Women, Occupations and Work in the Victorian Censuses Revisited

There has long been a tendency amongst historians to view the Victorian and Edwardian censuses of England and Wales as a problematic source for studying the work of women. Census-taking in the period was a predominantly male affair – census enumerators, who were mainly men, gave to household heads, again mostly male, census household schedules which they filled up using instructions provided by the exclusively male civil servants of the General Register Office (GRO) in London. The Victorian enumerators collected the household schedules and copied them into census enumeration books (CEBs), and then dispatched these to the officials at the GRO. When the latter received the CEBs they proceeded to ‘abstract’ the information in them using classification and coding systems they had devised to create tables and commentaries to be published in Parliamentary Papers.¹ This, it has been argued, introduced biases against recording the work of women at almost every stage. If such under-enumeration existed it would create signal problems for understanding the changing role of women in the economy and in the family, and indeed the nature of economic development during the Industrial Revolution as a whole. This article is in two parts. In the first, Edward Higgs examines the historiography on the issue, and his own position in it, and in the second, Amanda Wilkinson presents new evidence on the reliability of the census returns.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF WOMEN’S WORK IN THE BRITISH CENSUSES

Historians’ concerns over the recording of women’s work in the census have been voiced over a considerable period. In History Workshop Journal in 1986, for example, Sonya Rose argued that ‘many historians have shied away from census data because of some very serious shortcomings in the extent to which women’s occupations are reflected in the enumerator’s records. Homework and casual employment in general are under-reported in the censuses’.² The following year, in their path-breaking work Family Fortunes, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall insisted: ‘information on women’s occupations where they were not a household head is so unreliable as to be almost useless, and, by definition, married women were not considered heads of households’.³ Similarly, in History Workshop Journal 35 (1993), in ‘Women, Work and the Census: a Problem for Historians of Women’, Bridget Hill, while claiming ‘censuses are – or should be – a way in to knowledge of work done by women’, asserted that, ‘what was common to all censuses was that women’s work was consistently under-recorded’.⁴ In 1995, Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries argued in ‘Women’s Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male Breadwinner Family, 1790–1865’, that although ‘many authors have used nineteenth-century census data to demonstrate declining female participation and increasing employment segregation … the census enumeration of women’s employment is demonstrably inaccurate’. According to Horrell and Humphries, the most substantial underreporting was to be found in the case of married women, in the agricultural sector, in manufacturing and in certain service occupations. Such work, they concluded, was ‘invisible’ to male observers.⁵ Instead they based their analysis of women’s participation in the labour force on family budgets in the works of contemporary social commentators, Parliamentary Papers, working-class autobiographies, and similar sources.⁶ Such a strategy is perhaps understandable given the fact that they were primarily concerned to examine the period when censuses did not give information for individual occupations. However, this did not stop them from querying the usefulness of censuses in general. The same year Humphries, in her contribution to June Purvis’s Women’s History, repeated these claims regarding the problems with the census, and showed that her and Horrell’s budgets recorded far higher levels of labour participation for women than in the census tables.⁷ However, their figures on women with occupational titles from the same sources showed similarities with my revised census figures for women’s employment in 1841.⁸ More recently Alison Kay rejected using the census for the study of women retailers in nineteenth-century London on the grounds that the source ‘suffers from a...