The New Woman in Wales: Welsh Women’s Writing, 1880–1920

Abstract

In 1909 two Fellows of the Royal Anthropological Institute edited a volume entitled Women of All Nations: A Record of their Characteristics, Habits, Manners, Customs, and Influence, in which Welsh women were hailed as forerunners in the march of progress. In a chapter on the British Isles, M.H. Morrison notes that, though ‘the English woman […] lags behind her husband’ and the Scotswoman ‘sits at his feet’, the same cannot be said of Welsh women. ‘[I]n Wales […] women take a very ample share in the life of the country’, claims Morrison, ‘they discuss with keenest intellectual alertness the gravest theological, ethical, and philosophical problems’ and ‘reveal a perfect passion for secondary and higher education.’ In higher education Welsh women were indeed in the vanguard of reform in this period: by 1888 they comprised one-third of the University of Wales’s students and were awarded full degrees. The 1889 Welsh Intermediate Education Act afforded girls the same secondary school opportunities as boys and succeeded in ensuring that the numbers of boys and girls in Welsh secondary schools were more or less equal by the close of the century.