Documenting Women’s Lives at St Fagans: National History Museum

St Fagans: National History Museum in the past 60 years has played an important role in collecting and recording the experiences of women in Wales. The Archive collections at St Fagans reflects the work done by several members of research staff to document the many facets that contributed to the lives of past generations of women in Wales, and continues to document their experiences. This blog focuses particularly on the work of one woman researcher, namely S. Minwel Tibbott, and her legacy, and on International Women’s Day looks at her invaluable contribution to document the lives of her fellow sisters in Wales.

S. Minwel Tibbott began working in St Fagans in the early 1960’s and later became Assistant Keeper. Her research work mainly focused on women’s everyday domestic lives collected via oral testimony, photography and film, and was set against a post Second World War Wales that was rapidly transforming, but for a number of women, life had stayed relatively unchanged for generations. Domestic appliances and labour saving devices were emerging and available, but out of the economic reach of many Welsh women at this time, however, as the 1960’s progressed and disposable income more commonplace this began to change.  Many of the images shown here therefore capture domestic rituals that may have been lost had it not been for the foresight of S. Minwel Tibbott to record them. St Fagans continues to record and document the lives of women in Wales via the #Creu Hanes #Making History project. Recent donations have included an archive collection relating to one Welsh woman’s experience at Greenham Common for example.