Centre for Gender Studies in Wales

Because of its existing expertise, the University is particularly well positioned to function as a centre of research excellence in this field.  

Activities 

Centre members encourage and support one another’s research through an annual event on International Women’s Day, the Ursula Masson Memorial lecture, as well as a seminar series, public lectures and through regular group meetings. 

Contact Us 

If you are interested in joining the Centre for Gender Studies in Wales or if you wish for any other information on any aspect of its work, please contact us.

Dr Rachel Lock-Lewis

RESEARCH PROJECTS

Historical fictions

Literary scholar Professor Diana Wallace works on historical fictions with a particular interest in how women and other marginalised writers have used this often maligned genre. Her work explores how novelists and short story writers re-imagine the unrecorded past through fiction and intervene in traditional historiographical narratives. Her current project, a monograph entitled Writing the Past: Modernism and historical fictions, uncovers and explores a strangely neglected body of work by writers in and from the four nations of Britain.  Writers discussed include Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, HD, Lynette Roberts, Naomi Mitchison and Helen Waddell. 

From the Women’s Liberation Movement to the National Assembly for Wales: Feminism in South Wales, 1970-1999.

Historian Dr Rachel Lock-Lewis is researching the history of the women’s movement in South Wales in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

By the early 1970s, a handful of loosely-structured women’s liberation groups were meeting in informal settings, with no fundings but plenty of energy, to discuss issues that mattered to its members.  Rallied by issues such as reproductive health, violence against women, sexism in the media, and unequal pay and opportunities at work, the women’s movement in South Wales grew in size over the next three decades and became increasingly concerted in its efforts to secure a better deal for women in Wales.  Indeed, feminists played a key role in ensuring that the 1998 Government of Wales Act had gender equality ‘hardwired’ into the constitution of the new National Assembly for Wales and were instrumental in the election of 24 female AM’s to the Assembly (of sixty seats) in 1999.  This, and the selection of a cabinet in which five out of the nine posts went to women, was unprecedented in the United Kingdom.  This book traces the evolution of feminism in South Wales from its small beginning to its achievement of such a dramatic change to the political and cultural landscape of Wales.               

OUR MEMBERS

The expertise of our members mean that the University is particularly well positioned to function as a centre of research excellence in the field of gender studies, providing a focus for cross-Faculty, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research in relation to Welsh history, culture and society in particular. 

URSULA MASSON MEMORIAL LECTURE

Each year on 8 March - International Women’s Day - the Centre for Gender Studies in Wales presents the Ursula Masson Memorial Lecture, to celebrate the day and to commemorate its founder.  

Ursula Masson

Ursula Masson was a woman who made things happen. Proud to call herself a feminist, she was a fine scholar and an inspirational teacher whose passionate commitment to woman and to politics was evident to everyone who knew her.

As a history lecturer at the then University of Glamorgan from 1994, she became a leading figure in the field of women’s history, especially Welsh women’s political history. Ursula was an early proponent of what is now called in REF-speak ‘Impact’. That is, she took historical research out of the academy and back out into the wider world.  She was also instrumental in founding Archif Menywod Cymru/Women’s Archive of Wales. Their very successful women’s history roadshows were initially her idea and she was instrumental in pushing through the Heritage Lottery bid which gained the fund to support this campaign.  

Her published work included two editions of women’s political writing for Honno Press: Elizabeth Andrews’ autobiography/memoir, A Woman’s Work is Never Done (2006), and The Very Salt of Life: Welsh Women’s Political Writings from Chartism to Suffrage (2007). She also produced an edition of the minute book of the Aberdare Women’s Liberal Association from 1891-1907, entitled: Women’s Rights and Womanly Duties (2005). An active member of Llafur, the Welsh People’s History Society, she was also co-editor of their journal. And she was Chair of the West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network. 

Born in Merthyr Tydfil, Ursula took her first degree at Cardiff University followed by an MA at the University of Keele. She worked as a journalist in Australia and then in Adult Education in Swansea before she came to Glamorgan. Her PhD research focused on Women’s Liberal Associations in Wales and was published posthumously as For Women, for Wales and for Liberalism: Women in Liberal Politics in Wales 1880-1914 by the University of Wales Press.

She also set up, with Professor Jane Aaron, the Centre for Gender Studies in Wales. It is fitting, therefore, that the Memorial Lecture is given in her honour on International Women’s Day. 

The Ursula Masson Memorial Prize  

The Ursula Masson Memorial Prize is awarded annually for the best undergraduate dissertation in women’s history or gender history to recognise the legacy of the late Dr Ursula Masson.  Ursula was an esteemed and much-loved historian at USW who, amongst many other endeavours and achievements, founded the Centre for Gender Studies in Wales.  Her premature death in 2008 was a blow to the research and teaching community at USW though this prize is one of the ways in which we remember her wonderful contribution to her subject and to the University.         

Winners

• 2020 - Christine Powell: Why Did Abertillery's First Local Authority Birth-Control Clinic Fail? and Alis Thomas Stone: A Rejection of Femininity? A Study of Female Self-Starvation in Britain, 1864-1914.
• 2019 - Nicola Pitman: Heroines in Muddy Boots? Perceptions and Portrayals of the Women's Land Army of the Second World War.
• 2018 - Julie Marie Edwards: The Disappearance of the Younger Witch in Early-Modern Art and Rebecca King: An Exploration of the Erasure of Trans Voices in the LGBT+ Movement and its Historiography.
• 2017 - Leah Ellis: Bleidlesiau I Ferched! An Assessment of the Newspaper Coverage of the Women's Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1869-1914.

STUDY WITH US

Postgraduate study

We welcome applications for PhD or Masters by Research study in one of our areas of expertise. You can study full or part time, on campus or remotely. If you're a professional with an existing body of research, a PhD by Portfolio could be the route for you.  
 
Postgraduate researchers are assigned a supervisory team who have the expertise and experience to support them in their studies. Supervisors will help you to shape your doctoral research project, advise you on creating networks and establishing your career.