This book traces the social backgrounds, educational experiences and subsequent lives of women who attended the university colleges in Wales from their inception to the outbreak of the Second World War. Using a sample of 2,000 graduates, the book foregrounds the experience of working-class women and critically assesses the claim of social inclusivity built around education in Wales. It charts changes and continuities in women's career prospects; explores graduates' relationship with the communities in which they studied, lived, and worked; and, finally, examines the extensive networks which underpinned their personal and professional lives.

This innovative collection offers a reappraisal of gender as a category of analysis in modern Welsh history. Beginning with sex work in the eighteenth century and concluding with women’s late twentieth-century anti-nuclear activism, the contributors show how gender has been constructed, represented, performed and experienced by men and women at different times and places throughout Wales’s modern past. Using a variety of approaches, the collection interrogates gender as a concept that encompasses both femininity and masculinity, provides fresh perspectives on familiar themes, and demonstrates the value of gender analysis for our understanding of the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Wales. Chapters by leading historians and early career academics each set an agenda for exploring the intersection of gender with nationality, race, class, age and sexuality.