Welsh Journals

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WOMEN WORKERS IN WALES, 1968-82 two archetypal and quasi-mythical figures loom through the mist of our memory in Wales: the Welsh Miner and the Welsh Mam. Both were invented by the nineteenth century. The twentieth century has eliminated one and is transforming the other out of all recog- nition. Tonypandy used to be a name to conjure with in the best left-wing circles: theatre of the celebrated Riots, birthplace of the Miners Next Step, home of the Militant Miner. Sixty-five years later, in June 1977 to be precise, of the officially registered workers of Tonypandy, 49 per cent were women. Neighbouring Treorchy is renowned for a Male Voice Choir. They appear to have time to rehearse; in June 1977, 57 per cent of Treorchy's workers were women.1 If the Rhondda had a presence in the British Left in the early 1980s, it manifested itself in its women at Greenham Common. In 1921, the largest single group of workers in Wales were 270,000 miners; one Welsh man in every four was a collier. They dominated the trade union and political organizations of Welsh Labour and, with their families, must have accounted for a good 40 per cent of the entire population in Wales. In June 1977, the largest single group of workers in Wales were 118,000 women who worked in educational and medical services; in the trade union and political organizations of Welsh Labour, they were a cipher. Welsh women and waged work The Welsh Mam was constructed as a complement to the Welsh miner, quarryman and steelworker. There is not much trace of her in the eighteenth century. The establishment of coal, steel and slate as the overpoweringly dominant industries of a Wales which served as the export base of an imperial British economy progressively excluded women from waged work. The very idea of work itself was reconstructed on masculine principles. Few regions of Britain have been, over generations, so totally immersed in so macho a perception of work, the home and the relations between the sexes. In the process, women were subjected to what came to be considered a traditional, but was in fact an historically novel, dependence. Welsh women, and 1 Digest of Welsh StatisticsjCrynhoad o Ystadegau Cymru 1981 (Welsh Office 1982), appendix III, county profiles, p. 175. The 1981 Digest here repeats the figures in that for 1980.