Books in the Gender Studies in Wales series

Assesses how policies developed by the National Assembly for Wales are affecting gender inequalities and investigates whether they are having an impact on social justice for women in Wales. Focusing on distinct policy domains, this book explores gender politics in a devolved Wales.

This collection of essays rediscovers and reassesses the extraordinary literary legacy of the border writer, Margiad Evans (1909-48) - novelist, poet, short story writer and autobiographer.

This book explores the neglected history of women who were active in Liberal politics, campaigning for women's rights, the vote, and a full role for women in Welsh public life, at the end of the nineteenth century, and before the First World War. The over-arching argument of the book is that Welsh women's Liberal politics was distinctive, in its attempt to integrate an understanding of Liberalism which they shared with their English counterparts, and which included the aim of full equality for women, with a distinctively Welsh political agenda, and constructions of Welsh national identity. These constructions sometimes included a positive view of women in the nation, but in times of political crisis redefined gender on a more reactionary model.

Equality of opportunity is a contested concept. It evokes strong emotions from proponents and opponents alike. Enduring issues of inequality and discrimination mean that it remains at the forefront of political priorities in the twenty-first century. Traditional analyses tend to focus on developments at the level of the unitary state or European Union. In contrast, this book underlines the salience of multi-level governance and offers the first detailed comparative analysis of contemporary efforts to promote equality of opportunity in the wake of constitutional reform in the UK. It presents a summary of social theory on equalities in relation to gender, and a full range of social groups and identities - such as disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation and age. It outlines the contemporary evidence base relating to patterns and processes of inequality in the 'devolved' nations. A 'governance perspective' is also advanced; one that details how constitutional law establishing the devolved legislatures contains equality clauses that enable and empower government to promote equality in public policy and law. Analysis reveals the development of distinctive regulatory structures and equalities policy lobbies in each territory. Overall, this volume charts the development of divergent legal rights and public policy on the promotion of equality in the wake of constitutional reform in the UK. Notwithstanding ongoing challenges, it is argued that the move to quasi-federalism is significant for it marks a shift from the predominant, centralised administration of social policy witnessed throughout the twentieth century, to divergent approaches designed to address contrasting socio-economic patterns and processes in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Poetry, Geography, Gender examines how questions of place, identity and creative practice intersect in the work of some of Wales' best known contemporary poets, including Gillian Clarke, Gwyneth Lewis, Ruth Bidgood and Sheenagh Pugh. Merging traditional literary criticism with cultural-political and geographical analysis, Alice Entwistle shows how writers' different senses of relationship with Wales, its languages, history and imaginative, as well as political, geography feeds the form as well as the content of their poetry. Her innovative critical study thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first century Wales.

A history of Welsh women's writing in both Welsh and English during the twentieth century. This book identifies and analyses a distinctive female literary tradition and reveals that Wales is represented very much as 'a different country' by its modern women writers.

This book breaks new ground in the history of Welsh women's literature, by tracking the life and work of the two forgotten women from the countryside who made their mark on their communities, their society and their nation through their campaigns and literature.

This book in the series Gender Studies in Wales uses representations of pregnancy and menstruation as a basis to interpret a wide range of Welsh fiction by women; a perspective of striking novelty in the context of contemporary Welsh.

Gender (defined as the knowledge about perceived distinctions between the sexes) is an important signifier of borders as constructed and contested lines of differences. This book explores this new interdisciplinary field and develops it further.

This book argues that industrial patriarchy in South Wales established an exclusive though damaging form of structural masculine conformity expressed through a limited -and limiting - set of gendered practices.