Welsh Women

From Wales Online comes these three interesting articles on Welsh women:

Welsh Women & The Vote:

In the summer of 1913 many Welsh women took to the roads. They were usually quite well-off, professional women themselves or married to professional men, and could afford to travel by train or sometimes even by car or carriage. They were walking to make a political point. They wanted the vote and they were using a peaceful way to campaign for it. Read More HERE

Kate Bosse-Griffiths:

Kate Bosse-Griffiths was born in Wittenberg, the German town where Martin Luther had initiated the birth of Protestantism, in 1910. Having studied Archaeology and Egyptology in Berlin, Bonn and Munich, she gained a doctorate for her thesis on the human figure in late Egyptian sculpture in 1936 and was appointed to a post in Berlin, poised for a career curating the world-renowned collections in its museums. Read More HERE about this Egyptologist who fled Nazi persecution.

Women & the National Library of Wales:

The National Library of Wales opened to the public in 1909 in a temporary location at the Assembly Rooms in Aberystwyth before moving to its permanent home on Penglais Hill in 1916. Between the years 1909 and 1912 around 350 individual readers used the library’s reading room and consulted more than 1,300 books, manuscripts, maps and prints.

Unsurprisingly, men were in the majority, but 14% of the readers during this period were women. It was predominantly a younger female generation who used the library, as almost two-thirds of the female readers were under 30 and many were enrolled as university students. Read More HERE and meet the women academics of the 19th Century.

Welsh Brothel Sex Slave Shame

From Wales Online:

Nearly 100 trafficked women from Eastern Europe and Asia are thought to be working in Welsh brothels, according to a new police report detailing the extent of people trafficking in Wales.

The figures were released by Britain’s top cops as they revealed that an estimated 2,600 women have been trafficked in to England and Wales to work in the sex industry.

The Setting the Record report from the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) found that about 17,000 of the estimated 30,000 women working in off-street prostitution are migrants.

Of those migrants, 2,600 were deemed to have been trafficked, while 9,200 were identified as vulnerable migrants who may be further victims of trafficking.

But Jeff Farrar, assistant chief constable of Gwent Police and Acpo Cymru’s lead on protecting vulnerable people and human trafficking, said the picture in Wales was not reflected by the overall statistics in the report.

There are estimated to be 479 women working in off-street prostitution in Wales. Of these, an estimated 55 are Asian, with a further 40 from Eastern Europe and another 48 whose origins are unknown, as well as 337 who are British.

Welsh Wills Online

From BBC News:

About 800,000 pages of documents, some going as far back as the 14th Century, have been placed on the National Library of Wales' website.

Among the wills available at the click of a button are Twm Sion Cati's, known as the Welsh Robin Hood, and hymn writer William Williams, Pantycelyn.

Officials said it had taken more than five years to digitise the documents.

The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth said the wills dated from the 14th Century until 1858, when civil probate was introduced, and 1,000 of them were written in Welsh.