wales, Miss Gladdish encouraged women to get involved in seeking adequate representation for women on educational authorities; to join the Primrose League and Women's Liberal Association-attached to the

Conservative and Liberal Parties respectively. Notably she directed Welsh women to get involved in the newly founded Liberal Social Council which sought as its primary goal

"to promote personal and social relations between all Liberals."70 Welsh women could help with the entertaining and social side of politics, i.e. hosting social events for the party. Although she actively directed women to get involved in these organizations, on the subject of actual political involvement she took a more passive stance, merely hinting that it might be interesting to ask some successful women speakers about the secret of their success. She noted that "all women, whatever their creed or opinion, are deeply interested" in nursing, and that temperance was of special interest to her readers because

"the women of Wales are alive to the sense of their responsibilities, and are ready to place those special qualifications which they derive from their innate womanly qualities at their country's command." She insisted that

the influence of women, especially in the direction of forming public opinion, is great, and it behoves [sic] us to see that it is always directed towards the promotion of "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good

6"Miss C. M. Gladdish. B.A. "The Interests of Women in Wales: A Foreword," Young Wales 9, (1903): 63-64.

70lbid. 120

report."

Having emphasized these traditional, feminine, moral, domestic roles for women,

Gladdish put a Welsh spin on her column by directing women towards supporting the

Welsh Industries Association, aimed at the encouragement of Welsh arts and crafts.71 She argued that this organization "has undoubtedly come to stay, and its success is encouraging" to its members, singling out two prominent women, Lady Wimborne and

Lady Eva Wyndham Quin for praise.72 Authors such as young, unmarried, college- educated Miss Gladdish entreated Welsh women to focus their public activities within professions, pastimes, and interests that remained basically nationally-valuable extensions of the domestic sphere. Traditional subjects that "peculiarly appealed] to the Welsh nation", and its "Celtic nature" including literature, music, and Welsh crafts are all that

indicated that this column was aimed at a Welsh rather than English audience.73

Women's suffrage and other political agendas disappeared from the pages of Young

Wales.

This was also true in periodicals aimed specifically at Welsh women, including Y

Gymraes [The Welshwoman] which returned to separate publication in 1896 under the editorship of Alice Gray Jones (" Peris") a prominent Temperance Reformer.74

71 Ibid. She also noted that in order to appeal to the "Celtic nature" of her readers she would showcase the work and personalities of the women novelists and "sweet singers" of Wales, including Allen Raine and Mrs. Mary Davies.

72Ibid.

73Ibid.

74Alice Gray Jones (Ceridwen Peris), (1852-1943) was a journalist, poet, author and early feminist who edited Y Gymraes from 1896-1919. 121

An article about "Yr Aelwyd" (The Hearth) stated:

'Future Wales' depends on the young mothers of Wales more than anyone else. Not on Parliament, nor the University, nor the , nor the Schools, but primarily on the institute of the hearth. The mother is queen of the hearth, and her role and domain are very noble ... She is the source of the highest, purest, most sacred elements of man's social life, and it is on her character and influence that the future of the world mainly rests.75

Thus Welsh women were accorded authority and influence, even perhaps more than male-dominated institutions, however that influence remained confined to the home and motherhood. Romanticization of the Welsh-speaking aehvyd based on separate spheres ideology made the Welsh nationalist intelligentsia identify the aelwyd as an "inherently

Welsh characteristic"76 Thus Welsh nationalist feminists used their own periodicals to construct, reinforce and impose conservative separate sphere ideology upon their fellow

Welsh women.

In contrast to the shifting and inconsistent messages in Young Wales, emphasis on

75"Yr Aelwyd" Y Gymraes Vol. 1, No. 2 (1896): 19. [Ar famau ieuainc Cymru, y tuhwnt i bawb eraill, yr ymddibyna "Cymru Fydd'. Nid ar y , na'r Brifysgol, na'r Colegau, na'r Ysgolion, ond yn benaf ar athrofa yr aelwyd. Y fam yw brenhines yr aelwyd, a thra urddasol y ei swydd a'i theyrnas ... Oddiwrthi hi y daw elfenau uchaf, puraf, a mwyaf cysegredig bywyd cymdeithasol dyn, ac ar ei chymeriad a'i dylanwad hi yn benaf y gorphwys dyfodol y byd.] For similar themed articles see Anna lonawr, "Cyfran y Merched yn Ffurfiad Cymeriad Cenedel y Cymry", YFrythones, Vol. II, No. 10 (1889): 302-3.; "Dadl: Cartrefi Cymru", Y Gymraes, Vol. 16, No. 187 (1912): 51-2.

76See Rosemary Jones, '"Separate Spheres'?: Women, Language and Respectability in Victorian Wales," in Geraint H. Jenkins ed., The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801-1911 (Cardiff: Wales, 2000): 196-7. Jones elaborates on the importance and impact of Victorian separate spheres ideology as a concept in Britain and Wales during the nineteenth century, especially in relation to the conscious use of the Welsh language. This work however argues that Welsh nationalists and nonconformists, both male and female, consciously adopted that ideology in response to the critiques of Welsh morality and women during the Blue Book furor of 1847 and after. Thus this ideology is centered within an imperial and reactive nationalist relationship in which gendered ideology and constructions constitute varying degrees of power and respectability. Nationalists used such ideology to articulate their difference from the imperial power, but in adopting Victorian ideology to do so, inherently accepted both the hegemonic gender roles and the criteria used to judge their culture as inferior by the English. 122 traditional domesticity dominated Owen M. Edward's cultural magazine Wales from the beginning. Women authors contributed significantly less here than in Young Wales. A few articles by elite, educated women focused on heroic women of the distant Welsh past and early Welsh literature.77 Short fiction, serialized novels and poetry by women also found their way onto its pages, although they were heavily outnumbered by male authors' contributions.

Authors of both genders used their romanticized stories to construct a specific view of the ideal Wales and an idealized Welsh culture consistent with the domestic trope found in the works already discussed. One story for example represented women as content to remain at home, apprehensively waiting for their collier husbands to return from the mines, yet appreciating the natural beauty of the mine rock formations and spurning life in "civilized" London.78 Another played on the orientalized English stereotype of Welsh people as "a pair of fresh untamed savages from the Welsh mountains."79 The interaction of John Jones and Gwen with a visiting English couple in the story represented the "true" nature of Welsh men as poor but happy collier ;

Welsh women were demure and modest, but also excellent singers, in touch with their emotions yet insistently doing their duty raising male, Welsh-speaking, moral children.

"Beatrice E. Boone, "The Women of Wales I: in early Welsh Literature," Wales: A National Magazine for the English speaking parts of Wales 2 (1895): 101-104. "The Women of Wales II: Our two great Poetesses" 2 (1895): 241-243.

78R.E.T. Law, "The Collier's Wife," Wales: A National Magazine for the English speaking parts of Wales 3(1896): 43-45.

7"Owen George, "Something Unconventional" Wales: A National Magazine for the English speaking parts of Wales 2 (1895): 130-133. 123

The author presented these in contrast to the visiting English couple, depicted as unhappy amidst all the wonders of modern English industrial society with its cool logical rationality, social stratification and its wealth. Poems also represented women as performing their 'traditional' Victorian roles as nurturer, wife, and mother, although with a Welsh twist, portrayed as extremely moral, thus a better version of Christian and sexual virtue than the English whose model they had adopted.80 For example, one author described 'Gwalia's Own Daughter" as "Richly and endowed by every virtue - Of the

Celtic nature and the Cymric Blood ..Linked to a past of virtuous behavior and unbesmirched reputation, the "Sweet maid of Gwent" was to "complete- The complemental duties of your sex.- Then, as sweetheart, wife, and mother... in your nature, surely lies the moulding And the making of a nation's men."81 These authors presented Welsh women with an idealized role model to emulate, one which scorned decadence associated with English urban modernity and emphasized the "traditional" as feminine requirements. Such definitions of Welsh femininity constructed discursively through women's periodicals paradoxically emphasized the English model of separate spheres, as well as late nineteenth century concerns with the deterioration of the British race due to poor mothering and the impact of modernity and economic competition upon

80The Victorian domestic role of motherhood had by the late nineteenth century been constructed and labeled as 'traditional' and characteristically 'Welsh'. Rosemary Jones, 'Separate Spheres'?: Women, Language and Respectability in Victorian Wales," in Geraint H. Jenkins, ed. The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801 -1911 (Cardiff: Wales, 2000): 197.

81W. H. Kersey, "Gwalia's Own Daughter,", Wales: A National Magazine for the English speaking parts of Wales IV (1897): 126. 124 the population.82 Parents, in this case Welsh women, raised the next generation of both

Welsh and British citizens, and thus their roles became the focus of national attention and concern, communicated through periodicals.83

By the 1880s 'traditional' domestic femininity became a central component of

Welsh nationalist assertions of Welsh men's, and thus the Welsh nation's, masculinity and 'modernity.' For example, writing in 1911 on the subject of "Great Welshmen,"

Lewis Hywel attributed the genius of Welsh nationalist politicians such as David Lloyd

George, Tom Ellis, Rev. Lewis Edwards of Bala and others to the experiences of their early youth, specifically the inspiration of Sunday School and the dedication and ambition of their mothers. Once they developed "overwhelming ambitions to become a power in land" based on their experiences at Sunday School and singing in the "Cymanfa fawr,' (singing ) their mothers came to their aid. Such women were portrayed as heroic in their sacrifices for their sons, and thus the nation.84 Indeed, as W.H. Kersey asserted above, the "making of a nation's men" depended on women doing their duty, acting correctly 'feminine' and motherly.

s2See Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 87-151. As Davin notes, debates over the health of the population permeated the publications of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These periodicals used their rhetoric to imposed gender discipline and hierarchy upon their readers. English periodicals emphasized the importance of racial health and eugenics for the cause of imperial supremacy and survival. Welsh nationalist periodicals picked up and used the same rhetoric to mobilize the population towards a more national cause, although that cause often continued to participate in the British imperial project.

"Ibid., 90-92.

MLewis Hywel, "Great Welshmen," J. Hugh Edwards ed., Wales: A National Magazine Vol. I, No. 6, (October 1911): 301. 125

Wales's authors and editors represented Welsh women as a threat to the Welsh nation if they failed to adopt the model of industrious, undecorated, and "natural" mothers. In the case of the poem, "Gwalia's Own Daughter," the male author labeled women as 'Decadence' if he observed them wearing lipstick and walking idly for hours.85

He blamed women who pursued such habits as responsible for the downfall of other nations, asserting that Wales could follow if Welsh women failed to adopt the model of the idealized traditional Welsh mother. Even other women identified makeup as a foreign import that undermined traditional Welsh culture and fashions. That meant that women who sought to augment their personal appearance using make-up or fashionable clothing purchased from 'foreign' i.e. English vendors, rather than made in Wales or by themselves found themselves judged and criticized for their actions, labeled as 'decadent' and thus the opposite of 'sacrificing' for her sons, 'modern' vs. traditional. One 1897 article reported that Miss Lucy Griffith of sought "to combat the latest invasion" by create a new Anti-face-paint and Anti-hair-dye league" for the women of

Wales.86 Various authors repeated a common theme which identified "modern" industrial habits and conveniences that might create leisure time as foreign imports that

"Lipstick was seen as a threat outside of fiction as well.

g6"A New Order" O.M. Edwards ed., Wales: A national Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales IV, No. 34 (February 1897): ^8. The editor noted that "Women, leagued together, can do much. A league of women would be as powt al as mediaeval crusaders or a league of the time of the Protestant . But can they withstand the fashion? If so. let them write to Miss Griffith at once." 126 would undermine Welsh culture.87 Other fictional prose constructed female weakness as a threat to Welsh culture. Female author Sioned Pryce used her story "For the Sake of the

Farm" to warn young women and men of folly. In that story an ancient Welsh farm was legally swindled away from its male owner due to his restless stepmother's need for love.

Attracted to the lights of town, she betrayed the naive trust of a Welsh-speaking farmer and his son, both focused on working the land and the Welsh way of life.88 In this overtly misogynous story, all women were depicted as treacherous, unfamiliar with the traditional life and language, discontent with their roles, imperilling the Welsh nation and its future. Yet even women who adhered to roles deemed proper could be dangerous, as in the poem, "For Mother's Sake" by Arthur Mee, in which a collier attempting to support his mother financially worked extra shifts, and was killed in a cave in.89 Welsh nationalism depended upon women remaining limited to a domestic 'feminine' sphere, supportive of the patriarchal social hierarchy. Yet the overall message, both contradictory and misogynous, elaborated that the purpose of Welsh men asserting their masculinity and national status of Wales within the British Empire and the rest of the world based on the English model. Welsh men and sons worked for nationalist causes

87See also "Stray Leaves" Wales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales III, No. 21(January 1896): 1-6. Here the author notes that the Welsh peasantry have "forgotten the useful work which made Welsh homes so pleasant. And wives who once wove and spun, -they talk all day and they run to the nearest shop and buy wretched cotton stockings, which have no warmth and which lose their color, on credit."

88Sioned Pryce, "For the Sake of the Farm," Wales: A National Magazine for the English speaking parts of Wales 3 (1896): 359-370.

"'Arthur Mee, "For Mother's Sake," Wales: A National Magazine for the English speaking parts of Wales 2(1895): 332. 127 and recognition to end the need of Welsh mothers sacrifice so greatly for their sons, to protect their daughters, sisters, and wives from slander by others, and to thereby free them to enjoy the fruits of modernity, an increased income, and more leisure time. According to these periodicals and their ideology, women who did so, however, were 'decadent' and not truly 'Welsh' enough.

Especially within the culturally oriented periodicals, such as Cymru, Wales: A

National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales, and others, Welshwomen occupied space in the movement only as subjects of investigation, links to the past, and as fictional characters delineated in broad strokes. Their participation in the discursive construction of Welsh culture remained extremely limited, as did their voices. Reflecting broader trends in contemporary Europe and the rest of the world, any nationalist discussion of women in general tended to be increasingly repressive.90 Women increasingly appeared not as fighters and activists working to achieve national recognition or independence, but as maternal, characters in fictional stories with titles like "Mary of the Mill: A Welsh Love Story," "Queen of the Village," "John's Chair," and "A Life's

Chase."91

'"See Margaret Ward, "The Ladies' Land League and the Irish Land War 1881/2: Defining the Relat.Dnship Between Women and Nation,"; Marilyn Lake, "The Ambiguities for Feminists of National Belonging: Race and Gender in the Imagined Australian Community,"; and Helen , "Regendering A frikanerdom: The 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer War," in (da Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000). See also Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1983)., and Anne McClintock, " 'No Longer in a Future Heaven': Nationalism, Gender, and Race," in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996):260-285.

9lVarious authors. Wales: A National Magazine I-IV (1911-1914). 128

The only regular nonfiction women's feature in Wales: A National Magazine consisted of prose advertisements in the form of letters about fashion and home furnishings. Presented as a letter about Lady Gwladys' travels to London and elsewhere, these advertisements about the current trends were addressed to her Cousin Gwyn, whose address was "The Wilderness, ."92 The juxtaposition of London against

"The Wilderness" of Wales emphasized the peripheral, backward nature of Wales and the need for Welsh women, the "poor relations", to adopt the fashions and of their class leaders in the geographic and imperial core, even if they could not in fact, travel there themselves. In a periodical advocating the importance of Welsh culture and tradition, these advertisements implicitly encouraged women to reject that culture for that of the hegemonic capital of Britain. In fact these advertisements looked just like the other articles in the publication, featuring several pages of single spaced prose. Titled "The

Modish Woman", "Woman and Her Interests", "Concerning Autumn Fashions", and "A

Chat on Furniture and other things", these advertisements were not included in the index

or paginated with the rest of the volume, thus reducing women's formal presence

primarily to that of readers of fiction and consumers of English goods. Women who

wished to purchase the goods and clothing described in the advertisement could contact

the author 'Gweneth'. Advertisements for other periodicals appeared on the back cover

of these periodicals and did not resemble the articles that made up the majority of the

'2Gweneth, "A Welsh Writer in London," Wales: A National Magazine I, No. 2 (June 1911); "A Chat on Furniture - and Other Things" Wales: A National Magazine II no. 11 (November 1912); "The Modish Woman" Wales: A National Magazine II No. 9 (September 1912); "Fashions in the Home" Wales: A National Magazine ill, No. 1 (January 1913); "Supplement to Wales: The Modish Woman" Wales: A National Magazine IV (May-). 129 publication.

