Women at the heart of shaping history

TWO Swansea women will have a particular reason to celebrate the centenary this year of Votes for Women. For more than 30 years they have been central in efforts to highlight the place of women in history.

In 1981, at a time when women’s history was often derided, Gail Allen, from Hafod, and Jen Wilson, who now lives in Sketty, helped to form the Swansea Women’s History Group, which made a series of challenging, innovative documentary films that have become iconic, showing the central part played by women in key community events.

The group was led by the late Ursula Masson, the academic whose life is commemorated in a series of annual Ursula Masson Lectures. They researched the part of women in WWI and WWII, women’s suffrage and women’s domestic service, collecting original photographs and recording oral history interviews.

The epoch-marking films that identify the central role played by women in Wales came after the group enrolled on a Swansea University course on making video history. Their first, Back to the Front Line, focused on women munitions workers at Bridgend Munitions Factory. It has been screened extensively and a copy is housed at the Imperial War Museum.

Clips from their Splendid and Smiling Women, filmed from the point of view of women in the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike, have been used by the BBC and S4C over the years and hit the highlights again when scenes from the original footage were used by the Manic Street Preachers in the music video for their 2013 album Anthem for a Lost Cause, itself set in the mining valleys during the strike.

Another of the group’s iconic films, Swansea Conchie Controversy, now widely viewed on YouTube, tells the story of Swansea classics teacher Rosalind Bevan (later Rusbridge), a conscientious objector who lost her job in the now-infamous Swansea “conchie crisis” of 1940 for refusing to sign a Loyalty Oath.

Against the background of a virulent campaign against pacifists, Swansea Council passed a resolution to suspend pacifist campaigners from employment by the council – a move it was forced to rescind five months later by the Home Secretary, who firmly pointed out that no-one should be penalised for holding opinions.

The 1988 film, in which Ursula interviewed Rosalind, immediately defined the period. And although in all 19 council employees were suspended, 10 of them women, the impact of the film ensured that Rosalind’s voice became the voice of the crisis and it is her name that is indelibly linked with the Swansea “conchie controversy”. She never returned to Swansea to teach.

But the three pioneers, Ursula, Gail and Jen did not stop with films. In 1998 Ursula was a leading figure in bringing together a Wales-wide group of women historians intent on keeping women’s history alive and accessible, and the three film-makers were among the early members of the national women’s history group Women’s Archive Wales (WAW), where Gail is the long-term treasurer. Jen went on to found Jazz Heritage Wales in 1986.

In a happy coincidence, the Archive celebrates its own 20th anniversary in 2018, just as Votes for Women reaches 100 – and has great plans to celebrate both. It has won a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to celebrate Century of Hope/Canrif Gobaith.

Plans start with the 1918 victory, when the right to vote was given to women over 30 with a property qualification, include major highlights in women’s rights along the way, and will cover the 20-year history of the Archive itself. This year’s Archive conference in October will have a special Suffrage Dinner to celebrate 1928, when the vote was extended to all women over 21.

You can look out for details on the website https://www. womensarchivewales.org

You can be sure some Swansea women will be right at the heart of it all. Jean Silvan Evans Peterston-super-Ely