Gender equality pioneer’s legacy is preserved for future generations
Audrey Jones was among the 30,000-plus women at the historic United Nations World Conference in Beijing in 1995 to shape the Beijing Platform for Action, still seen as a watershed in mainstreaming gender equality. Dr Jean Silvan Evans tells her story ahea
DOCUMENTS and papers of a women’s rights campaigner, whose work helped to set the international standards for gender equality, still acclaimed today as the most progressive blueprint ever for advancing women’s rights, have been deposited with the Glamorgan Archives ahead of a major conference this weekend.
Audrey Jones was among the 30,000-plus women who streamed into Beijing for the historic 1995 United Nations World Conference on Women, networking, lobbying and rewriting to shape the Beijing Platform for Action, seen as a watershed in mainstreaming gender equality.
Long-time chair and founder member of Wales Assembly of Women, Audrey travelled the world to represent the group at UN conferences on women’s rights and was central to women’s rights campaigns in Wales.
Wales Assembly of Women became accredited to the UN Economic and Social Council in 2000, when Audrey hand-delivered the application in New York, and she represented the group on the UN Economic and Social Council.
She regularly represented the Assembly at the annual New York sessions of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to review progress on the Beijing Platform and took part in the major conferences Beijing+5 (2000) and Beijing+10 (2005).
I deposited Audrey’s documents – a whole six crates of them! – with the Glamorgan Archives and also recorded Audrey’s life and achievements for the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, the national database of people in Wales who have made a significant contribution to national life. The files, deposited on behalf of Wales Assembly of Women, were so extensive, they had to be wheeled into the Archives building on a trolley.
Audrey was one of just 60 leading feminists in the UK interviewed for the British Library archive Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project that documented memories of activists at the forefront of the fight for political and social equality in the 1970s and ‘80s.
She first made her mark as an inspirational teacher and an uncompromising advocate of girls’ education and the Sisterhood and After archive holds a video clip of Audrey commenting, in typically animated fashion, on the sexism evident in exam questions of the time, as well as a summary of her six-hour audio interview.
For 30 years she taught at St Cyres Comprehensive School, Penarth, rising to deputy head, a distinction gained by few women in 1980s comprehensives. Committed to challenging sexism in education, she encouraged girls to study science and maths.
Audrey came to live in Wales in the 1950s when her late husband Hugh Jones took over transport logistics for international chemical company Dow Corning, and the family settled in Dinas Powys.
As devolution loomed, she was an ardent campaigner in the powerful movement of women’s groups that combined to persuade the new National Assembly to commit to equal opportunity and she took to the streets in the drive to get the Labour Party to adopt constituency twinning to ensure gender equality in Labour representation in the first Assembly.
Professor Jackie Jones, chair of Wales Assembly of Women, said: “Audrey was a real pioneer. She was there in the early days travelling the world to champion women’s rights. I am delighted her papers are now in the Archives where so many others can share them.”
Audrey died in 2014 and Wales Assembly of Women established the Audrey Jones Awards for Research by Women in her honour.
The awards are co-ordinated by Dr Jane Salisbury, who said: “Audrey always stressed the importance of research that could illuminate the lives of women and girls. She understood that hard evidence could inform policies and underpin campaigns that properly enhance women’s rights.
“The Audrey Jones Awards honours this and ensures that new data and analyses on contemporary women’s lived experience in Wales reaches a wider public. It is great that her papers are now lodged safely in Glamorgan Archives, where her insights will be of value to people researching this area.”
This year’s Audrey Jones Awards will be presented at Wales Assembly of Women’s annual conference, when two women researchers will talk about their work. Dr Rosie O’Driscoll’s talk “Othering: Taking the M out of Mothering” will be about women who choose not to have children, and Dr Claire Evans will share her findings on the topic “Are Gender and Low Pay Synonymous in Wales?”
■ Wales Assembly of Women’s annual meeting will be held at Cardiff University School of Social Sciences, Cardiff, CF10 3WT on Saturday from 10am to 3.30pm. Attendance, to include lunch, is £12. For more information or to register, email eleri.evans@talk21. com or info@walesassemblyofwomen.co.uk