One of the few intellectual articles about women and aimed at a female readership concerned an elite lady's work with the Welsh Industries Association.93 Significantly this

Association focused on attempts to revive traditional crafts and cottage industries such as the weaving of woolen cloth for 'traditional' Welsh women's costumes, pursuing the goals laid out for Welsh women by Lady Llanover in the 1850s, discussed in the previous chapter.94 Writing on "The Women of Wales", Kenneth sought to reconstruct the symbol often used to represent Wales alongside , , and others. He argued that 'Dame Wales' or 'Mam Cymru', an older woman alongside these other youthful symbols, conveyed positive meanings. In essence she represented the ideal construction of Welshwomen's role in the new, yet 'traditional', Welsh national culture.

Mam Cymru lived in a extremely clean cottage, wore flannel handed down from her mother, and the traditional Welsh hat. Welsh speaking, she sang while she worked, gave everyone and cakes, and was reverent towards those she raised. "Secretly wise" yet untroubled and amused by simple, day to day things, she ruled her household with love and took care of the sick. This was the representative of Welsh womanhood, domestic, servile, overly cheerful and content, yet the author asserted, "I never saw her but I thought

"Interestingly enough, one of the advertisements mentioned in the previous footnote included 'Gweneth's report that she "had a sweet frock for helping at the Welsh Industries Association Sale, all pearl-grey marquisette and satin." Again the line between prose work and advertisement blurred for the reader. See "A Woman Writer in London" Wales: A National Magazine I, No. 2 (June 1911).

94F.M. Strutt-Cavell, "The Work of the Welsh Industries Association: An Interview with Mrs. Richard Mashiter," Wales: A National Magazine I No. 3 (July 1911) Investiture issue. 143-145. For a discussion of Lady Llanover's invention of the traditional costume for Welsh women, and her determination to revive 'traditional' industries and crafts, see Chapter 2 of this dissertation. 130 her a queen or goddess disguised, and expected her transfiguration."95

Significantly, in this construction, the "warrior" present in national symbols such as Britannia or was represented by a separate, historical figure- Buddug or

Boadicea, an actual historical figure although she was actually geographically from

England rather than Wales. Notably, a statue of the Iceni warrior queen Boadicea erected in the new Cardiff City Hall during the First World War as a result of the relatively late realization that when commissioning the Pantheon of National Heroes statuary that there were no men included among the ten national figures selected for commemoration.

Buddug (Boadicea) was chosen to represent both women and Ancient Britain. Yet the statue represented Boadicea as an unarmed mother holding her two children, thereby de- emphasizing her warrior nature in favor of the maternal and conquered.96 This portrayal represented an interesting inclusion into the Pantheon of National Heroes of Wales, as the artist had won a prize at the 1874 eisteddfod in Bangor for another version of the same subject, Boadicea at the Head of her Army. This statues represents the artist's and committee's definite choice to portray the "National heroine" as a conquered, acquiescent and maternal subject representing a conquered, submissive land.

No male symbol of Wales corresponding to John Bull existed. Postcards from the era representing the four nations of the United Kingdom feature male figures for England,

Scotland and Ireland, with the young Welsh girl in Welsh costume as the only female

95Kenneth Morris, "The Women of Wales," J. Hugh Edwards ed. Wales: A National Magazine I No. 4 (August, 1911): 188-190.

%Peter Lord, Imaging the Nation, The Visual Culture of Wales Series. (Aberystwyth: Wales, 2000): 337. The statue titled Buddug/Boadicea by J. Havard Thomas portrays Boadicea in a flowing gown. 131 figure in the group. Writer Kenneth Morris identified a few other women as Welsh heroines, yet they were either mythic figures from the past or from Welsh literature.97

The few contemporary examples included Lady Llanover, , and

Allen Raine.98 All three were included in his list because their efforts to protect Welsh traditions and language, either through Eisteddfod prizes, translations, or novels fit into the "appropriate" cultural, domestic sphere of action for Welsh women to demonstrate their national pride.99 These professions required money and leisure to pursue, and all emphasized Welshwomen's link with and duty to the past and Welsh traditions. For example a poem memorializing the authoress and contributor 'Allen Raine' in Wales: A

National Magazine commended her because "SHE told us of the simple life" using "Her gentle words, her quiet style, Her terse and vivid way.. Not cooped within the mother- tongue, She sent her message wide." Here Raine was praised for her publication in both languages, Welsh and English, and thus she was not limited by her "mother tongue" of

97Kenneth Morris, "The Women of Wales," J. Hugh Edwards ed. Wales: A National Magazine I No. 4 (August, 1911): 188-190.

98For more biographical detail on Lady Llanover see chapter 2 above. Writing under the pen name "Allen Raine" Anne A. Puddicombe (1836-1908) was a prominent novelist, shared a prize won at the 1894 Carnarvon national eisteddfod for a serial on 'Welsh life.' She published seven novels between 1898 and 1906, with several others published posthumously. Her works were serialized in a number of the periodicals under discussion.

"At the same time, Lady Charlotte Guest, a wealthy prominent figure, esteemed as a national heroine for her work in translation of the Mabinogion, was again relegated to the domestic world by one male literary critic. According to J. G. De Hirsch-Davies, the critic "Puts an unerring finger on various shortcomings in her work, many of which, however, may be quite explicable in view of the fact of its dedication to her children." Yet De Hirsch-Davies makes no connection between the two matters after this statement. Hirsch-Davies implied that Lady Guest's translation should be dismissed because her domestic role as a mother inherently tainted her intellectual, creative project. Her work had value only as a mother passing stories down to her children, and for other mothers to use to do the same. J. E. De Hirsch-Davies, "Welsh Literary Notes and Queries", Wales: A National Magazine Vol. 5, No. 32, (Dec 1913): 126. Welsh. The effect of Raine's work, done in such a quiet style with a traditional emphasis, was that "The Saxon paused with eager ear; He lingered at her side." and "So England learned to know our land Far better than before; She honours Cymru and its folk More highly than of youre."100 Raine was identified as a heroine for reacquainting the Welsh and English people with traditional Welsh culture; as a result her presence as a public figure was valued.

Absent from Morris' purview of "Th 'T 'omen of Wales" or Wales: A National

Magazine in general was any mention or example of the modern young women attending the University of Wales, the "ordinary" married woman and mother, or even young working-class women earning their own income.101 Single women, women without children, or women outside of patriarchal control were excluded from this cultural . Modernity, especially for women, although entertained in the pages of

Young Wales, was rejected by the other culturally nationalist publications in favor of looking to a mythic, patriarchal past. In this aspect, Welsh nationalism resembled other nationalist movements.

The invention of an historical "Golden Age" when there were elevated conditions for women and society as a means of excusing the degradations and inequality of the

100Arthur Mee, ('Idris'), "To the Memory of "Allen Raine", in J. Hugh Edwards ed., Wales: A National Magazine Vol. 1, NO. 2 (June 1911): 68.

""Such women did exist, as Welsh women attended the University of Wales soon after its founding. For the seminal discussion of female education in Wales see W. Gareth Evans, Education and Female Emancipation: The Welsh experience, 1847-1914. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1990). 133 present occurred in various contemporary nationalist movements and ideologies.102 This mythic past was often claimed and depicted as a time when certain exceptional, usually elite, women enjoyed more rights and greater freedoms, a "Golden Age" within the

"traditional' patriarchal structure of Welsh society.103 One author, giving a picture of time long ago, listed "what a Welsh man wants" in the article, "An Old Time Gentleman of Wales."104 According to Stephens, a Welsh man wanted:

"His wife chaste"; "his daughter cleanly"; "his maid-servant civil." The lady of the house was much honoured, as the laws of Hywel testify. She enjoyed a large measure of freedom. No slave was she to her husband. If he misconducted himself she had her remedy in instant divorce. Altogether, as long as she conducted herself properly her position was one of great dignity.

l02For more on the conflicts between nationalist, feminist, and social ideology in Ireland and elsewhere see Dana Hearne, "Contesting Positions in Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland" and the "Introduction" in Himani Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab, and Judith Whitehead eds., Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001): 84- 115 and 3-33 respectively. On the representation of Ireland as a contested female body despoiled by male England, as well as the role of this 'golden age for women' ideology within the ballads and publications of the Movement during the 1840s see Sean Ryder, "Gender and the Discourse of 'Young Ireland' Cultural Nationalism" in Timothy P. Foley, Lionel Pilkington et al. eds., Gender and Colonialism (Galway: Galway University Press, 1995):2I0-224.

103 This was true in Wales, but also India, fellow subordinate member of the British Empire, where the invention of the Aryan Past depended on gendered constructions of superior elite women, those women having disappeared under the influence of the British. See Uma Chakravarti, "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism, and a Script for the Past." in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989 (reprinted 1997): 27-87. Similar constructions of the past occurred around the debate over Sati, see Lata Mani, "Contentious traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India" in Ibid, pp. 88-127. The importance of such constructions to the incorporation of women's activism and women's issues within the Indian Nationalist movement, which thereby led to a subordination of women within the idealized model of the home is argued by Partha Chatterjee in his chapter in the same volume. See Partha Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question" in Ibid., pp. 233-253. Feminist scholarship has revealed the long held tendency of Welsh nationalists to view the past as a "Golden Age" for women, see Llinos Beverley Smith "Towards a History of Women in Late Medieval Wales" in Michael Roberts and Simone Clarke eds., Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales (Cardiff: Wales, 2000): 14-49.

104T. Stephens, "An Old Time Gentleman of Wales", Wales: A National Magazine Vol 1, #5,(September 1911): 219-221. Note J. Hugh Edwards had printed this article ten years previously in his other publication Young Wales Vol 7, No. 76 (): 77-79. 134

The reader will note that all of the women mentioned here were identified in relation to a male, and that a married woman must 'conduct herself properly' whatever this might have entailed before she had the right to divorce. Although seeming to recommend divorce as a possible course of action, because this discussion was based in the 'traditional' past, the reference to divorce threatened the gender hierarchy less than contemporary feminist discussions of women's equality with men. Yet even in this 'traditional' past, women remained a threat. For example Stephens listed the "the three chief perils of a woman - a pretty face, a foolish head, and a proud heart." Individual assertive women could cause chaos. Emphasis on the middle and upper levels of society, divided into the separate spheres remained, as Stephens outlined the qualities Welsh women must emulate: "The young ladies of the house were skillful in the art of conversation, and entertained strangers with as much charm and fascination as a young lady of our day does."105

Clearly this mythic, selectively remembered, past remained attractive and seemingly relevant to the future because such 'traditions' emphasized the important, complementary gender roles for both sexes within the ideal Welsh household, and by extension, the

Welsh nation. As a result Welsh men seeking to advance the nationalist cause in the public sphere did not have to accommodate Welsh women challenging the patriarchal nature of society at a time when men challenged the imperial nature of British society.

By linking themselves to this mythic past, Welsh men claimed to recreate that world in the present after years of oppression due to British conquest. The idealized future w~uld

l0SIbid. 135 solve any problems of the present; thus those problems such as lack of women's rights and suffrage prior to 1920, equal access to education, and political participation could be ignored until that future of national recognition was achieved. Typical of most nationalist movements, nationalism took priority over the needs and agendas of women or other groups within Wales. Notably, W. Llewelyn Williams, an M.P. denounced the "Golden

Age of Wales" as a "Popular Delusion" and argued that the "Golden Age" of Wales was in the future, not in a mythic past.106

These nationalist periodicals increasingly reconsidered and implicitly challenged women's concrete gains made earlier in the 19th century such as women's higher education opportunities during the 1880s and Welsh Liberal support for women's suffrage, previously a source of pride in Wales.107 As the English-dominated campaign

for women's suffrage grew increasingly radical, many Welsh cultural nationalists reacted

by further distancing themselves from modern Welsh women and their concerns.

Although Welsh women often supported women's suffrage within Liberal Party and

Cymru Fydd organizations, the first organization for women's suffrage in Wales was established in 1907. with many to follow, usually following the leadership of English

1(16 W. Llewelyn Williams, K.C., M.P., "Popular Delusions: IV. - The Golden Age of Wales" Wales: A National Magazine VI, (August 1914): 286-8.

l07For more on the women's suffrage movement in Wales see Kay Cook and Neil Evans, '"The Petty Antics of the Bell-Ringing Boisterous Band'? The Women's Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1890- 1918" in Angela V. John ed., Our Mothers' Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History 1830-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991): 159-188. As the authors note, by the 1880s women's columns in a number of Welsh newspapers disseminated information on the suffrage movement to a growing middle- class Liberal group of readers. A Cardiff Town Hall meeting in 1881 supported votes fc- women. 136 organizations and their efforts.108 The lack of waged employment for women in Wales prevented women's demands for suffrage from making a significant impact in Welsh politics.109

In addition to the reality of limited economic opportunities, Welsh women found themselves criticized in the pages of Welsh nationalist periodicals when they sought to engage in economic employment. In 1913 proposed a "Welsh National

Programme" that made no mention of women's suffrage, and remained silent about women in the category of Welsh workers. He did assert that any man who "brings a

Welsh girl into disgrace and then abandons her shall be publicly branded a scoundrel."110

Notably the abandonment element is the main cause of his disgust. In 1912 G. Arbour

Stephens condemned the value of any gains Welsh women made through attending university.111 Stephens asserted that Welsh women had failed to use their access to education to "improve the national stock, nor have they been content to wrench a few of the university prizes from those men who are properly foremost in the arena of

l08Ibid., 166-168, 170-171,180. The Women's Social and (WSPU) and the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). The more militant efforts of the WSPU and the Women's Franchise League (WFL) drew increasing opposition and hostility-most famously at the 1912 National Eisteddfod speech by David Lloyd-George from Welsh suffrage supporters against the 'foreign' agitators. The NUWSS had more success in steadily founding new branches and gaining support. The beginning of the First World War in August, 1914 interrupted this momentum.

109Ibid.. p. 184.

"°Gwilym Davies, M.A., "Welsh National Programme" Wales: A National Magazine Vol. 3, No. 2 (February 1913): 101.

'"G. Arbour Stephens, M.D. "Welsh Nationalism as a Social Religion: Do Women Play Their Proper Part in the National Life of Wales?" J. Hugh Edwards ed. Wales: A National Magazine 11(1912): 54-60. 137 intellectual strife"112 Thus women were not competing with men in the areas of Welsh language study and Welsh literature, nor were they teaching those skills to their children after attending university. He argued that "A nation rises to the height of its womanhood, but only in so far as it is developed along national lines," concluding "woe to the day when women cease to contribute their fair share to the national welfare."113

Indeed Stephens asserted that while the "Government of a State ... may relieve the men of their paternal duties by feeding, clothing, and schooling the children, one thing is certain, that it cannot take on the duties of motherhood.""4 Education for women was intended to create good, educated nationalist mothers who emphasized the Welsh language and correct moral behavior. Based on this representation of motherhood as the essential female characteristic and duty, the Welsh nationalist intelligentsia, both women and men, judged ordinary Welsh women and found their attempts to gain equal access to the public sphere dangerous, accusing them of undermining the formation of the Welsh nation through individual self-fulfilment and intellectual competition with men.

Women's sole legitimate role as contributors to the Welsh nation was firmly located within motherhood and the home, where the mother was 'the high priestess' of the family.115 This was deemed the key to national status throughout the empire, as "a nation

":Ibid, 56.

"'Ibid, 57.

""Ibid. 56.

'"See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 'introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism" in Mohanty, Russo and Torres eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991): 22. 138 composed of successful units of this kind will stand well amongst the other nations, both as regards the present state of things, as well as the prospects for the future."116 The imposition of contemporary liberal notions of citizenship depended on the patriarchal household as its basic unit; in Wales this was even stronger than in the rest of Britain.

The colonial relationship between England and Wales within the British state resulted in the Welsh nationalist intelligentsia imposing the model of the 'rational, masculine' colonizer upon their fellow Welshmen to a greater degree than even the English, in other words, 'out-Englishing the English.'117 The overwhelming emphasis in these periodicals on the sexual division of labor within the separate spheres, with women firmly located in the home, was used to assert an overwhelming masculinity, and thus national fitness and status, of both Wales and Welsh men based on their control over the Welsh women in their society.

MASCULINITY:

The development of the Welsh nationalist movement, like any other reform

""Ibid, 57.

