One significant anniversary in 2023 passed almost without mention. In May 1923, the Welsh women’s peace petition was initiated – a plea from the women of Wales to the women of the US, urging the US to take its place in the newly formed League of Nations and encouraging its full participation in the permanent court of international justice, which had come into being in 1922. The text refers to American-Welsh cooperation in the 19th century, and welcomes the steps taken after the first world war to control the arms trade and tackle what we now call human trafficking and the movement of illegal drugs.
These are issues that give it a startlingly contemporary ring. But more startling is the fact that nearly 400,000 women in Wales signed. The petition, with all its handwritten signatures (amounting to several miles’ worth of paper), was received formally in Washington DC, and travelled all over the US, as far as the west coast. Housed in a purpose-made chest of Welsh oak, it ended up in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC – where, after an initial flare of enthusiasm, it was forgotten for decades. In its country of origin, it was commemorated only by a small plaque in the Temple of Peace in Cardiff.
That modest memorial finally attracted attention a few years ago. Various researchers and activists, supported by the Wales Peace Academy, took up the challenge of marking the centenary and – with generous support from the Welsh government – this culminated in the triumphant return of the petition (in its original oak chest) to Wales. Lodged now in the National Library of Wales, it is the focus of a number of projects and events, including digitising the documents, tracing as many signatures as possible – and looking at how this legacy can be built on.
Annie Hughes Griffiths, who played a leading role in the initial campaign, was a nonconformist minister’s wife from west Wales, but her first husband had been a noted Liberal politician, Tom Ellis, an early advocate of devolved government for Wales. Annie, like most of those who supported the initiative, came from a culture that was deeply invested in local co-operative structures, mutual support, ethically slanted education and international concern. Although a good many prominent Welsh chapel leaders had become fiery and jingoistic propagandists in the first world war, the petition shows that at grassroots level another instinct persisted, expressed in concern about agreed legal structures for managing conflict, the protection of the vulnerable and displaced, and an overall commitment to non-violent consultation as the default setting for international affairs. A deeply anti-hierarchical Christianity continued to inform this kind of political vision right up to the last quarter of the 20th century. Even a professedly secular figure such as the great Rhodri Morgan, the former first minister of Wales, would draw eloquently on this legacy in setting out a prospect for Welsh society.
And the memory of all this has been at work in another context in the past couple of years as the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales has done its work on the strengths and weaknesses of the Welsh devolution settlement. The commission reports in January. It’s fair to say – in the light of the interim report last year – that the real weight of the document is likely to be at least as much in what it says about the creation of a strongly rooted democratic culture as in its specific analyses of constitutional options. The commission has broken with precedent by conducting a full programme of direct community engagement – meetings with local groups around the country, with networks representing minorities, migrants, people with disabilities, secondary school students and many more. It makes use of the “citizens’ panel” model for more extended scrutiny of issues, so as to tease out the connection between immediate challenges on the streets of Wrexham, Tregaron or Merthyr and how constitutional structures work or fail. The attempt has been to curate a genuine “national conversation”. The method of working has been as much front and centre as have the questions addressed.
The 1923 petition could only have come from a society that was profoundly literate both about the ethics of national and international relations and about the right and capacity of citizens to shape their lives together and to secure each other’s wellbeing. It was a literacy that owed much to that “dissenting” Christian witness, over a couple of centuries – to a self-reliance that did not have to degenerate into self-serving or self-protection. One of the questions we face now in building a really participatory political culture – in our pervasive climate of obsessions with “growth”, cynicism about leadership, malign and inward-turned localism, and the mechanical, functionalised models of education seemingly so popular with all political parties – is where we find resources for critique, vision and solidarity. Can we imagine a petition today that would gather the signatures of such a significant portion of the female population, never mind the population overall?
It’s worth noting, too, that part of the force of the original petition was precisely that it came from a group whose position in the world of public decision-making was vanishingly narrow. Women’s suffrage was still a novelty; female politicians were practically unknown. But somehow these women had been given confidence to “take their authority” as political agents because they could understand themselves as moral agents – people whose decisions mattered for others. And that gives a hint of what we most need: a culture in which everyone’s decisions are seen to be serious because they give or withhold life where others are concerned.
The good news is that the commission has found a deep and growing resonance in Wales around this general vision, an enthusiasm for more participation and accountability and for better education in civic and public engagement. Younger people have stepped up to the plate with great energy – the impressive work of the Talking Shop initiative, which effectively creates pop-up seminars on democracy and governance for young people across Welsh communities, has been an inspiration here.
The centenary of Annie Hughes Griffiths’s big idea ought to be a good moment to take stock of how we build a new generation’s readiness to take the kind of responsibility that she and her friends articulated with such prophetic clarity and generosity. It is high time to invest more imaginatively in local deliberative networks and in ongoing civic education – in the hope of nourishing the confidence that inspired Annie and her colleagues, the confidence that what they said and did was capable of changing things, and that those who hold the levers of power can be held accountable by an informed, critical, hopeful public.
Rowan Williams is co-chair of the Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales and chair of the trustees of the Wales Peace Academy, and a former archbishop of Canterbury
