Welsh Journals

This analysis allowed him to develop a radical critique of marriage, religion ('the struggle for equality will be bitterest and most relentless when women claim to be preachers, priests, bishops, cardinals and popes', p. 90), sexual double standards and much else. Women's clothes, he insisted, were no more than a form of bondage. His solution to this perceived enslavement was total equality before the law in all spheres. This, he recognized, would lead to women losing the protection of, for example, employment laws but then, 'One of the penalties for equality is equality'. Gibson's advanced ideas were not widely shared, as he acknowledged, but this text reminds us of how profound the debate on 'the woman question' was in Victorian Britain. Gibson's book demonstrates just how radical and, in many respects, deeply subversive of conventional opinion his views were concerning gender relations. From Gibson's Aberystwyth office, therefore, rural Wales was introduced to some of the most advanced thinking concerning the role of women in society. It would be intriguing to know how his readers reacted to the editor's forcefully expressed ideas. R. MERFYN JONES Bangor 'YAN BOOGIE': THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SWANSEA VALLEY GIRL. By Eileen Baker. Privately published, printed and bound by Sigma Press, Pretoria, 1992. Pp. 157. N.p. This is an unusual book. Published privately in South Africa, with a long and comprehensive introduction by Gwyn Campbell, it is a moving account of Eileen Baker's early life in the Swansea Valley during the early part of the twentieth century. There is nothing especially extraordinary about that particularly as we now, thankfully, have a growing number of memoirs by women which detail their youth in the way that B. L. Coombes's These Poor Hands and Wil Jon Edwards's From the Valley I Came did for men two generations ago. What is special about this volume is that it reveals the complexity of the working class in the valleys of south Wales. This is the story of a child of a railway family which in many ways, through a partly English background, different (lower) wages and not without some craft pride, was set apart (and set itself apart) from working-class communities seemingly dominated by miners. Welsh historians have sometimes been accused of helping to perpetuate myths: here is a book which is a corrective of that and which in a sensitive and humane way explains that we are not a homogeneous mass. Eileen Baker's memoirs read as if they are an oral history of the inter-war period with chapters on family life, neighbourhood, 'railway people', schooldays, holidays and the General. Strike. The editor has also added two interviews with near contemporaries of the time in order to provide a broader picture. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to get a better understanding of the social history of Wales and should be consulted alongside Raymond Williams's Border Country and our newly emerging feminist historians. Eileen Baker is of another