"7For more discussion of the colonial relationship and British attempts to 'out-Indian the Indian' in the work of Rudyard Kipling and others see Satya Mohanty, "Drawing the Color Line: Kipling and the Culture of Colonial Rule" in Dominic La Capra, ed., Boundaries of Race (Ithaca: Cornell, 1991): 311 -343. See also Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry & Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse" October 28 (Spring 1984): 125-133; Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders" Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817" in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. "Race", Writing, & Difference" (Chicago: Chicago, 1986): 163-184; Gerald Sider, "When parrots learn to talk, and why they can't: domination, deception, and self-deception in Indian-white relations" Comparative Studies in Society and History. Vol. 29 (January I987):3-23. Notably, this 'mimicry' of the colonizer is doomed to fail, as the colonizer will never admit the colonized is an equal, thus the colonized can never take their place among the other nations, and thus will never gain the recognition of their peers. The latter is a primary element of masculinity formation according to John Tosh. 139 movement, demanded that participants reconsider their own masculinity and femininity, resulting in competing versions of both.118 As a result Welsh nationalists' gendered cultural definitions of what it meant to be Welsh were not limited to women. Indeed the construction of femininity could only take place in relation to the construction of masculinity, for gender is a relationship of power rather than a given category.119 Welsh

nationalist periodicals and their contributing authors scrutinized, evaluated, criticized and

constructed relative national, racial and individual masculinities.120 The position of

Wales within the British Empire, and the need for Welsh men to live up to the hegemonic

model of England placed Welsh men and women in a difficult situation. Because British

colonizers justified their imperial efforts by depicting colonial men as less than men,

Welsh nationalists communicated their frustration and insecurity regarding the status of

Wales within Britain and the British Empire through discussions of masculinity.121

Railing against a recent article in the Times of London about soldiers returning from the

Boer War, J. Hugh Edwards argued that press representations and practices systematically

ll8This was true in the British women's suffrage movement of the early twentieth century. See Sandra Stanley Holton, "Manliness and militancy: The political protest of male suffragists and the gendering of the 'suffragette' identity" in Angela John, The Men's share?, pp. 111-112.

"9For the basic outline of analytical gender theory see the classic work by Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" in Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia, 1988): 28-S2. For a recent discussion of women and nationalism see Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000).

IMOn the general historiography of masculinity as a vital part of gender analysis, see John Tosh, "What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain" History Workshop Journal 38 (1994): 179-202, especially pp. 190-92.

121 Ibid., 190, 193-4. By the late nineteenth c .ury 'manliness' became increasingly identified with British imperialism, articulated through the Scouting movement under Baden-Powell, and a large amount of literature aimed at the different classes. 140 excluded Welsh men and soldiers from equal membership within Britain. In fact, Welsh men were being excluded from competing and participating in the Empire for status and wealth, and thus were not being acknowledged by their peers as fellow men. Nor were they being allowed to perform the primary role as citizens, fighting for their country.

This was the primary qualification that differentiated the citizenship rights of men and women.122 He complained that "The Times greeted the new century with a leading article in which it declared with a pardonable flourish of rhetoric - "To all Englishmen,

Scotsmen, and Irishmen, the first of all considerations must be; How will the new century affect the moral and material greatness of their country and their empire?"123 Edwards's statement revealed the constructed and contested nature of 'Britain' as a homogenous country and culture at the center of the British empire. Edwards stressed the contradiction that Britain was identified as a Protestant culture and nation, yet the

Catholic Irish here took precedence over the Protestant, albeit nonconformist, Welsh.

Ireland, as England's first imperial possession, ought to be included as part of the imperial core. Edwards asked his readers, "why are Welshmen left out of the range of the consideration? Does the writer of the article for a moment entertain the thought that the moral and material greatness of our country and empire do not concern the people of

Wales?"124 Despuc their desire for English recognition of national difference, the "moral

l22On the role of warfare and eventually maternity in justifying women's demands for equal citizenship rights in Britain see Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood."

I23J. Hugh Edwards, "Wales: Month by Month" Young Wales Vo. 7, No. 73 (January 1901): 24.

I24lbid. 141 and material greatness" of Britain and its empire greatly concerned most Welsh people, including nationalists, who frequently asserted that they were the most loyal of British imperial subjects. They were not, however, Edwards lamented, acknowledged as such by

British society and Parliament; the latter preferred to construct Welsh culture and men as effeminate, foreign, and subordinate to those of England and even Scotland and Ireland.

This view of Wales as the 'other', similar 10 vivws of India and other imperial possessions, helped fashion British imperial culture as Anglo-Saxon, masculine, and modern in opposition to colonized Welsh culture as Celtic, effeminate, and 'hopelessly traditional.'125

British writers excluded Wales from equal membership in Britain based on gendered, imperial judgements of cultural status and masculinity. At the same time, and in response to these judgements, Welsh nationalists defined and defended their national identity, status, and masculinity using gendered language to convey Welshmen's claims to inclusion. In an earlier article written in the midst of the Boer War, Edwards

l25See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic fringe in British national development, 1536-1966. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Hechter's mode! of this imperial relationship within Britain privileges economic relationships and fails to acknowledge the unique context of Wales and all the other parts of the 'Celtic fringe' as well as the importance of the cultural discourse that helped maintain and justify that colonial relationship. In addition, Hechter asserts that Celtic assertions of nationalism and cultural individuality are simply a response to the actions of the imperial core, rather than viewing them as a relational, reciprocal process of development. The very interconnected relationship of core and periphery in the development of imperial culture has been demonstrated in the work of Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915. (Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 1994); Chandra T. Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" in Mohanty, Russo, Torres eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991): 73, 51-80. Indeed, as Satya Mohanty argued, not all Englishmen fit the imperial, masculine model of either, thus Baden-Powell's Scouts and children's literature sought to self-fashion the British in opposition to the Indian 'other'. This also applied to fashioning the British self against the opposition of Welsh society at the turn of the century. See Satya Mohanty, "Drawing the Color Line: Kipling and the Culture of Colonial Rule" in La Capra ed., The Bounds of Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991): 311-343. 142 expressed his "keen feeling of disappointment and of regret" that "Mr. Chamberlain ... entirely ignored the splendid heroism displayed by Welshmen in the struggle." Edwards reported that "Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen vied with each other in heroic efforts and have performed what has been admitted to be impossible feats." "Why," asked Edwards,

"are Welshmen who shared the heroic achievement of impossible feats omitted from the commendation and tribute? Is it because Mr. Chamberlain, in common with the bulk of his countrymen, harbours the absurd idea that a Welshman at best is but an imperfect

Englishman?" He concluded in frustration, "When will educated Englishmen realize that every consideration that establishes the distinctive nationality of Scotland and of

Ireland holds equally true of Wales?"126 With such comments Edwards exposed the complexity rather than homogeneity existing within British identity at the turn of the

twentieth century as well as the unequal gendered valuations placed on its different

constituent cultures, even those that were similarly labeled 'Celtic.'127 This statement

summed up the dilemma Welsh nationalist men faced: they must either attempt to

become 'perfect Englishmen' based on the middle-class Victorian model of imperial masculinity and control suited to modern industrial society, or seek to emphasize their

i26J. Hugh Edwards, "Wales: Month by Month" Young Wales Vol. 6, No. 61 (): 46- 48.

'"'Celtic' identity too was riven with degrees of status, as the willingness of Scotsmen and Irishmen to serve in the and imperial project, including the Boer War, made Scotland and Ireland seem closer to the English model of masculine cultures than that of more pacifist Wales, as demonstrated above. At the same time, Scots soldiers were often depicted as 'Wild Highlanders' whose ferocity was channeled by "Anglo Saxon discipline and military technology" into a valuable imperial force, tu be used in a similar fashion as other Colonial troops, i.e. as expendable cannon fodder, even through the First World War. See Murray G. H. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999):44, 108. 143 national distinctiveness at the risk of being considered even more unmanly and traditional.128 Of course the first choice was ultimately futile, because Welshmen, deemed "imperfect Englishmen," would never be considered masculine or 'English- enough' within the hegemonic English culture of Britain.129 Their nation could never be regarded as a peer by England, and thus Welsh men were caught in a double bind. This, however, did not prevent them from imposing the hegemonic English gender roles upon

Welsh women in order to reinforce their own patriarchal dominance within Wales.

Attempting to grapple with such problems, nationalists like other reformers often disassociated themselves from the present with its impossible disadvantaged rhetorical positioning and constructed themselves instead as inheritors of ancient traditions, thus returning the nation to its true path based on those traditions but with a modern

l28Ironically, at the same time that nationalists such as Rhoscomyl and others emphasized the importance of adopting the tenets of Victorian middle-class domestic culture over the uniqueness of nonconformist chapel culture, the Liberal Party became formally increasingly tolerant of national cultural differences within Britain. See John S. Ellis, "Unity in Diversity": Ethnicity and British National Identity 1899-1918. Unpublished Pd.D. Dissertation, Boston College, 1997.

I29ln other words, to be Anglicized is not to be English: almost the same, but not quite. On the ambivalence of colonial discourse, see Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry & Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse" October 28 (Spring 1984): 125-133; Bhabha, '"Signs Taken for Wonders': Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817" in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. "Race Writing, & Difference" (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986): 163-184. Abdul R JanMohamed criticizes Bhabha and argues that Bhabha falsely assumes the unity of the colonial subject, and that this ambivalence cannot be viewed outside of its historical, colonial context. Thus these discourses serve both a conscious, deliberate and unconscious ideological function of transforming difference into moral difference and superiority. See Abdul R. JanMohamed "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature" in Gates, Jr. editor, "Race ", Writing & Difference (Chicago, 1986): 78-106. See also Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle" in Mohanty, Russo, Torres eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 19919): 11, 33. For a discussion of such issues between Native Americans and colonizers in see, Gerald Sider, "When parrots learn to talk, and why they can't: domination, deception, and self-deception in Indian- white relations" Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 29 (January 1987):3-23. 144 direction.130 As discussed earlier, such constructions depended heavily on the construction of a 'Golden Age' in Welsh history that nationalists could model themselves upon as the inheritors of 'true' Welshness. Writing about the nature of the 'true

Welshman' rnd 'Welshwoman' in the pages of Young Wales, Owen Rhoscomyl131 compared the Welshman of the late eighteenth century with that of the late nineteenth century. Both of these representations differed radically from those of working class men in England. He blamed Welsh nonconformist chapels and their earlier influence in defining Welsh morality, culture, and ethnicity for undermining Welsh men's masculinity, stating that:

That careless, witty, drinking, love-making, fighting Welshman; never too much to eat, but always a merry jest; always a ready fund of satirical catches; always ready for the games or a little rough horseplay - where is he now? Well, the chapel clutched him pretty tight: told him that he had a soul to be saved, and insisted upon his stopping his dancing and drinking, and saving it at once. It stopped all his dancing and most of his drinking; but as to his love-making; that seems pretty deep in, as certain statistics show. His fighting, too, is there yet, though he does not now strip naked to it....

The chapel... scotched a good deal of the old Adam in us, but it never succeeded in thoroughly emasculating us ... the chapel is beginning to be on its trial, haled to the bar by its own sons and ministers. Doubtless we shall in good time find the dancing restored again, though by that time stewed tea will probably have left us no stomachs to digest the strong ale

130 See Uma Chakravarti, "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past" in Sangari and Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990): 27-87. Chakravarti points to new Indian nationalists reconstruction of themselves as Aryans, after the identification of an ancient golden age that they would recreate in the post-colonial world.

l31'Owen Rhoscomyl' was the pen name of Arthur Owen Vaughan (1863-1919). Deborah C. Fisher, Who's Who in Welsh History. (Swansea: Christopher Davies, 1997): 148. 145

of our fathers.132

Here Rhoscomyl chastised his contemporaries for rejecting their pre-eighteenth century

'Celtic' culture and traditions, such as dancing, drinking, chasing women and fighting naked, and turning to the chapel in response to the 1847 Blue Book Report's condemnation of Welsh cultural practices as immoral.

Rhoscomyl argued against considering the Welsh a timeless racial type, hopelessly traditional and out of place in the modern world; instead the Welsh character existed "to be modified or moulded, to be strengthened into new force or watered down to new feebleness."133 Rhoscomyl asserted that Welshmen must regain their national

virility by choosing the path of education rather than religious nonconformity: "Of the

four races [English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish ] we stand on the threshold of the greatest change - and that change for the better." The author identified education as the source of

national and cultural strength, creating a virile population of men. He argued that

"Education, together with increased facilities for intercommunication, must broaden the

Welsh character of the moment into the quiet, confident, and ready strength which comes of being firm planted on one's feet, and able to look clearly and cooly straight to the

uttermost horizon on every hand." He called for Wales to look outside the chapel and

towards the larger world. Using sexualized language he concluded: "Wales has sown

strength in the educational movement; logically she must reap vigour and virility such as

will burst through all narrowness as the young eagle bursts forth out of its shell. Cool

132Owen Rhoscomyl, "As to Some Conventions" Young Wales IV, No. 39 (March 1898): 49-58.

'"Ibid. 146 controlling rather than fiery prompting is what the race will need then."

According to Rhoscomyl these future generations of Welshmen should not simply imitate their masculine, yet frivolous forefathers of the in their drinking, dancing and sexual peccadilloes, nor their fathers' devout but "emasculating" Welsh nonconformity, but should follow the model of cool, controlled rationality.134 Religion was still important, but must take the form of forward-looking, Evangelical devotion, rather than backward-looking, insular and uniquely Welsh nonconformity preached in the

Welsh language. Welsh nationalist author Rhoscomyl held up English Victorian middle- class ideas of masculine control and behavior for the future men of Wales to follow.135

Yet he also sent a mixed message, by invoking the distant 'Celtic' past as a positive model of behavior destroyed by chapel culture. These mixed messages reveal the disagreement among Welsh nationalists over what actually made a 'real Welsh man', although masculinity remained a central preoccupation in all nationalist writing and periodicals.

Moreover Welsh nationalist efforts should also be controlled, pragmatic and rational, in the view of Rhoscomyl and others, not militantly aimed at an independent

l34Nor should that education take place using the Welsh language, despite the increasing amount of bi-lingualism and the corresponding decline in monoglot Welsh speakers revealed in the 1891 census. Edwards, Principal of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth urged R.T. Jenkins to "Go to the English chapel." As the authors Geraint H. Jenkins, Gwenfair Parry and Mari A. Williams, "More people speak it than ever before" in Gwenfair Parry and Mari A. Williams ed., The Welsh Language and the 1891 Census (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999): 467 (454-482). argue, the university which billed itself as 'the People's University" created its own English academic culture, alongside other Anglicizing agents including the railways and tourists.

l35On constructions of middle class, Evangelical Victorian masculinity see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): chapters 2-3. 147

Welsh nation.136 Editor J. Hugh Edwards noted that, "the Principality of Wales has profited by the supersession of the old theory that nationalism is a reversion to sheer tribalism which must needs be discouraged and destroyed."137 Edwards supported a

''modern" form of nationalism, not wedded to . The equation of emasculating militancy and emotion with separatist politics and radical policies was not unique to debates about the nature of Welsh nationalism. Male literary figures such as suffragist

Scotsman William Archer criticized militant tactics. He recommended "active agitation according to the rules of the game as men understand it."138 According to Archer the political game was played by 'real men' using rules, strategically, rationally and in a controlled manner, in contrast to the 'rowdies' who interrupted meetings and broke windows of public buildings. Male suffragists who adopted militant tactics based on conceptions of masculine chivalry undermined their own masculinity in the eyes of the

136This was the dominant view within Welsh nationalism during the last decades of the 19lh century. See Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: A History of Modern Wales. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981): 121. The Dean of St. David's, when asked "As a Welsh Nationalist yourself, do you think that Welsh nationalism is being developed along the right lines?" stated, "I am always glad to see Welsh nationalism of the right kind fostered and encouraged. It should not, however, be of a clannish, priggish, conceited type, but broad-minded and large-hearted, and, above all, with religion as its essential element." "Interviews with Welsh Leaders: VII. The Dean of St. David's" Young Wales Vol. 8, No. 85 (January 1902): 10-13.

