Women were not explicitly banned from voting in Great Britain until the 1832 Reform Act and the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act.[1] In England the suffrage movement existed before and after the 1832 act, but did not form a national organisation until the creation of the National Society for Women's Suffrage in 1872. Although there were notable exceptions such as the working-class areas of Lancashire, the women's suffrage movement in England was predominantly a middle-class movement.[2] In Wales there were only two narrow bands of wealthy society in the Anglicised north and south coastal areas.[3] Much of the female population of an emerging 19th century Wales was based in the low-waged, densely-populated, industrialised valleys of the south. At first women found work in metalworking and coal extraction, but then faced mass unemployment after the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act had prohibited them from working underground.[4] The coal mining industry, with its absence of pithead baths, led to unpaid women's employment as the need to keep both their homes and the family's menfolk clean became a never ending task.[4] This led to the image of the stoic Welsh Mam, a matriarch of the home, but little could be further from the truth in a society controlled by men.[5]