The publication of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales (1847) was a defining and profound moment in Welsh history. Its criticism of Welsh education was controversial in itself, but its findings on the supposed immorality of the Welsh people, and women in particular, caused the biggest uproar. This thesis combines literary criticism and historical analysis to argue that Anglophone Welsh literature in the late-nineteenth century challenges both the pejorative vision of working-class Welsh womanhood set out in the Blue Books, and the vision of female Welsh piety established in reaction to that depiction. Alternative visions of modern Welsh womanhood as revealed in this literature include rioters and maids, singers and witches, and the middle- and upper-class women who valiantly but naively seek to help working-class women on their path to an idealised, pious, traditional vision of Welsh womanhood as promoted by the periodicals and pamphlets aimed at women of the time. Indeed, there is a complex middle ground between traditional womanhood and the Report’s widely exaggerated immoral womanhood which this thesis uncovers through literary analysis of the works of Amy Dillwyn, Allen Raine, Anne Beale, Sara Maria Saunders, R. Dansey Green-Price, and Bertha Thomas. In doing so, it builds on the important work done by Jane Aaron, Katie Gramich and Kirsti Bohata among others in the field of Women’s writing in Wales, extending their work by offering a systematic approach to literary constructions of Welsh womanhood between 1879 and 1907.
The texts analysed in this thesis underline the complex nature of nineteenth-century Welsh women’s identity, and her path to modernity. The battle fought in the periodicals and pamphlets to portray Welsh women as morally good, pious mothers is worth recognising, but is aimed at middle- and upper-class women. The Report’s support for the anglicisation of Welsh women is also noteworthy, as it seeks to ‘improve’ such women but erase their cultural identity in the process. Moreover, with the Report mainly targeting working-class women, any assessment of its impact should include representations of working-class women. Accepting the traditional ideal of womanhood is, arguably, to accept the Report’s findings that working-class Welsh women were inherently immoral and in need of improvement. Instead, the texts analysed in this thesis fill the space in between the Commissioners’ and the middle-class view of Welsh womanhood by seeking to amplify the varied representation of Welsh working-class women. This thesis will argue that the path to modernity at the turn of the twentieth century is one that is driven by working-class women rejecting both the pious and immoral image of them, and attempts at anglicisation, for an identity that is decidedly Welsh in nature.