IJ7J. Hugh Edwards, "The Month in Wales", Wales: A National Magazine Volume I, No. I, (May 1911): 50.

l3*For a discussion of the need to constantly reinforce and reconstruct the tenets of masculinity see Michael Roper and John Tosh eds., Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991). On the increased antipathy towards male domesticity and the increased imperial emphasis on the unmarried, imperial hero playing the imperial game after 1870 see John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity in the Middle Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, l999):2-3, 174-181. 148 public and the police and endangered their credibility as 'champions' of women.139

Rhoscomyl too argued that "It is time too to bare the steel against dilettante nationalism; time to lift the spear against those "ardent nationalists" who are in the business of nationalism for what they can get out of it." He asserted that "nationalism must have its goal if it is to live ... if we be men enough to win them." That goal, according to Rhoscomyl was not 'Wales for the Welsh', but "the place of Wales in the

Empire,.. -to lead, not follow; in fact, to make good our national motto: 'T Ddraig Goch a ddyry gychwyn. " [The Red Dragon will lead the way] Rhoscomyl condemned Welsh

leaders who sought positions of authority or political independence. Instead he proposed a cultural agenda of leadership from behind, based on Welsh educational and moral difference and thus superiority. He argued that the secret to stimulating leadership qualities in Welsh men was forgetting the wrongs of the past, stating: "What is done is done, it cannot be recalled. What is to be done, and what may be done, is what counts most. And our first need is to be lords in our own house." Welsh men must leave behind

their past, emotional 'ardent', militant and thus feminized nationalism, and become cool, controlled, patriarchal lords in their own houses as in the nation of Wales. This in turn

would, in theory, give Wales access to its role in the Empire. Rhoscomyl described

Wales's role in that Empire as, "a breeding-place of leaders; of fresh strengths and

'"See Angela V. John, "Men, manners and militancy: Literary men and women's suffrage" in Angela V. John and Claire Eustance eds, The Men's Share? Masculinities, Male Support and Women's Suffrage in Britain, 1890-1920. (London: Routledge, 1997):97.( 88-109) The women's suffrage movement, like the Welsh nationalist movement demanded that participants reconsider their own masculinity and femininity, often resulting in competing versions of both. Sandra Stanley Holton, "Manliness and militancy: The political protest of male suffragists and the gendering of the 'suffragette' identity" in Angela John, The Men's share?, pp. 111-112. 149 inspirations for the toiling myriads of earth's delvers and diggers, and a source above all for a steadfast strength of soul in the hour of temptation to the Empire, the hour that comes so suddenly and sometimes so unforeseen."140 He argued that young middle class men, future nationalist, nonconformist, and class leaders of the Welsh working classes, who wished "to see Wales not a mere lichen-covered buttress of England, but a firm and polished pillar of the Empire" should forget about the "limitations of "types" and the

"Celtic temperament which is supposed to make us faithless and unstable."141 To achieve this, Welsh men must adhere to the correct, masculine, nationalist path outlined by

Rhoscomyl. Yet, at the same time that Rhoscomyl emphasized the importance of the domestic, patriarchal role for Welsh men as heads of households, English trends moved away from the earlier Victorian model of domesticity. Thus Welsh nationalists imposed a model of Victorian gender roles that grew increasingly unpopular in the country they sought to emulate.

In contrast to the negative 'Orientalized' judgements made by Rhoscomyl, other

Welsh authors also essentialized the emotional characteristics of the Welsh race, defending them as positive attributes. Principal E. Griffith-Jones, argued that regarding the

Psychical characteristics of our race, the Welsh are uniquely marked by their emotional intensity. If the Frenchman lives primarily in his brain, and the average Englishman in his hands and feet, the Welshman lives in his heart.... We have intellectual Welshmen and practical Welshmen,

l40'Owen Rhoscomyl' "The Place of Wales in the Empire", Wales: A National Magazine. Vol 2, No. 7, (July 1912): 369-371.

141'Owen Rhoscomyl' "The Qualities of the Welsh People" Young Wales X. (1904): 119. 150

but, unquestionably, the quick feeling, eager, sentimental type of temperament is predominant amongst us. A Welsh lover is well equipped with the epithets of endearment, and a mother enjoys many synonyms for expressing her feelings as she croons over her baby ... every Welshman worthy of his land is at least potentially a poet.142

Yet this presented a dilemma for those who sought to assert the virility and masculinity of the Welsh nation as required for membership in British Empire and the nations of the world. The hegemonic standards of the day did not judge uncontrolled emotion a valued masculine trait.143 Interestingly in this case France was identified with the brain, and

England with skilled hands and feet, more pragmatic skills. Griffith-Jones's juxtaposition undermined others who sought to justify the masculinity of the Welsh nation and male population based on the requirements of the British Empire for controlled, rational heads of households, 'manly' hunters and military men.144 He was not alone. W.J. Gruffydd asserted in 1912 that "At the present time, the male population of Wales is divided into preachers, politicians, and ... '.'[poets]."145 Characterizations of the Welsh as emotional, undisciplined, and thus different from the English became enshrined in

M2PrincipaI E. Griffith-Jones, "The Celtic Genius" J. Hugh Edwards ed., Wales: A National Magazine. Vol 2, No. 4 (): 203.

l43For a discussion of the changing relational nature of masculinities see Michael Roper and John Tosh, "Introduction: Historians and the politics of masculinity" in Roper and Tosh eds., Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800. (London: Routledge, 19919): 1-24.; John Tosh, "What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain," History Workshop Journal 38 (1994): 179-202.; Tosh, A Man's Place. Catherine Hall, '"From Greenland's Icy Mountains ... to Afric's Golden Sand': Ethnicity, Race and Nation in Mid-Nineteenth Century England" Gender & History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 1993): 212-230.; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Working Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).

I44lbid.

I45W.J. Grurfydd, M.A., "Representative Welshmen: X. John Morris Jones" J. Hugh Edwards ed., Wales: A National Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 12 (December 1912): 647. 151 educational policy and practice. W. Llewellyn Williams, reported that although

Englishmen can plod along from day to day impelled by a high sense of duty; the Welshman will perform miracles if only he is allowed to "enthuse" now and again. The Englishman is content with his ordered ritual; the Welshman needs his periodical "revival." The Code of Regulations may be sufficient for the Saxon, but the Welshman, if he is to persevere in the dull routine of system, must be allowed his occasional fling. And so, most wisely, the Welsh Department of the Board of Education have decreed that St. David's Day shall be kept as a day of educational junketing in Wales. Welsh boys and girls, and their parents and as well, are encouraged henceforth to hold high revelry on the festival day of their native saint. Let them sing the old folk-songs of Wales ... Let them tell the romance of Old Wales, her joys, her sorrows, her failures, and her victories, her heroes, her saints, and her martyrs.146

Here the Welsh people, not just students or children, are portrayed as youngsters who need to be indulged rather than as adult patriots and workers. What appeared a report of victory in the battle for recognition of Welsh cultural difference implicitly infantilized

Welshmen and Welsh society in comparison to the English. Other discussions of the

'Welsh character' reinforced the image of an effeminate people in comparison to the

'Teuton type' and the 'Anglo-Saxon race.' Lord Justice Vaughan Williams explained the fact that the Celts never produced a successful political state in comparison to their 'much duller Teutonic cousins" arguing that:

The characteristics of the Celts seem to be quick-wittedness, depth of religious feeling, love of fine arts, passion and energy, sympathy including politeness, a tendency to oppose public law as distinguished from the private law of the tribe or family, a lack of love of personal liberty. The

146W. Llewelyn Williams, K.C. M.P. Wales: A National Magazine Vol. 4, No. 25. (May 1913): 25. The practice continued over the years. See J. Hugh Edwards, "The Month in Wales" Wales: A National Magazine Vol. 6, NO. 36, (): 123-124. Edwards noted that Mr. Alfred Davies was responsible for supervising the "new policy of linking up the elementary schools of Wales with the patriotic memories of St. David's Day. He has sown the seed of Cymric patriotism in virgin soil, and each successive generation will mark an abundant harvest." 152

Celts cannot be said to be orderly or practical, they are addicted to theory and are dreamers of the past. The characteristics of the Teutons seem to me to be love of liberty and respect for the rights _ men, respect for the law when made by themselves, a love of justice, at all events towards those of their own race, a love of labour coupled with a love of liberty.147

Despite touting these characteristics as positive attributes, such binary comparisons between the Welsh and other cultures, primarily used to create a sense of national difference and pride in Welsh culture, also created a sense of insecurity amongst Welsh nationalists.

This insecurity about their own culture reflected the subordinate place Wales occupied within Britain and its hierarchal system of stratification along lines of race, class, and gender, despite efforts to create pride in being Welsh and "Celtic", in contrast to the dull and humorless "Saxon" English. In 1911 a report on the natural sciences in

Wales included the following story, comparing the country to an old, uneducated country

lady afraid of certain kinds of knowledge and education:

"There is a well-known story to the effect that a lady, on sending her daughter to College, wrote to the Professor of Physiology and said: "I beg that you will not teach Sally anything about her inside; I don't think it is good for her, and, besides, I think it is rather rude."

The author, Principal E.H. Griffiths, Vice of the University of Wales

continued,

One cannot resist the conviction that this has been somewhat the attitude of Dame Wales in the past; she has been slightly suspicious of natural science, more especially of those biological and geological studies which

l47Lord Justice Vaughan Williams, "The Celtic Character" Wales: A National Magazine Vol. 3, No. ((January 1913): 3. 153

deal with evolution. She has not been sure that it was "Good for" her children.

Griffiths chastised the Welsh for timidity in the pursuit of science and modernity. Yet at the same time Griffiths identified this flaw as an essentialized cultural characteristic, unchangeable however much such a change might be desirable, thereby embedded in the temperament and nature of Welshmen:

There are some, whose patriotism appears circumscribed (although, perhaps, for that reason, the more intense), who say that the temperament of the Welshman fits him to tread the flowery pathways of literature and music rather than the rugged roads of natural science.

As this passage reveals, Griffiths used gendered imagery, contrasting the less masculine and curvy 'flowery pathways' of literature and music to the manly and straight 'rugged roads' of natural science. After this creation of two dichotomous approaches to the world of education, implicitly giving both value based on their differing degrees of masculinity,

Griffiths in the next sentence made a point about the usefulness of the less-masculine,

'flowery' gift of imagination:

They claim, and I think rightly claim, that he excels in the gift of imagination; and they assume, and I think wrongly assume, that this gift is unfruitful when applied to the study of hard facts, or the demonstration of problems; and that the Welshman possibly lacks that steady, grim perseverance in the mastery of apparently uninteresting details, and that logical sequence of demonstration which are considered as the hall-marks of the scientist.148

Although Griffiths agreed that the Welsh character was less suited far the 'Teutonic'

English 'steady, grim perseverance in the mastery of apparently uninteresting details' of

'•""Principal E.H. Griffiths, Sc.D. FRS, "Welshmen and Natural Science" Wales: A National Magazine Vol. I, No. 3 (July, 1911): 131. 154 science, he challenged the notion that the less masculine gift of imagination had no use in the field overall. Griffiths emphasized the complementary relationship of the two gendered national characteristics, * oth of which justified Welsh national difference as more female yet valuable, justifying Wales's subordination to England within Britain.

1 he characterization of the Welsh nation and culture as an old woman mired in tradition, a mother who wished to qualify the information her daughter should learn, represented a tension and insecurity within nationalist discourses. On the one hand women who were only supposed to be mothers, were expected to be heroines, sacrificing their comforts for their male (and in the rare case female) children, and protecting their legacies of language, music and traditions. This woman, labeled 'the greatest heroine that can ever be-a Welshman';* mother," sacrificed luxuries or gave them to her son, denied herself the bare necessities of life to give her son an education, and prayed for his success upon her knees "to the All Powerful that their sacrifices should not be in vain."149

On the other hand traditional, religious, uneducated, barely literate mothers seemingly avoided such knowledge themselves because it made them uncomfortable.

The continued presence and crucial influence of such women implicitly indicated that

Welsh men, raised by such women, could never quite leave behind those roots and succeed according to the British model. They learned about modernity and their masculine identity at the feet of their traditional, feminine mothers. Similar issues faced middle-class Englishmen raised by their mothers within the domestic household, however

l49Lewis Hywel, "Great Welshmen", J. Hugh Edwards ed. Wales: A National Magazine 1, No. 6, (October 1911):301. 155

Welsh men were doubly troubled by such issues due to their need to affirm their masculinity from the colonized and therefore relatively emasculated side of the imperial relationship.150 The aforementioned story about the Welsh mother reluctant to encourage her daughter's knowledge of her 'inside' implicitly criticized alleged Welsh attitudes favoring traditional literature over the modern hard sciences. This boded poorly if Wales and the Welsh people were to take their place alongside the other nations of Britain within the Empire. The symbol of Dame Wales, an older woman from the hills dressed in traditional garb, herself subtly undermined Welsh nationalist representations of Wales and Welshmen as modern, industrious, capable and appropriately masculine members of

Britain and the world as well as in practice.

The perceived degrees of effeminacy and deficient masculinity of their race, nation, and national symbol troubled many Welsh nationalist men. The pages of Wales:

A National Magazine in 1912 contained a number of debates over the historical basis and gendered traits of a new national emblem for Wales.151 While both sides found valid historical justification for both the and the daffodil, Ivor B. John argued that "Is it

likely that any nation would choose a cultivated vegetable of this kind as its national

150On the difficulties of Englishmen making the transition to an adult masculine identity see John Tosh, "What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain" History Workshop Journal 38(1994): 196. As I argue above, Welshmen raced even greater difficulties due to the imperial relationships within Britain.

ls'The issue was raised prior to this, and was debated up through the Second World War in a number of periodicals. See "Editor's Notes" Wales: A National Magazine for the English Speaking Parts of Wales III, No. 24 (April 1896): 185-6; Ivor B. John, M.A., "The National Emblem of Wales" J. Hugh Edwards eds., Wales: A National Magazine II, No. 3 (March 1912): 125-134; Llewelyn Williams, "The Emblem of Wales" Wales: A National Magazine III, No. 3 (March 1913): 111-114. To this day both symbols are seen on flags along the Promenade in Aberystwyth and elsewhere. 156 emblem?" and noted that the leek lacked any kind of distinction to justify such status.

John then compared the cultivated, i.e. 'tame' vegetable to the usual choice of wild flowers, for example "the — the Irish shamrock ... ~ the Scotch thistle -the fleur-de-lys of France— the broom (planta genista) of the Plantagenets."152 In response

W.J. Gruffydd conceded that the leek should win out, whether or not it was chosen by

Welsh writers, or assigned by the English, because even if the latter, he stated, "I take it that England meant to pay Wales the very highest compliment; they held that the energies of the Welsh were better symbolised by the useful practical leek than by the lady-like and languishing daffodil."153 Here Gruffydd demonstrated the importance that English opinion held in the formation of Welsh national identity. Even the national symbol was redolent with gendered implications regarding the virility and masculinity of Wales, as they dismissed the seductive and dangerous femininity of both the daffodil, and thus

Wales as a useless and 'languishing' or "gaudy flower" trying to supplant the place of the humble yet masculine leek in the hearts of Welshmen.154

CONCLUSION

The content, in which gender-both masculinity and femininity were central as well

l52Ibid., p. 130.

151 W.J. Gruffydd, "Welsh Literary Notes", Wales: A National Magazine, II, No. 5 (): 290-292.

l34Marquess of Tullibardine, "The National Emblem of Wales: The Leek or the Daffodil?" Wales: A National Magazine IV (1913): 207-212. See also W. Llewelyn Williams, "The National Emblem of Wales" Wales: A National Magazine IV (September 1913): 266-268. 157 as deeply contested, of the principal Welsh nationalist periodicals in the decades prior to the First World War illuminate the complicated and contradictory gendered process of identifying what the Welsh nation was supposed to look like. That process remained unresolved until 1914 and indeed, continues through the present. Elite members of both sexes participated in the process, contributing varied viewpoints that changed over time, within broader contexts of debates over women's suffrage and concerns over the status of imperial masculinity both in England and Wales. Although consensus on most issues was rarely reached, both male and female members of the Welsh intelligentsia asserted that Welsh women were responsible for maintaining continuity with the Welsh cultural past, passing those traditions, language and history on into the future. As the nineteenth turned to the twentieth century, all authors relegated women's responsibility for the future of the language and national culture to the domestic sphere.

Welsh men too were admonished to avoid militant actions favoring the creation of an independent Welsh nation and look coolly and rationally towards the future of Wales as a full member of the British empire, while at the same time preserving their unique but effeminate 'Celtic' gifts of emotion, imagination and literary flair. The often contradictory messages about gender roles presented in a single number of Young Wales, compared to the more consistently conservative views conveyed in Wales: A National

Magazine for the English speaking parts of Wales, or Wales: A National Magazine demonstrated that "Welsh culture" was not a timeless inheritance from the past agreed

upon by all Welsh people, who all spoke Welsh, and thus embodied Welsh culture.

