Rocking the Boat Welsh Women Who Championed Equality 1840-1990

This insightful and revealing collection of essays focuses on seven Welsh women who, in a range of imaginative ways, resisted the status quo in Wales, England and beyond during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essays challenge expectations about how women’s lives were lived in the last two centuries, as well as raise issues of gender and nationality. From the pioneer doctor and champion of progressive causes, Frances Hoggan, to the irrepressible twentieth-century novelist Menna Gallie, these women spoke out for what they believed in, and sometimes they paid the price. Although proud of their Welsh identity, they articulated it in a variety of ways, and each spent most of their adult lives outside Wales. They became familiar, and often controversial voices, on the page and platform in London, Oxford, Northern Ireland, and internationally. 

Vice-president of Llafur, the Welsh People's History Society, Angela V. John is a widely published historian and biographer.  Angela V. John is a widely published historian and biographer living in Pembrokeshire but originally from Port Talbot. For many years she held the chair in History at the University of Greenwich, London. She is now an Honorary Professor at Aberystwyth University. Her previous biographical subjects include Lady Charlotte Guest, Elizabeth Robins, Henry W. Nevinson and, most recently, Margaret Haig Thomas, otherwise known as Lady Rhondda. In 2010 Angela’s biography of Evelyn Sharp (Rebel Woman: 1869-1955, Manchester University Press) was longlisted for the biennial Portico Prize for Literature (known as ‘The Northern Booker Prize’). She is a vice-president of Llafur, the Welsh People's History Society. Angela V. John is a widely published historian and biographer living in Pembrokeshire but originally from Port Talbot. Her previous biographical subjects include Lady Charlotte Guest, Elizabeth Robins, Henry W. Nevinson and, most recently, Margaret Haig Thomas, otherwise known as Lady Rhondda. In 2010 Angela's biography Rebel Woman: 1869-1955 was longlisted for the biennial Portico Prize for Literature.