Women's Archive Wales - Equal Pay, Equal Rights?
Can you help Women’s Archive Wales with their latest project? We want to commemorate and understand more about the impact of the equalities legislation of the 1970s on women in Wales.
2025/26 marks the 50th anniversary of three ground breaking Acts:
- Equal Pay Act 1970: Implemented in 1975, ‘An Act to prevent discrimination, as regards terms and conditions of employment’. This was a first attempt to ensure equal pay for equal work (although not for work of equal value, as had been campaigned for for many years, due to economic concerns about the cost).
- Sex discrimination Act 1975: This legislation made sex discrimination unlawful in employment, education, services, and property management. - Race Relations Act 1976: The scope of the legislation included discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, nationality, ethnic and national origin in the fields of employment, the provision of goods and services, education and public functions.
For the next 6 months, Women’s Archive Wales will aim to shed new light on the history and impact of this first attempt at legislation against discrimination in the workplace. Later combined into the equalities act of 2010, what, if any, change did these Acts bring to women’s lives?
This is a small-scale project, but by March 2026 we aim to:
- Create a small collection of personal experience stories from women across Wales.
- Provide a guide to existing archive resources relating to the subject, and hopefully collect new archive material for future researchers.
- Create an exhibition to share these stories.
Our long-term legacy, we hope, will be to provide future audiences with a starting point to a deeper understanding of the fight for equality, and to point people in the direction of further research on the impact of this legislation in Wales.
So, if you are:
- A woman who campaigned for change in the 1970s.
- A woman whose life was impacted by the changes.
- An archive or museum holding collections relating to this story in Wales.
- A company, organisation, union or campaign group who were active at the time, and may have some record or papers or memories of the time.
we would love to hear from you!
If you think you might be able to help us in any way at all, please contact Ffion Fielding, project manager, or Michelle Rafferty, project researcher, by emailing: ffionmfielding@gmail.com, if possible before December 15th 2025, for inclusion in the project.