Rather this evidence reveals the complicated, contested, and ultimately contradictory 158 elitist process through which elites constructed what it meant to be "legitimately" part of the Welsh nation from the top down, and then attempted to educate the populace into agreement with that view. The role of the Welsh nation within Britain and the world remained contested throughout the period. We will see in the next chapter that many ordinary people did not agree with nationalist intellectuals and Welsh speakers in Wales continued to grow fewer in number. Yet these multiple and incompatible constructions of Welsh gender roles, culture and nation continued to resonate and influence Welsh nationalists during the balance of the twentieth century. 159

CHAPTER FOUR

'The backbone of the nation Women & Gender in Plaid Cymru, 1925-1945

This chapter examines the rise of Plaid Cymru- the Nationalist Party of Wales after its founding in 1925, focusing on the construction of nationalist gender roles within general Party ideology and its separate Women's Section (Adran Merched) under the leadership of poet and author Kate Roberts and others.1 The Party leadership prescribed the crucial, if secondary role, of Welsh women in the rural home, raising the future generations of Welsh-speaking citizens imbued with the spirit of Welsh traditions.

English and Welsh-language party newspapers, Welsh Nationalist and Y Ddraig Goch, both generally and through the publication of dedicated women's columns, disseminated these idealized gender roles among party membership and beyond. Yet as evidence will show, these periodicals and the Party leadership communicated conflicting examples for the women and men of Wales to emulate. Despite the seeming prominence of the

Women's Section of Plaid Cymru and female leaders at both the local and national level, nationalist leaders, both male and female, used the Women's Section's separation to keep women's formal participation in Plaid Cymru marginalized to the domestic, supportive roles of holding 'coffee mornings' and 'jumble sales' to raise money and distribute

'Hereafter referred to as Plaid Cymru. The original founders named the organization Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru, which was shortened to Plaid Cymru during the mid-1940s. Adran Merched will be used for Women's Section in this paper, however it must be noted that Merched'Ferched in Welsh means daughters or girls, thus the name of the Section was changed to Adran y Menywod meaning women's section with no paternal implications. See Laura McAllister, Plaid Cymru: The Emergence of a Political Party (Bridgend: Seren, 2001). 160 literature, organizing the annual Summer School, and other tasks that did not threaten male dominance over the Party's 'important' functions such as economic policy formation. Even after 1925 Welsh nationalist women remained cast in the supporting, complementary roles found in the hegemonic Victorian gender ideology based around the notion of separate spheres and 'traditional' culture, as was the case in other post-colonial nationalist movements in the former British Empire.2 This continued in Wales long after this ideology eroded in the rest of Britain. Yet, within these constraints, as workers, volunteers, fundraisers and ideological symbols, the female members of Plaid Cymru remained crucial to the financial survival and growth of the Party.

Welsh Nationalist Organizations, 1880-1920

As discussed in the previous chapter, the decades between 1880 and 1920 witnessed the rise of a number of groups interested in promoting their competing

2In the British case, Victorian domestic ideology of separate spheres acted as a hegemonic discourse, the ideology of the dominant middle-classes and industrial capitalist culture both imposed upon, and implicitly accepted as hegemonic, by the rest of society. In other words, as Gramsci argued, hegemony required the complicity and participation of the masses subject to the hegemonic discourse. On the intersection of Gramsci's Western Marxism and Foucault's conceptions of power see Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, "An Introduction," in Williams and Chrisman eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia, 1994): 1-20. On hegemony see also T.J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90 no. 3 (June 1985):567-593. For comparisons to other nationalist movements which mobilized around the crucial role of the family and the private sphere as the site of women's supportive activities and subordinate position based on the invention of a 'natural' division of gender roles, in this case both and in , see Anne McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family," Feminist Review 44 (Summer 1993):61-80. McClintock builds on Tom Nairn's notion of the nation as the 'Modern Janus", with one face looking back into the mists of a 'traditional' past, and with the other looking into an infinite, progressive, modern future. The neck that supported this Janus-faced nation centered on women's role as passive conduits of invented 'traditions' from the past into the future, as such women served as the 'living archive' of the nation, a 'temporal anomaly'. Welsh nationalism continued this pattern, and encountered no serious feminist challenges to this gender ideology within nationalist movements. 161 versions of Welsh interests and culture. These usually included encouraging the survival and expansion of the Welsh language among the increasingly English-speaking population of Wales and in Britain as a whole. Building on the model provided by the influential role and tactics used by the Irish Parliamentary Party to pressure the Liberal

Party to support Home Rule for Ireland, Ministers of Parliament led by Thomas Edward

Ellis and founded the Cymru Fydd, (Wales to Be/Young Wales) movement to assert similar agendas for Wales.3 The Honorable Society of

Cymmrodorion in London held lectures and supported academic exploration of Welsh history, education and language.4 Other groups such as the Undeb Dirwestol Merched y

De (South Wales Women's Temperance Union) and the Welsh Women's Temperance

Societies, as well as the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies emphasized the unique circumstances and needs of Wales within larger British organizations.5

By the early decades of the twentieth century, most of these groups had abandoned the more politically radical electoral elements of their platforms. Earlier agitation succeeded in obtaining recognition of the distinct cultural character of Wales

3Thomas Edward Ellis (1859-1899), M. P. For Merioneth (188601899) and chief Liberal whip (1894-5). David Lloyd George ((1863-1945), M.P. for (1890-1945), Chancellor of the (1908-1915), Prime Minister (1916-1922).

4David Lewis Jones, "Capital Men and Women: Leading Welsh personalities and the London Welsh," in Emrys Jones ed., The Welsh in London 1500-2000 (Cardiff: University Wales Press on behalf of The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 2001): 229-236.

5 Wales has remained relatively absent from discussions of British women's suffrage movements. Most representations present Wales as extremely hostile to suffrage campaigns, however as one scholar notes, quiet, steady support for the Women's suffrage movement occurred under the NU WSS who continued to found branches and expand their numbers after • >07. Suffragists participated in imperial celebrations such as the 1911 King's Coronation as well as demonstrating against David Lloyd George and the Liberal Party, two major symbols of Welshness at the time. See Kirsti Bohata, '"For Wales, See England?' Suffrage and the New Woman in Wales," Women's History Review 11, no. 4 (2002): 643-656. 162 within the British empire as evidenced by the foundation of the National Library of

Wales, the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, and Disestablishment of the

Anglican Church in Wales.6 By 1909 the discussed a proposal to found a Welsh Liberal Association. They based the need for a new Welsh political organization on the recognition that as a political force Cymru Fydd (Future Wales) was dead and that prior to this the political center of Welsh activism in London remained focused in the Welsh chapels.7 Newer organizations focused on Welsh culture rather than politics, founding the National Eisteddfod Committee, establishing the St. David's

Eve Welsh National Festival, holding Welsh Flag Day on St. David's Day, the founding of a Welsh Order of Chivalry8 and other cultural festivals. Even groups such as the

Welsh Nationalist League (1910-12) and the longer lived Union of Welsh Societies

(Undeb Cenedlaetholy Cymdeithas Cymreig), the latter founded as an umbrella

6Both the National Museum and National Library of Wales were founded in 1905, and the Disestablishment of the Church in Wales occurred on 31 March 1920. For more on the campaigns to gain specifically Welsh national institutions see Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 1868-1922 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991 ):218, 274.

7Ibid, p. 232. See David Lewis Jones, "Capital Men and Women: Leading Welsh personalities and the London Welsh," in Emrys Jones ed., The Welsh in London 1500-2000 (Cardiff: Honorable Society of Cymmrodorion/University of Wales Press, 200l):232-233.

"Although it never fully developed into a reality, several members of the Welsh Nationalist League devoted considerable thought and effort to the foundation of a St. David's Order of Chivalry, also referred to as the St .David's Federation of Chivalric and Humane Organizations in Wales. As J. Cambrensis Williams explained in a recruitment letter, they hoped that "the flower of Welsh manhood and womanhood will become associated in support of this essentially national, voluntary, civilian, non-political, humanitarian, and truly chivalric movement, which, while attempting to co-ordinate the various organisations mentioned and extending their operations, will, at the same time, endeavour to arrest the tendency towards over-lapping among them. The Boy Scout organisation in Wales, in its best elements, might form a Junior Branch of the Order, which lays such stress on pluck and manliness, more especially as exemplified in the rescue or protection of the innocent, the weak and the defenceless." See National Library of Wales. NLW MS 21910 E. Welsh Nationalist League Papers, f. 137. Letter from J. Cambrensis Williams to possible members, March 15, 1912. 163 organization to encompass a number of Welsh groups, focused on asserting and gaining recognition for cultural difference from the British government, rather than on active,

formal political campaigning.9 This emphasis on culture over electoral politics also

reflected the loss of influence by Welsh M.P.s and Welsh issues following the 'Liberal

Landslide' election of 1906. Despite this victory of the Liberal-Labour during

this election, afterwards the Liberal Party no longer relied on Irish and Welsh M.P.s to

maintain a majority in Parliament and no longer felt as much pressure to address 'Celtic'

demands such as Welsh Disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales or possibly

Home Rule. Moreover, although he remained a symbol of Welsh national pride as the

premier Welsh politician of the age, David Lloyd George turned away from Welsh

nationalist politics to the wider, British political arena once he joined the British Cabinet

in 1908.10 Thus by the inter-war period, frustration with the overwhelming and

9For the agenda of the Welsh Nationalist League, which emphasized Welsh disestablishment and passed resolutions in favor of Home Rule, see NLW MS 21910E Welsh Nationalist League Papers 1911- 1912. Also the pamphlet, YsprydGlyndwr neuy cleddlie metho hedd: gan "iorworthfeddyg" (Aelodo r cyngrair cenedlaethol cymreig). Y'nghyda chadlef gan eifion wyn. A word in English at the end. (Gwrecsam: Hughes a'i Fab, 1911). On the subject of the National Union of Welsh Societies (UCCC) see NLW, E.T. John Papers, 5552. Arthen Evans, The Tenth Anniversary of the Formation of the National Union of Welsh Societies. The Secretary of the National Union of Welsh Societies reported that consensus regarding the desire for Home Rule for Wales among the M.P.s representing Wales indicated to the organization that such concerns remained "national questions lying outside the sphere of party politics." Thus, the organization focused its efforts on calling for and organizing St. David's Day Festivals and conferences to discuss securing for Wales "its due recognition as a nation and a nationality" and develop a national scheme of public education. See NLW, E.T. John Papers, 5555. St. David's Day 1925.

'"Lloyd George turned to the British political scene in large part due to his frustration with the inability of Welsh Liberals and nationalists to set aside their regional differences and join into a united organization under his leadership. See National Library of Wales. NLW E.T. John Papers, 5552. The leadership of the NUWS noted this new tendency of Lloyd George, reporting that "During the General election of 1922, the National Union [of Welsh Societies] submitted three questions to all the Parliamentary Candidates contesting Constituencies in Wales and Monmouthshire. The questions were:-- I. Are you in favour of Home Rule for Wales? (continued...) 164 unreciprocated allegiance of Wales to the Liberals and Lloyd-George, led a small number of intellectuals in a new direction, resulting in the founding and rise of Plaid

Cymru the Nationalist Party of Wales.

A New Path?

In 1925 two small group of nationalists combined to form Plaid Genedlaethol

Cymru- 'he Welsh Nationalist Party, later renamed Plaid Cymru under the leadership of

Ambrose Bebb and from South Wales, and H.R. Jones and Reverend

Lewis Valentine from North Wales." One woman, Mai Roberts, secretary to E.T. John,

Liberal M.P., assisted in arranging the meeting, and claimed to be the first to register and pay her membership dues.12 As developed over the following months, Party policy focused on two main points, the 'compulsory use of Welsh' by local authorities, Party membership, and the educational system and the necessity of breaking links with all other political parties in Britain. Although previous organizations such as the National

Union of Welsh Societies had emphasized the importance of maintaining the strength of

10(...continued) 2. If a Home Rule Bill were introduced in the next Parliament would you support the principle of such a measure? 3. Would you be in favour of making both English and Welsh Official languages in Wales under the new regime - both languages to be treated on a footing of equality, and to possess and enjoy equal freedom, rights and privileges? The answers received were preponderatingly [sic] favourable to the views of the Union on these great questions. It is true that a minority of the present Members of Parliament did not reply to the questionnaire, and among them much to the surprise of some of us was the Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd George."

"D. , The Welsh Nationalist Party 1925-1945: A Call to Nationhood. (New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1983): 35-43.

l2Laura McAllister, Plaid Cymru: The Emergence of a Political Party (Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 2001): 186 n. 2. 165 the Welsh language, Plaid Cymru policy criticized their limited vision of the role of

Welsh within a nationalist movement. The editor of The Welsh Nationalist, writing in

English, argued that the Welsh language should exist, not just for its own sake, but in aid of political and economic agendas, and criticized the policy of the National Union of

Welsh Societies (NUWS) and its leader William George. He stated:

What value would the Welsh language be if it did not express itself in political and economic spheres? .. if content to express its nationality thenceforward only in the sphere of literature and arts, then that literature and those arts will very quickly become provincial and unimportant- mere echoes of the ideas and artistic movements of the neighbouring and dominant nation.13

According to Party policy, developed under the leadership of Saunders Lewis, Plaid

Cymru should pursue the election of candidates and the boycott of the Westminster

Parliament, following the model of the Irish several years previously. In differentiating

themselves from previous nationalist organizations, the early leaders of Plaid Cymru succeeded in appealing, although often unevenly, to both cultural and political

nationalists. Morris Williams emphasized the importance of both "protecting and enriching Welsh culture" as well as the need to "improve our workers' standard of

living" and argued that any member who forgot to do one or the other was "betraying the cause."14

,3Notes and Comments: Language and Politics" Welsh Nationalist II, No. 7 (July I933):5.

l4Morris Williams, "Culture and Economics" The Welsh Nationalist Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1932): 3. In the very first issue of the English language publication Williams noted that the Party had been accused of "addressing too much the cultural side of Nationalism and ignoring economic facts." 166

In support of those aims, in July 1926 the organization began publishing a Welsh language monthly newspaper Y Ddraig Goch (The Red Dragon). After much debate

Plaid Cymru began publishing an English language paper, The Welsh Nationalist, in 1932 in order to address a wider audience in both Wales and England, breaking away from the original intentions of the party founders.15 During the formative years of the Party, these periodicals remained the primary means of constructing and communicating the ideals of this new Welsh nationalism to a recently expanded electorate including the working classes and women over thirty years of age.16 In order to take advantage of almost universal suffrage, the Executive Committee of the Party and the editorial committees of both periodicals attempted to develop a pragmatic and focused party platform to distinguish PLid Cymru from their cultural nationalist predecessors and other Welsh political movements, particularly those movements' alliances with the British Liberal

party, implying as it did complicity, and/or active participation in British imperialism.17

For example during the Boer War Welsh politicians and the public followed the Liberal

party lead in supporting the British imperialist campaign. Efforts to demonstrate that

"the people of Wales were ready as a nation to join in the great Imperial work undertaken

l5Despite the publication of The Welsh Nationalist in English and its possible appeal to a much broader audience, the size and detail of Y Ddraig Goch remained much larger, although its editorial policy on women's coverage and gender remained the same.

'"The Representation of the People Act, I9l8extended the franchise down the social scale to include working class men and rate-paying, or married to a rate-payer, women over the age of 30.

l7For example the Welsh campaign to raise money to send Welsh troops and a equip a Welsh field hospital in South Africa during the Boer War, 1900-1. See NLW MS 13724 E. Welsh hospital for South Africa Scrapbook 1900-1901, ffii, iv, vi-viii, reverse, & 7. In addition, prominent citizens in Cardiff sponsored a public meeting in support of the Welsh Hospital to raise money, due to Cardiff's claim to be the capital city of Wales. 167 by England, Scotland, and Ireland" occurred be H .1 London, Wales, and South Africa.

Many of these efforts stemmed from concern that Scotland had already founded their own hospitals, and thus Wales needed to participate, lest it fall behind as a member of the

Empire. One cartoon titled "As Patriotic as the Best" depicted Dame Wales, an older woman in Welsh costume gathering supplies. She stated, "If Scotland an' Ireland can send hospitals to the front, indeed to goodness, I don't mean to be behind, so send your shillings, bachans [little ones], an' let us make our Welsh Hospital worthy of Old Gwalia, look you!"18 In trying to differentiate themselves from complicity with imperialism and construct themselves as different from previous organization, however, these academically-oriented authors and politicians constructed traditional, domestic, complementary national roles for Welsh women, reifying, imposing, and artificially perpetuating the imperial, Victorian, domestic gender ideology of the nineteenth century onto the idealized Welsh family and nation well into tne icae twentieth century.

