Beth Jenkins

Bio

I am a historian of modern Wales and Britain, with particular research interests in women's education, work and political activism. I received my PhD from Cardiff University in 2017 and held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Essex between 2018 and 2021. 

Research 

My first monograph, Graduate Women and Work in Wales, 1880-1939: Nationhood, Networks and Community, was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2022. The 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.

More recently, I co-edited (along with Professor Paul O'Leary and Dr Stephanie Ward) a collection of essays titled Gender in Modern Welsh History: Perspectives on Masculinity and Femininity in Wales from 1750 to 2000. Beginning with sex work in the eighteenth century and concluding with women’s late twentieth-century anti-nuclear activism, the collection 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. 

Selected publications

Books

• with Paul O'Leary and Stephanie Ward (eds), Gender in Modern Welsh History: Perspectives on Masculinity and Femininity in Wales from 1750 to 2000 (University of Wales Press, 2023)

• Graduate Women and Work in Wales, 1880-1939: Nationhood, Networks and Community (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Chapters

• with Neil Evans, 'Spaces and Places of Women's Social Movements in Wales, 1890-1914', in B. Jenkins, P. O'Leary and S. Ward (eds), Gender in Modern Welsh History: Perspectives on Masculinity and Femininity in Wales from 1750-2000 (University of Wales Press, 2023), pp. 121-146.

• ‘Suffrage Organizers, Grassroots Activism and the Campaign in Wales’, in Lyndsey Jenkins and Alexandra Hughes-Johnson (eds), The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (University of London Press, 2021), pp. 87-108.

Articles

• 'Gender, Embodiment and Professional Identity in Britain, c.1880-1930s’, Cultural and Social History, 17.4 (2020), 499-514.

• 'Women's Professional Employment in Wales during the First World War', Welsh History Review, 28.4 (2017), 646-675.

• '"Queen of the Bristol channel ports": Gender and Civic Identity in Cardiff, c.1880–1914’, Women’s History Review, 23.6 (2014), 903-921.

Dictionary entries

• Mackenzie [nee Hughes], (Hettie) Millicent (1863-1942), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2018.

• Bonarjee, Dorothy Noel ('Dorf') (1894 - 1983), poet and lawyer, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, 2020.

• Williams, Mary (1883-1977), French scholar, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, 2017.

• Hoggan [née Morgan], Frances Elizabeth (1843-1927), physician and social reformer, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, 2016.

Media contributions

• ‘The Hindu bard’ documentary, BBC World Service, Dec 2020, and BBC Sounds Podcast.

• ‘She is beautiful but she is Indian’: The student who became a Welsh bard at 19’, BBC, Dec 2020.

• ‘The Lost World of the Welsh Suffragettes’, with Cerys Matthews, Radio Wales / BBC Sounds, Dec 2018.

Contact

bethrosejenkins@gmail.com