Women's* Participation in Plaid Cymru

In addition to the historic social, political, religious and economic marginalization of Wales within the British isles, Welsh history remains on the

historiographical margin within the field of British history, while Welsh nationalism has

been ignored and dismissed by scholars focused on more 'successful', often violent, post-

""As Patriotic as the Best" reprinted in Young Wales 6, no. 62 (1900). 168 colonial nationalist contests such as India or Ireland.19 Increased scholarly attention to

Wales within the past two decades continued to ignore the presence of women within

Welsh history.20 Thus Welsh women, and the role they played in Welsh society have remain ioubly marginalized within the historical narrative. Until the past few years even studies that acknowledge the presence of women, attribute little agency or significance to their actions.21 Although several scholars dismissed the political role of trie Plaid Cymru Women's Section as failing to become a 'prominent feature of party organisation', the columns of YDdraig and The Welsh Nationalist, as well as Party

>9Scholars who do address Welsh nationalism, usually political scientists and sociologists, usually evaluate it according to various global models or paths of development based on other post-colonial independence movements. For example Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Charlotte Aull Davies, Welsh Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: The Ethnic Option and the Modern State (New York: Praeger, 1989) etc. Notably, scholars focus on the past four decades, when formal electoral campaigns and the rise of violent fringe groups caused Welsh nationalism to seem more 'authentic' in their claims for an independent nation state. This assumption of the necessary emphasis on the nation-state as the ultimate goal of nationalist movements ignores regional and cultural variation, as well as privileging certain movements over others. This notion is currently being reconsidered regarding East and Central European nationalisms. Thus, despite the relatively late demand for an independent nation state in Wales, Welsh nationalism resembles other post-colonial nationalist movements from across the globe, especially in the mobilization of gender roles and women's subordination to legitimate the nationalist cause, define national identity based on 'invented traditions' and an imagined community, and finally to ensure that women's labor remained firmly within the limits of the domestic sphere and nationalist control.

20K.O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics; Ibid., Rebirth of a Nation.

2lOften casually referred to as the "Add women and stir" mode of women's history, such accounts ignore and fail to analyze the gendered constructions of both men and women and their roles within societies, groups, and life patterns. Although feminist scholarship, in addition to the burgeoning field of imperial, post-colonial, world and subaltern studies have complicated and illuminated the central role that gender play in the maintenance of power hierarchies within and between groups and societies, those insights are rarely applied to Welsh history or Welsh nationalism. A brief listing of exceptions to this include the contributors and editors of the landmark volume edited by Angela V. John, Our Mothers' Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History 1830-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991); and the companion volumes in that series including Jane Aaron, Teresa Rees, Sanda Betts, and Moira Vincentelli ed., Our Sisters' Land: The Changing Identities of Women in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994; Deirdre Beddoe, Out of the Shadows: A History of Women in Twentieth-Century Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000); Kirsti Bohata, 'For Wales, See England? Ursula Masson and a number of other scholars. 169 records, do not support such a narrow definition of political activism.22

From the first years of their publication, the columns of Y Ddraig Goch and The

Welsh Nationalist documented the presence and active roles of prominent women members of the Party The column, "Party Affairs " [Helynty BlaidJ welcomed new members such as author Kate Roberts, Mai Roberts and Lady Mailt Williams of St.

Dogmaels who occasionally acted as an editor.23 The Red Dragon reported the successful efforts of Miss Kate Roberts traveling Wales speaking, recruiting new membership and beginning new branches, including Women's Branches, for the Party.24 As membership increased to 176 members by 192625, and Party organization developed, reports on

22Davies, p. 70. ft 25. Most historians have ignored women in Wales. Scholars such as Deirdre Beddoe, in seeking to redress this imbalance in the historical narrative have not addressed the role of women within the political parties of the twentieth century. See Deirdre Beddoe, Out of the Shadows: A History of Women in Twentieth Century Wales (Cardiff: Wales, 2000): 103. Other scholars also dismiss the role of the women's section in the Party prior to the 1980s, based on a very narrow definition of political involvement and influence. See Laura McAllister, Plaid Cymru: The Emergence of a Political Party (Bridgend: Seren, 2001): 185-208. McAllister acknowledges the male-dominated nature of the Party, while pointing out for the first time that women have made up a significant proportion of the membership of the Party throughout its history. McAllister attributes the resistance to feminism of the late twentieth century amongst Party membership and leadership to feminism's association with foreign ideas and influences, i.e. from outside of Wales similar to the hostile given to ideas from 'white' groups during the movement. Her analysis, admittedly focusing on post-1945 Party development, does not deal with how these gendered conceptions of the nation developed much earlier within the imperial context of Wales' relationship within Britain and its Empire before and during the early years of the Party.

23"Helynt y Blaid", YDdraig Goch, (Hydref 1926):8; Ibid., (Medi 1926):8. Y Ddraig Goch (Awst, 1926):6. Miss Kate Roberts, B.A. published a children's book in 1926, and went on to become the premier Welsh-language author of the 20lh century. "Helynt Y Blaid" Y Ddraig Goch (Tachwedd, 1926): 8. Lady Williams belonged and supported financially any number of Welsh nationalist organizations including the Undeh Cymdeithasau Cenedlaethol Cymraeg [Union of Welsh Societies] and Plaid Cymru.

24 Y Ddraig Goch, (Medi 1926): 5.

25Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party: 1925-1945, p. 67, [table 8] p. 270. By 1930 membership is estimated at 4,000 in 1941. Membership figures were usually grossly overestimated in the pages of both Y Ddraig and The Welsh Nationalist, often seeking also to compensate for lapsed members who did not renew their memberships each year, [check plaid cymru notesj (continued...) 170 branch activities included listings of several of female branch officers in the larger, general party organization.26 By the 1930s the editors of Y Ddraig featured several women, including Nora Celyn Jones; Miss Mai Roberts Secretary of the Women's

Section and founding member of the Party; Miss Cassie Davies M.A.- Lecturer in

Education; and Miss Tegwen Clee-member of the Executive Committee, in "The Party

Gallery" [Oriely Blaid\. This new column featured short biographies and a picture of prominent members of the Party and frequent contributors to the pages of Y Ddraig

Goch.21 Unmarried, educated Welsh women became visible as active members of the

Party and on the pages of both Party periodicals. Yet the presence of so many "Misses" running meetings, attending University, writing columns, traveling around Wales, all public, non-domestic activities, challenged the domestic message these women disseminated in their columns, as well as general Party ideology.

Women remained prominent beyond the pages of Plaid Cymru periodicals as well. One of the first candidates put up for election by the party, Miss Catherine Huws, ran unsuccessfully as the Welsh Nationalist Candidate for the Plas Newydd Ward in the

(...continued)

26"Helynt y Blaid: Symud Rhagom" Y Ddraig Goch, (Tachwedd 1926): 8. This edition of Y Ddraig reported on the meeting of the of Meirioneth [Pwyilgor Sir / Feirion] whose membership included Miss I.E. Gruflydd, ; and Miss M. Louisa Jones, Aberdyfi., as well as the recent meeting of the Women's Branch [Cangen Merchedy Nhalysarn], See also Y Ddraig Goch (Rhagfyr 1927): 7. Ibid., (lonawr, 1928): 8. Ibid, (Rhagfyr, 1934):5.

""Oriel y Blaid-12", Y Ddraig Goch (Hydref, I933):3; "Oriel y Blaid-16", YDdraigGoch (Mawrth, 1934):5; "Oriel y Blaid-19", Y Ddraig Goch (Mehefin, 1934):3; "Oriel y Blaid-12", Y Ddraig Goch (Medi 1934):3. 171

1934 Elections.28 Alongside such public attempts to rally public electoral support for the Party, the Annual Summer School remained the premier activity for renewing members' faith and enthusiasm during the early years of the Party. Women not only helped in the financing and organization of these week-long events, both as donors and fundraisers, but also attended and presented papers on a number of different subjects. For example Friday morning began with a talk by Miss Hilda Jennings from

Brynmawr on "How to perform a social survey."29 This was followed by a presentation on "Work for Women" by Mrs. G. J. Williams of Gwaelod-y-garth.30 The Minutes of the

Summer School Committee for August 1928 reported that the Committee passed a motion thanking Mrs. Mailt Williams for her contributions, while also appointing Miss

Cassie Davies to the responsibility of collecting subscriptions one evening.31 The

Program for the August 1932 Summer School included a Bazaar (Basarj held by Kate

Roberts and Mrs. G. J. Williams to raise money for the Party and a Women's camp for members from out of town, and was chaired for one day by Miss Tegwen Clee.

Female members of Plaid Cymru, participated in these public, Party functions, yet only because they could be viewed as an extension of the domestic sphere. Chairing

28NLW, Plaid Cymru J130-Anerchiad etholiadau lleol (Election Addresses).

29(Sut i wneuthur Ymchwil Cymdeithasol). See NLW Plaid Cymru M23, Rhaglen Ysgol Hafy Blaid Genedlaethol, , (Awst 8 hydy 12, 1932). See also NLW, Plaid Cymru A 28, f. 38.

30(Gwaith I Ferched). See NLW Plaid Cymru M23, Rhaglen Ysgol Hafy Blaid Genedlaethol, Brynmawr, (Awst 8 hydy 12, 1932). See also NLW, Plaid Cymru A 28, f. 38.

3INLW, Plaid Cymru A26-Minute Books, 1925-32, ff. 26-27. (Pasiwyd ein bod o wneud ateb (apel!!?) am gyfraniadau at y Blaid yng nghyfarfod nos Wener, a bod Miss Cassie Davies a Barri i gasglu tanysgrifiadau.; Pasiwyd i arfyn pleidlais o ddiolchgarwch gvvresog i Miss Mailt Williams am ei siec ychwanegol a hanner canpunt.) 172 the sessions aimed at a female audience could be seen as a form of hostessing, an extension of women's role within the home, as single women often performed that function for their political fathers. Miss Jennings and Mrs Williams' presentations focused on subjects about women and their 'social' role as gatherers of information, i.e. formalizing the techniques of gossip, and harnessing social networks already in place for

Party use towards distributing literature, acquiring new members, and raising money.32

Although these remained identified as extensions of the domestic sphere, the presence of so many women simultaneously disrupted the gender constructions disseminated by these periodicals, as women developed their political skills and performed tasks vital to party survival. For example, at the request of the Party, and the Women's section organizer

Nans Jones, women also walked the streets of Wales, visiting homes, knocking on doors, collecting new members, donations of both money and goods, and selling Party materials.33 Indeed, Miss Jones included instructions on the best way to visit people in their homes and how to sell pamphlets. Yet, Women were instructed to take a pleasant and ladylike attitude, given a suggested opening into conversation, to avoid arguments

'no matter what the temptation' and to judge if there was 'desire and chance for more

32See NLW Plaid Cymru K5, Plaid Cymru Bulletin: Ideas and suggestion.-, some old, some new, on ways in which women can assist the work of Plaid Cymru, by spreading its beliefs and raising funds, no date. See also NLW, Plaid Cymru A 28, ff. 112-13. Letter from Tegwen Clee to membership, 1932/33.

""Party News-District Committees" The Welsh Nationalist (April, 1948):6. Miss Annie Davies- Jones, Secretary "I enclose L8 5s.0d, which I have collected from door to door. I had a friendly reception everywhere and found a general readiness to contribute. I am glad to say that the arrangements for the on April 3rd are in hand. Miss Davies Jones sent 45 contributions." See NLW, Plaid Cymru A28, ff 112-3. 1932/33. See also NLW, Plaid Cymru K23, K25. 174 kept the Party financially viable throughout its first two decades, to the small contributors to the St. David's Day Fund.38 Moreover, the Women's Section of the Party held frequent 'bazaars', jumble sales39, coffee mornings, and membership drives to raise money for a Party that remained in debt throughout its first two decades.40 Female members of the Party ran bazaars at the Annual Summer Schools, in 1933 raising over 25 pounds, almost as much as the Party earned selling pamphlets.41 In September 1929 a

Plaid Cymru Bazaar at raised almost ten pounds for Party coffers.42 The Welsh

Nationalist reported on fundraismg efforts every month, for example the Carnarvonshire

Ladies Section's contribution of the 10 pound proceeds of a Jumble sale in 1929.43 By

1948 a similar bazaar at earned 60 pounds.44 Party leadership attributed the successful raising of 3,050 pounds towards the Election fund of 1946 "mainly... to the

,H"Helynt y Blaid", Y Ddraig Goch, (Medi 1926):8. (See archival notes: NLW ) Noted in Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party, p. 200. "St. David's Day fund reaches L 2,000" The Welsh Nation 17, No. 4 (April, 1948):6;The Welsh Nation 18, No. 5 (May, 1949):6. The Welsh Nation 17 No. 9 (September 1947): 6. Etc.

"Jumble sales were similar to the American rummage sale, and involved the sale of any combination of secondhand, donated or handcrafted merchandise, at a market stall, shop or other location with the proceeds donated to the Party, or the St. David's Day fund to support future electoral campaigns. Bazaars focused on the selling of more arts and crafts, and new merchandise.

40Davies, p. 269 (table 3).

4INLW Plaid Cymru M23. Adroddiau YPwyllgor Gwaith / V Gymhadledd 1933-4. Income from the bazaar raised L25.2.2. while pamphlet sales earned L31.1.1/2.

42 "Basary Blaid ym Mhwllheli", Y Ddraig Goch (Medi 1929): 8. Actual receipts contributed to the party were L9, 10s, Od.

43"Party News-Women's Section" The Welsh Nationalist (January, 1938): 8. "Party News-Bazaar" Welsh Nationalist ():8. "Party News-Women's Section" Welsh Nationalist (November 1938): 7.

"""Party News-Bazaars" The Welsh Nationalist (January, 1948), 6. That same editions announced another L20 pounds raised by the Cardiganshire County Committee Tea Party, and a undisclosed amount contributed by the Women's Committee. 175 magnificent effort of the Women's Committee" at a Caernarfon sale, an Aberystwyth

Play, and a Singing evening which raised a combined amount of 350 pounds, ten percent of the total amount needed.45 Indeed, the Women's Sections were asked by the Party

Executive to pursue fundraising as one of their primary functions. The Party asked lady members of the Party to raise money so that the Party could grant fifty pounds to the

National Language Petition Fund, and the Welsh Nationalist reported that at least five different branches had pledged to hold functions to raise funds. The editor stated, "If every county will do their bit,... the lady members of the Party can be truly pleased with themselves for having shouldered this financial burden for such a great cause."46 Indeed, by 1949 the various county Women's Committees were 'rewarded' for their labors by the establishment of a Central Committee to "organize their work on a national basis."47

Thus Party leadership recognized the importance of women's efforts, and sought to organize and harness their labor under the centralized control of the overwhelmingly male Executive Committee of the Party.

In addition to their formal public fundraising efforts, Welsh women engaged in more subtle, if not even more crucial financial support of Party functions, which the

Party clearly recognized. Female members of Plaid Cymru and wives of male Party members supplied tea for the plethora of monthly meetings and larger events held

45"Election Fund" The Welsh Nationalist (January, 1946):4.

46"Party News-Women's Section" The Welsh Nationalist (December, I938):8.

47"Annual Report: Plaid Cymru's Work for Wales" The Welsh Nationalist (August, I949):4. 176 around the country.48 Kate Roberts "rendered hospitality to the visiting speakers" for a large campaign of open-air meetings in 1935.49 Welsh women entertained guests, provided room and board for speakers and tea and cakes at meetings, all domestic activities not defined as 'labor' or 'activism', but on which political movements and all other public functions depend on.50 Moreover, these activities, simply an extension of the domestic role into the public sphere, did not challenge Victorian constructions of women's domestic role that the editors of Y Ddraig and the Welsh Nationalist disseminated in their columns of newsprint.

The pages of Plaid Cymru periodicals, in fact, contained conflicting messages about women's role in the future Welsh nation. As mentioned previously, women were highly visible in both of these publications, as well as at Party events. Mai Roberts founded the Party alongside Saunders Lewis, Ambrose Bebb and by putting these men in contact with one another. Women were officers in local branches and district committees, and formed their own committees and branches as well. Even

4HWelsh Nationalist (December, I938):8. "Tea provided by Mrs. S. O. Tudor, Mrs. E. Stanley Jones, Caernarvon, Miss Eleanor Jones and Miss Mai Roberts, ." See also "Party News- Caernarvonshire" Welsh Nationalist (January 1938):8. "Party News-District Committees- Caernarfon Committee" Welsh Nationalist (April, 1948):6. "Tea provided by the Misses Blodwen Boyer, Edna Jones and Elinor Jones, Deiniolen;. East Committee: Tea was provided by Cardiff members Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. J. E. Jones, Miss Hilda Price and Miss May Nicholas." Mrs. J. E. Jones was the wife of Party Secretary J. E. Jones who ran the Party Office in Cardiff.

"""Success of Great Open-Air Campaign" The Welsh Nationalist (August, 1935): 10. "Party News- Opening of'Ty'r Werin'" The Welsh Nationalist (November, 1938):8.

50For more on the complex relationship between women, gender, domesticity and politics see Victoria Loree Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff eds., Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999):9-10. See also Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,"in Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres eds.. Third World Women arid the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991): I- 50; and Leonore Davidoflf, Worlds Between. 177 more visibly, women were frequent contributors to Y Ddraig and The Welsh Nationalist, and spoke at various meetings and the annual Summer School/' Kate Roberts edited a monthly column called The Women's Circle and Cassie Davies edited and contributed to a regular feature on Women's Education. Clearly Plaid Cymru sought to appeal to newly enfranchised women voters. The pages of its periodicals provide a site for public discourse by educated women who taught school, ran newspapers, and actively participated in the public life of their future nation.52 Yet Party policy as outlined in these pages communicated a very different role for women.

Although featuring prominent, educated, often single women in its membership and public events, the rhetoric of Plaid Cymru emphasized the important, but rural, domestic and traditional role for women in preserving the "Welsh way of life." That

Welsh way of life was firmly located within the Welsh-speaking, traditional household farm, free from the Anglicizing interference of the state, be it Socialist, Communist, or

Liberal.53 In this view, not only the state, but organizations such as the Women's

5l"Party News-Swansea Summer School" The Welsh Nationalist (July 1938):8. The paper announced that Miss Kate Roberts was scheduled to give a talk on August 11, 1938 at the Swansea Summer School on "The Next Five Years in Cultural Institutions." The Party and Carmarthenshire Education Committee "commended Miss Tegwen Clee, a Llanelly member of the Blaid, in strongly defending the character of the Welsh miner" at a lecture to local teachers in "The Committee Thanks Her" The Welsh Nationalist (June 1946):2.

52Cassie Davies, M. A. edited Women's Education in Y Ddraig as well as teaching school. Kate Roberts, in addition to becoming known as the "Welsh Chekov" and major Welsh literary figure of the 20,h century ran a newspaper with her husband, and continued to do so after his death. Miss Mai Roberts was unmarried and private Secretary to prominent politician E. T. John.

"Cathrin Huws, "The Fallacy of the Perfect State" The Welsh Nationalist (June, I934):8. The author argued that the both the Welsh Communist and the Welsh Socialist could not envisage a Welshman's owning his small farm... moreover that both political philosophies were "steadily and (continued...) 178

Institutes, an organization of rural, agricultural women learning how to improve their

'traditional' agricultural skills, making jam, raising children, and singing hymns, acted as an "Anglicising movement" that threatened the "very life of rural Wales" working

"quietly, persistently and zealously" to consolidate the English, urban lifestyle and population in the Principality of Wales.54 As one author, known only as "Watchman" argued,

...the womenof rural Welsh Wales are the backbone ofthe nation. If there is any patriotism in Welshwomen, it is to be seen in them. It is they (subconsciously perhaps) who have preserved the national tongue, customs, and traditions of our land. A national dignity was theirs. They were the guardians of the best things in life - of healthy simple courting ways, plain living and sensible attire suited to the austere beauty of the hills. Now they are urged to imitate the mincing artificial life of the women in our towns-little and big-whose one ambition is to copy the

(...continued) insidiously at war with Welsh traditions." Welsh nationalism was the solution to the specific concerns of Wales. See also "Notes and Comments" The Welsh Nationalist II, No. 7 (July 1933): 4. Here the editors echoed their support for "reasonable private property-which is against and Communism." They rejected "laisez[sic] faire" -which is against Liberalism .. and abhorfed] imperialistic -which is against Conservatism." Any political creed of England was deemed unsuitable to conditions in Wales, where Plaid Cymru supported "the right of all to freedom and property and the duty of co-operation" as the basis of the Welsh State." The editors also opposed the growth of , both in Europe and in Wales.

54"Watchman", "A New Peril for Wales" The Welsh Nationalist (December 1933):5. Significantly, the Women's Institutes began in Ontario, and were imported into Britain via Wales. Mrs. Alfred Watt of founded the first British Women's Institute branch at Llanfair, Wales in 1915. Two other Welsh branches quickly followed. As already noted, the Women's Institutes began by men in the Canadian Agricultural department as a movement to mobilize rural women in the battle to maintain the rural way of life in Canada by making them better farm wives. The movement then spread across the globe. See Mrs. A. Watt, "Address," Women's Institutes Report (1920): 126 as cited in Margaret C. Kechnie, Organizing Rural Women: The Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario, 1897-1919. (Montreal: McGill- Queen's University Press, 2003):3, n. 4. See also J.W. Robertson Scott, The Story oj the Women's Institute Movement in England & Wales <6 Scotland {Idbury: The Village Press, 1925), for an early, romanticized account of the movement. 179

women of the London suburbs.55

According to the "Watchman" Welsh women should remain passive, frozen in the

'traditions and customs' of an economically unviable lifestyle which they unconsciously transmitted into the next generation, looking to the past, and responsible for maintaining a national dignity they did not really comprehend. The 'Watchman' implied that although Welsh women had unknowingly and subconsciously acted patriotically, it was now time they be instructed by nationalists deliberately to focus on their role as embodiments of Welsh culture, dressed in homespun and tall peaked beaver , weaving cloth, serving tea outside, speaking Welsh and singing hymns on their rural

Welsh farms. Notably, none of these skills required intellectual qualifications. In this construction of Welsh gender roles, women could not be trusted to raise good Welsh citizens without instruction and supervision by nationalist leaders, who remained overwhelmingly male. Yet the majority of the female population, who lived in the coal mining towns of South Wales exposed to the evils of Anglicization found it difficult to

pursue such activities.56

Moreover, Welsh women needed to be protected from the influence of'foreign'

English organizations, in this case the spread of the Women's Institutes under the

supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture. The Women's Institutes "must be brought

,5Ibid.

""'The Coal Trade and Foreign Government" The Welsh Nationalist (June, 1934): 10. Ironically, the Women's institute movement which had originated in Canada, arrived in Britain through the founding of its first three branches in Wales in 1915. For more information on the history of the British Women's Institute Movement see Maggie Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women s Institute as a Social Movement (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997): p. 22. 180 into line with Welsh traditions, or Welsh Nationalists must form their own institutes."57

In the view of the Watchman, organizations such as the Women's Institutes, the largest women's organization in Britain, taught the wrong things to women who had not necessarily been organized or exposed to such efforts before. The WI provided a purely female space in which rural, working women discovered their abilities to organize and vote democratically, and encountered the idea that their domestic, skilled labor had value.

The 'common bond of womanhood' thus forged might threaten the Welsh nationalist's view of women's role in raising the next generation.58 Yet in actuality, the emphasis of the Women's Institutes on the preservation of rural life of England, Wales and Canada alike fit into the Plaid periodical's construction of Wales as rural place, centered around the family on the rural farm. Thus Welsh nationalists's primary objection to the WI must have involved the English and 'foreign' structure of the organization, which was based in

London. Although not a long term subject of discussion in these periodicals, the debate over the WI reveals the tensions within Plaid Cymru discourse over the role of agriculture, women's role, and women's labor in the Wales they sought to create.

The Watchman also warned against the impact of the English capitalist economy and state imposed economic controls on Welsh society. Writing about Plaid Cymru

policy in 1949, D. Myrddin Lloyd argued that "the high percentage of female labour in

"Ibid. The key element to such changes involved allowing, if not requiring the use of the Welsh language. The editors strategically advertised classes for the teaching of Welsh to English-speaking persons immediately below this column.

''"For a discussion of the Women's Institutes as a feminist, although apolitical space, see Maggie Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women's Institute as a Social Movement (London: Lawrence & Wishart. 1997). 181 the new factories disrupts the traditional pattern of Welsh life."59 The British government proposal in 1941 to regi ster women for wartime service provoked a heated response, as one author argued that such a policy, implicitly labeling women as mobile, was an assault on the Welsh "social and national character" in which the family was priceless and the 'bulwark of Welsh life." Here England was seemingly trying to deprive

[Wales] of her womanhood, the future of Wales."60 Nationalists and others in Wales characterized and women's employment as a "devilish system" in which

"parents have to hand over the care of their children to outside authorities." In such s system if Welsh "children manage to struggle to adolescence, they are transported by the slave system to blind-alley jobs in England."61 The migration of large numbers of young people, both male and female was not caused by the British government, but by larger economic forces, including the decline in the Welsh coal industry.

This outpouring of worry over the export of young people focused particularly on young Welsh women, whose families, having left the farm for the coal valleys, found their daughters lured to England by employment as unskilled domestic servants.62 One author outlined the difficulties young women faced in the towns of South Wales, the need

59D. Myrddin Lloyd, Plaid Cymru and its Message (Cardiff: Plaid Cymru, 1949): 15.

WIP.L.S.. "The War on Women" The Welsh Nationalist 10, (1941 ):3.

6lGwladwen Huws, "Special Area" The Welsh Nationalist 5, No. 9 (September 1936): 1.

":For a contemporary discussion of the problem see J. Mervyn Williams, "The New London Welsh" The Welsh Outlook XVII, No. 7 (July 1930): 193-4. On the gendered nature of this wave of Welsh immigration into London specifically, see Mari A. Williams, "The New London Welsh": Domestic Servants 1918-1939" Transactions of the Honourable Society ofCymmrodorion 2002, New Series, Vol. 9, 2003, pp. 135-151. 182 for employment to help the family income and placate their younger mine- working male siblings who "scorned to see that big girl at home instead of work." The London Welsh

Chapels founded the London Welsh Friendly Girls' Aid Society, an organization to help girls integrate themselves into the London Welsh community, or return home to Wales when situations became problematic.63 Both in London and back in Wales stories abounded, both true and fictional, of girls lured into prostitution in London, girls who committed suicide rather than continue such a degraded life. Nationalists used such stories about girls tricked into working in pubs and brothels, or committing suicide due to extreme alienation to call for an independent that could solve Welsh social and economic problems that caused the exodus to England in the hi at place.64

Accordingly, Welsh girls needed employment opportunities in the coal towns of South

Wales, or better yet, back in the Welsh countryside on farms, baking bread, raising children, and teaching them Welsh. Unfortunately, neither solution acknowledged the realities of the economic problems in Wales. Both the coal and agricultural industries continued to decline.

65Mari A. Williams, "The New London Welsh", 136. The numbers of Welsh people who migrated into London in search of employment peaked during the first half of the twentieth century, particularly during the difficult years between 1920 and 1945. Assimilation into the London Welsh society usually began through membership in a Welsh chapel in one of the neighborhoods surrounding King's Cross Railway station. Membership in the Tabernacl, chapel, King's Cross reached over a thousand members during certain years in this period. Significantly, membership remained extremely fluid, with many Welsh migrants withdrawing from membership after several years as the Welsh arrivals in London assimilated into urban culture, their retention of Welsh identity abandoned. Thus concerns over migration and its effects on Welsh culture were warranted. For an excellent visual depiction of this migration pattern, see Emrys Jones ed., The Welsh in London 1500-2000 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001): 193-196.

m"A Post Mortem" The Welsh Nationalist 3. No. 11 (November 1934):3. 183

But that did not stop Plaid Cymru using such issues for its own ends, declaring in its periodicals that voting for the Party would help Welsh men protect the innocence, reputation, and place of Welsh women. In "A Political Parable" another author argued that voting for Plaid Cymru would put a stop to an English employer's slandering of the young male protagonist's sister, simultaneously protecting her honor and reputation, and providing employment for him. The young man stated:

L don't mind leaving : Tie myself... A man can always tramp from workhouse to workhouse or turn his hand to any sort of job until he gets back into his own trade-but my sister-she's just been sacked by her boss in Hull because his wife objects to Welsh servant girls; and when she asked for a 'character' her mistress gave her this ... he read out indignantly one hateful sentem •* Altho. 'jli Miss Davies is, as far as I know, a moral young woman, I have heard enough concerning the Welsh to prefer her outside my house! It is advisable I consider to employ clean English girls.65

Overall the Plaid Cymru solution to such problems focused on returning such girls to their rural homes, to protect them from insult and slander, and from being tainted p*

'dirty' or immoral by modern, urban, industrial society; to raise rural, Welsh-speaking families rather than seek out safe, local employment for women. Thus Plaid Cymru social and economic policy sought to ignore contemporaiy economic problems, focusing instead on the maintenance of a no-longer economically viable agricultural, domestic hinterland. Although Plaid Cymru sought to differentiate itself from previous Welsh

Nationalist organizations, this theme of Welshmen protecting Welsh women from

English slander placed Plaid Cymru firmly within a patriarchal tradition of remonstrance

65S. R. J., "A Political Parable" The Welsh Nationalist 2, No. 6 (June I933):2. 184 against English insults to Welsh women's morality and Welsh men's masculinity traced back to the responses to the Blue Book Reports of 1847.66 Similar calls to protect the traditional indigenous female population, especially their bodies, sexuality, and thus morality from the destructive interference of British imperial ideology and legislation permeated nationalist discourse throughout the British empire.67 Thus both groups of men, both British imperialist and Welsh nationalist, re-asserted ideologies of repressive social conformity in the realms of Women's sexuality, rural domesticity, and public behavior typical of most nationalist movements, despite the fact that the Welsh nationalists never attained an independent state.68

66See previous chapters.

67Franz Fanon in 'Algeria unveiled', described imperial intervention into colonized cultures as a 'domestic rescue ', in which the female body became the passive terrain over which the colonizer and colonized fought. Ann McClintock, "Family Feuds", builds upon that argument by noting that such battles sought to determine which males (indigenous or colonizer) would occupy the patriarchal role of father and head of household within the colonized society. Thus the destructive impact of the imperial, extractive, industrial economy upon the rural, agricultural, Welsh household forced Welsh girls to leave the control of their Welsh fathers and venture into an uncontrolled, sexually dangerous world where they were at the mercy of predatory, British men. Plaid Cymru asserted their legitimacy as the representatives of Welsh culture and the nation based on their ability to end this exploitation and protect Welsh girls from English slander, reifying the patriarchal domestic ideology of a passive, weak, naive, rural Welsh womanhood under nationalist male control, in which the evils of imperial exploitation have been eradicated. This is similar to other nationalist discourse found in the debates over sati and the Age of Consent Act in India, and the developing ideology of the Indian National Congress prior to Indian independence in 1947. See Mrinilini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' in the late nineteenth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Suruchi Thapar, "Women as Activists; Women as Symbols: A Study of the Indian Nationalist Movement" Feminist Review 44 (Summer 1993);81 -96; Lata Mani, "The Construction of Women as Tradition in Early Nineteenth-Century Bengal," Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 117-56; Sungari & Vaid, Recasting Women.

68For the situation in Ireland see Mary Cullen & Maria Luddy eds., Female Activists: Irish Women and Change 1900-1960 (: Woodfield Press, 2001); Nora Connolly O'Brien, "Women in Ireland, Their Part in the Revolutionary Struggle', An Phohlacht, 25 June 1932 and other documents reproduced in Margaret Ward, In Their Own Voice: Women and Irish Nationalism (Dublin: Attic Press, 1995. For other areas, especially India see McClintock, "Family Feuds", 62-63; and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism," in Mohanty, Ann Russo, & Lourdes Torres eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana, 1991): I - 185

Columns directed at women primarily identified as mothers, such as "The

Women's Circle" and "Women's Life" described the patriarchal, rural, Welsh-speaking way of life that so needed to be preserved and strengthened. Authored by women such as

Kate Roberts, Mai Roberts, Cassie Davies and others, women who modeled one lifestyle as they organized and ran meetings, raised money, wrote columns, and participated in

Party activities, these columns advocated a very different lifestyle for their readers.69

According to Grace Roberts, Welsh women, as mothers, should focus on learning and strengthening the Welsh language by teaching it to their children: "Women of Wales, gift your children with the priceless treasure," the Welsh language, "kept alive by the sacrifice and passionate suffering of our fathers." At the same time, "Mothers must speak Welsh in every placc and at every opportunity, on the street, on the train, in the drawing room and in important places, not entirely at home." They should, "speak, write, and think in Welsh" and by doing so they would "contribute to the genius of our dear land and allow Wales to take its proper and special place among the nations of the world."70 To help facilitate mothers speaking Welsh, both periodicals included basic

6S(...continued) 50.

69 "South Wales Organiser's Report" The Welsh Nationalist V, No. 11 (November 1936):2. The secretary had the assistance of "Mrs. G. J. Williams, Gwaelodygarth; Miss Wherle, , Miss Tegwen Clee, Mr. Alund Davies, Gorseinion, while Miss S. Jones and MR. David Thomas gave much assistance in organising the meetings at ." See also the "South Wales Organizer's Report" The Welsh Nationalist (July 1938):8, where again Mrs. G. J. Williams assisted in organizing meetings to help recruit new members." Also (August 1938);

70 Grace Roberts, "The Place of Women in Welsh Life" Y Ddraig Goch (Medi 1927): 6. [Cylch y Merched: Lle'r Merched ym Mywyd Cymru eu Gwrhydri Gynt:... cofiwn fod bywyd gwerin Cymru yn fwy prydferth ac urddasol yn yr ardaloedd He y siaredir yr iaith Gymraeg yn ei phurdeb. Felly, famau Cymru, cyflwynwch i'ch plant y trysor amhrisiadwy a sicrhawyd trwy aberth a dioddefaint ein tadau. (continued...) 186 language lessons and advertised weekly classes.71

In addition to emphasizing the importance and priority of women keeping the

Welsh language alive, women were also charged with reviving traditional Welsh crafts such as weaving, sewing, and cooking. Multiple columns decried the impact of mechanization on Welsh industry and the resulting "death of the handicraft spirit" in

Wales.72 Welsh women were urged to take pride in traditional Welsh furniture, and bake their own Welsh bread rather than being tempted by the poor nutrition, expense, and

'foreignness' of store-bought bread.73 Kate Roberts called on Welsh women to pursue excellence in knitting, cooking, quilting, and other crafts.74 The pages of Y Ddraig praised women who pursued excellence in such crafts and sold them on behalf of the

Welsh Nationalist Party, such as Miss Beti Dyer, donated a valuable leather handbag to be sold for St. David's Day Fund. Made by an acknowledged expert in

(...continued) Bydded I ni fel merched siarad Cymraeg yn mhob man ac ar bob cyfle, AR Y STRYD, yn y tren, yn y drawing room ac yn bvvysicach na'r cwbl ar yr aelwyd. Siarad, ysgrifennu, a meddwl yn Gymraeg. Os gwnawn hyn, cyfrannwn at athrylith ein hannvvyl wlad fel y galluogir hi I gymryd ei lie priodol ymysg cenhedloedd y byd.]

7l"Cylch y Merched" Y Ddraig Goch (Rhagfyr, 1926):6. This particular column included a guide to Eisteddfod words in Welsh. "Do you want to learn Welsh?" The Welsh Nationalist (December 1933):5. "Elementary Welsh Course-Gwers 22" The Welsh Nationalist (June 1934): 11.

72"Cylch y Merched: Gwneuthur Dodrefn Cymreig. "Mass Production" yn Angau Ysbryd Crefft" Y Ddraig Goch (Ebrill, 1928):6.

""Cylch y Merched" Y Ddraig Goch (Tachwedd 1926):6.

74Kate Roberts, "Cylch y Merched" Y Ddraig Goch (Hydref 1926):6. 187 leatherworking her gift sold for over six pounds.75 Again we see Welsh women who did not follow such traditions constructing a purely domestic role for the rest of the women in Wales, and especially directed at the working classes who should stay on, or return to, the farm.

Within the rural, domestic lifestyle advocated by the party, the important function maintaining and furthering the Welsh language, culture and traditions originated with women's primary role of maternity. Thus appeals to women to gain support of Party

Policy and votes for Party candidates were not made using logic or reason as directed towards male voters, but directed towards Welsh women's maternal instincts and outrage. During the 1946 campaign for Parliament, Gwyneth Morgan the wife of Welsh

Party Candidate Trefor Morgan, entreated the women of Wales to protect their interests as mothers by voting nationalist She argued that "for the Welsh mother," the experience of wartime conscription, and post-war unemployment "is more bitter still." Mrs. Morgan stated "I, as one of the young mothers of Wales, appeal to you in the name of the Welsh

National Party... If you wish your children to be inheritors of the wealth of Wales, both material and spiritual, vote this time for Welsh Nationalism."76 Women returning from serving in the Women's Land Army in England and other national service on the behalf of Britain found a very different welcome waiting for them at the Plaid Cymru Party

Conference and its Resolutions:

75"Thanks to Clydach Member" The Welsh Nationalist (September, 1947):6.

76Gwyneth Morgan, B.A., "A Message To Women" The Ogmore Voice (special section in The Welsh Nationalist) (Suite 1946). 188

8. Welcome.- That as we Plaid Cymru place on record our welcome back to Wales to the men and women conscripted out of Wales by an alien Government, and we express our delight that so many of them are devoting themselves to the cause of Welsh freedom and prosperity; and we also call upon all Welshmen to serve the cause of Welsh freedom and prosperity so that no Welshmen need again be under compulsion to leave the land of their fathers.77

Thus women who returned from wartime service received a very nice thank-you, but could assume from this paragraph that their active, public service to the "cause of Welsh freedom and prosperity," the Welsh nation, was over. Although in actuality they served the British nation. Their future role would take place in the rural home, as mothers.

This was made even more clear by the resolution on Employment that followed, which

stated:

13. Employment.-In view of the high unemployment figure in Wales, this Conference of Plaid Cymru ... notes with regret the nature of promised light industries which will employ mainly adolescent and female labour; and is alarmed at the increasing emigration of our people to favoured areas in England, and the sentimental discrimination which forces Welsh male labour to the coal-pits while English key-labour is already tiooding the Welsh field.78

Here again Plaid Cymru avoided an opportunity to mobilize women as active, employed

nationalists due to the patriarchal, domestic gender roles that dominated Party policy.

The Party Conference thanked women for their previous valuable wartime service to

Britain and a 'foreign war', yet asked them to limit themselves to the domestic sphere of

home, nursery, and language in their future efforts on behalf of Wales. Welsh women

""Parliament of Wales: Plaid Cymru Conference 1946" The Welsh Nationalist (September 1946):4.

78lbid. 189 acted only as the link between the traditional Welsh past and the reinvented 'traditional'

Welsh future through their bearing and raising of future Welsh nationalists imbued with the cultural and linguistic traditions embodied in their mothers.

This emphasis on the importance of rural life in the construction of Welsh culture changed in the years after 1945. Kate Roberts and others used the Women's columns of these two periodicals to discuss the benefits of various types of makeup and other

"mincing artificial elements' brought to Welsh women from the cities of South Wales via

London. Yet those columns continued to entreat women to have children, to maintain traditional dress, to cook — including recipes— and focused solely on the hopefully

Welsh-speaking domestic sphere of household, family and school as women's place in

Welsh culture.79 Most women who supported Plaid Cymru found themselves limited to the complementary domestic role there as well, within the separate structure of the Party

Women's Section, raising money through jumble sales, coffee mornings, whist drives, and bazaars. Instructions on forming a group or branch, and a bulletin on how wor.ien could assist the work of the party, distributed by the Plaid Cymru Women's National

Committee recommended fundraising through the 'old and tried ways, of course. Jumble

Sales, Fairs, Coffee Evening, Nosweithiau Llawen, Local Raffles, Sports, Pop

Concerts, Pop Eisteddfodau" or an evening of "Welsh entertainment with a bowl of

lobscouse (a form of Welsh stew) during the interval" or selling goods at a shop, market

™See the regularly featured columns every week which included:' Chiefly for Women: On the Wild Frontier"; "Your Packed Lunch"; "The Crafts of Yesterday: The Welsh Dresser"; "The Beauty Parlor" Welsh Nation (14lh July, 1956): 6. "Chiefly for Women: A Future for Wool"; "The Beauty Parlor" Welsh Nation (28th July, 1956): 6. 190 stall, or fair. In addition to fundraising, these flyers encouraged women to engage in voluntary social work, visiting local hospitals, children's homes, old people's homes, giving gifts, taking the residents on outings, etc. Women were asked to arrange 'social evenings in private houses, so that our parliamentary candidates can meet as many uncommitted voters as possible.' On the subject of women running for office, women were to focus on local councils and local government, where "the woman's voice and point of view is badly needed."80 Notably, all of these activities remained arguably extensions of women's roles within the home. Such activities remained significant to the financial health of the Party, but failed to differentiate Welsh gender from that of

England and the gender roles of the previous century. A few women remained prominently active in the public leadership of Plaid Cymru, and once the party began actually contesting seats, ran for office. They remained however, anomalies and exceptions within the backward looking, Victorian, domestic and romanticized rural

identity that the male and female leadership of Plaid Cymru disseminated for its membership and the public to adopt. Welsh women's designated role in the future Welsh nation was "to win others to stand and work for Cymru,"81 passively enabling male nationalists to step into the public limelight.

80NLW, Plaid Cymru, K5. Ideas and suggestions, some old, some new, on ways in which women can assist the work of Plaid Cymru, by spreading its beliefs and raising funds. No date.

8INLW, Plaid Cymru K23. Plaid Cymru Ladies' Section: How to set up a Group or Branch. 1967- 9. 191

CONCLUSION

Throughout the century following the publication of the Blue Book Reports of

1847 the people of Wales wrestled with the question of what it meant to be "Welsh' within the context of the British Isles and the British Empire. The investigation of the state of education in Wales by the British Commissioners reveal Parliament's use of a gendered imperial discourse to increase their hegemonic cultural dominance within the

British Isles. During their survey of schools and students throughout Wales the

Commissioners pre-determined the results of the investigation by the types of questions they asked and the assumptions of superiority they brought with them to the process.

Those assumptions focused on the role of women, and the control of their bodies and

sexuality by men in order to judge the level of civilization of a culture. Thus the

Commissioners accused the Welsh of being inferior and in need of civilization due to the

second-hand reports of promiscuous Welsh women having illegitimate children.

According to the Commissioners and their informants, nonconformist Welsh men did not control the women of Wales, either through education or through appropriate dominant patriarchal gender ideology. Thus Commissioners Lingen, Symons, and Vaughn argued

that Welsh men were unmanly, Welsh women were immoral, the Welsh language and nonconformity caused both of these problems, and thus justified the expansion of the

English language via the creation of British schools to solve the problem by 192 homogenizing the British Isles based on the Victorian, English-speaking, modern, industrial, patriarchal model. This discourse doubly marginalized Welsh women who although deemed the symbol and cause of this inferiority found no opening to contribute to the investigation either as informants or participants. The production of this discourse created a volatile response among the population of Wales, revealing the tensions that permeated Great Britain in the midst of its imperial expansion across the globe.

During the decade after the publication of the Reports prominent Welsh men, and a few elite Welsh women, reacted against the judgements of the English commissioners and adopting a nonconformist, chapel-based 'Welsh identity.' Significantly, again Welsh women as a group found themselves silenced in the battle over different claims to superior morality and cultural supremacy between Welshmen and the British state. With the publication of Y Gymraes and the contributions of Lady Llanover to the process of reactive redefinition of Welsh identity, Welsh women found themselves limited within an

increasingly rigid, Welsh-speaking, 'traditional', domestic, and maternal definition of

Welshness. Women such as Lady Llanover, and the male contributors and editor of this periodical constructed new idealized definitions of Welsh women's role within Welsh society, a role that did not fit well into the increasingly industrial, 'modern' society and culture within which most of them worked, lived, and raised their families. Thus just as

Wales had been deemed uncivilized, traditional, and therefore contrasted to modern, patriarchal, English society, Welsh women contributed to this process of redefining 193 gender roles according to another constructed binary opposition. Through the production of national identity in Y Gymraes, the women of Wales became burdened with the need to look backwards, maintain the invented and pre-industrial traditions of the past through the speaking of Welsh, the weaving of flannel, the wearing of Welsh costume and the raising of children according to that model. The men of Wales then remained free to pursue modernity, looking forward to the their leaving of the home to work in a new industrial Britain, while their wives maintained their Welsh identity and nation at home within the suitably patriarchal domestic sphere. Welsh women formed the basis of Welsh national identity, yet through the fusing of Victorian domestic ideology and the emphasis on traditional culture and language by Lady Llanover and Evan Jones, Welsh women

found themselves limited to a complementary, crucial, and lacking in formal status role within Welsh society.

Lady Llanover and Evan Jones' contributions to Welsh national identity continued to dominate the increasing number of Welsh nationalist publications during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Reiterated and expanded upon by a new, educated, and

well-heeled generation of Welsh intellectuals, both male and female, the idealized rural,

flannel-wearing, domestic, Welsh-speaking mam became the symbol of all that was good,

backwards, and different about Welsh culture. Both positively, and negatively, Welsh

women, their language, and their bodies became the symbol of difference between

English and Welsh culture. The pages of a burgeoning Welsh nationalist literature which sought to promote Welsh culture and Welsh political needs as unique and in need of 194 recognition by the British state promoted this message of Welsh women's traditional domestic role. Significantly, elite Welsh women participated in this process of invention, imposition, and exclusion while often themselves failed to meet the idealized standards which they disseminated to others. As the nineteenth century transitioned into the twentieth century, the gender constructs promoted by Welsh nationalists became increasingly conservative and thus promoted this Welsh version of Victorian domestic ideology in Wales at the same time those same gender constructions found their hegemonic dominance challenged and adapted by the middle-classes in England.

That specifically Welsh version of domesticity, developed in the mid-nineteenth century in the midst of an imperialist discourse and proto-nationalist response continued

well into the twentieth century in the party literature and publications of Plaid Cymru. As a newly formed political party that emphasized its independence from British political

parties and earlier Welsh nationalist movements, Plaid Cymru never challenged the

specifically Welsh gender ideology of the previous century. Indeed, party publications

reiterated that gender ideology focused on the significant, complementary role for women

and added a new emphasis on a rural, Welsh-speaking culture. The party emphasized the

crucial need for Welsh women to live as, link to, and represent the traditional Welsh

speaking rural lifestyle away from the evils of modern, English imports. By forming their

ideology in opposition to English and British culture, Plaid Cymru's political message

depended on this symbolic, idealized role for working women; their lifestyle marked the

boundary between traditional Welsh and modern British culture. 195

Similarly to the late nineteenth century Welsh nationalist press, prominent Welsh women perpetuated and encouraged this official reiteration of these limited gender roles.

Kate Roberts, Alis Williams and other prominent female members of Plaid Cymru allowed no serious challenge to this ideology. Within the structure of a separate

Women's Section the female members of Plaid Cymru performed much of the vital work of the party, raising money, distributing literature, organizing events, providing tea and hospitality. Yet women's input into Party policy development and the Executive Council remained extremely limited, as the relegation to the Women's Section proved that women were separate but not equal, and gave the prominent, socially conservative women at the head of the Women's Section administrative structure almost hegemonic control over women's participation in Plaid Cymru. Not until the late 1970s did more radical women's issues begin to be debated in the Women's section, and even the existence of a separate Women's Section began to be challenged.

Analysis of womens' roles as ideological symbols and actors within the development of the Welsh nationalist movement reveals the complexity of imperial power relationships within nineteenth and twentieth century Britain. The asymmetrical power relationship between Wales and England was maintained and strengthened using gendered discourse emphasizing the immorality of Welsh women and the unmanly lack of control of Welsh men over those same women. Although silenced within those

imperial debates, elite women played major roles in the development of Welsh national

identity later in the century, and continued into the formative years of Plaid Cymru. Thus 196 this dissertation also reveals the significant participation of women in both Welsh history and the nationalist movements of the past two centuries.

Moreover, the use of women's intellectual and physical labor in the formation of nationalist identity and signifying of difference from the imperial culture of England resembles nationalist movements elsewhere in the world. Similar to movements in India and Ireland, Welsh nationalists, both cultural and political, mobilized women's labor and symbolic status to help construct a national identity and unite a population. Yet as this study reveals, in contrast to other post-colonial nationalist movements, Welsh nationalists never found themselves forced to deal with a significant group of women demanding specific concessions on specific issues.

Despite the end of the formal European empires and the development of supra­ national organizations such as the European Union, nationalism continues to cause great upheaval in the early years of the twenty-first century. The acquisition of an independent nation state based on cultural difference has not proven to end ethnic and nationalist conflicts in Europe, Africa, or Asia. Within the European Union various small members resist elements of integration and assert their cultural difference and national identities.

Thus Welsh nationalism must be recognized as a unique, but legitimate nationalist movement on its own terms, rather than simply a failed cultural or pale

imitation of more violent nationalist movements aimed at the establishment of a separate,

independent nation state. Welsh women must be recognized for their central

participation in the process of construction in the formation of Welsh national identity. 197

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