'Women do not count, neither shall they be counted': Suffrage, Citizenship and the Battle for the 1911 Census

Fig. 1.

Cartoon by 'A Patriot' (Alfred Pease), 'No Vote, No Census', Votes for Women, 24 March 1911.

The 1911 census, released in 2009, was always destined to be of wider significance for historians than any earlier censuses. There are three distinct reasons. First, the 1911 form included four additional columns, requiring the 'head of family' to state 'for each married woman entered on this schedule' the number of years 'the present marriage has lasted' and how many children were born alive to that marriage (this figure was further subdivided into 'children still living' and 'children who have died').¹ Second, unlike its predecessors, a 1911 schedule may be read exactly as it was written, usually in the head of family's own hand — rather than transcribed into a book by the census enumerator, who in the process sometimes standardized information.² Thus the schedules offer individuality rather than uniformity, an opportunity to eavesdrop on life in the Edwardian home. Third, 1911 was, of course, a time of heightened — indeed often frenzied — political activity. On the one hand, Herbert Henry Asquith's Liberal government had been returned at both 1910 General Elections, permitting the promotion of ever more ambitious welfare reforms. On the other, after nearly fifty years of campaigning, 'Votes for Women' supporters were becoming increasingly obstreperous. Suffragettes who had shown themselves ready to damage government property were unlikely quietly to obey government demands for census compliance. When the militant suffrage societies called for a boycott, the census became a site for what we have termed 'the battle for the census'.

The release of the archived 1911 census data was therefore awaited with particular interest. When the schedules were released early, in January 2009 rather than in January 2012 as expected, members of the public were able to pore fascinated over the handwritten depositions of their Edwardian ancestors. However, it was the suffragette census protest that captured the 2009 press headlines, in newspapers keen to remark upon the census boycott, deployed for the first time in Britain as a real political weapon.³

But beyond popular interest as to who might have evaded the enumerator, historians are now able to comment on the complex relationship between this piece of Whitehall data-collection in the early twentieth century, with its new questions about married women and their children (the answers to which would provide the statistics on which to base future social legislation), and the 'Votes for Women' campaigns, in 1911 nearing their height. For this collision of competing political agendas — welfarism and suffragism — is of key significance. We see in spring 1911 the two spheres of the traditional model used to depict Victorian society — the public, characterized by masculinity and politics, and the private, by the female and the home — in dramatic conflict. With every household instructed to complete its own census schedule, state bureaucracy was penetrating into the heart of the Edwardian home. It intruded most impertinently, its critics charged, into the domestic privacy of every woman, especially that of married women. The 'head of family' (usually a husband) was now required by law to provide the state with her intimate personal details. Yet this information was demanded by the same Liberal government that steadfastly denied women the rights of full citizenship. It was this entwining of the public and political with the intimate and domestic that transformed the 1911 census into a fierce battleground. The many returns for suffragette households, emblazoned with outspoken protest statements in their own handwriting, are a vivid testimony to this discord.

This article sets out to analyse the battle for the 1911 census. Using the newly-released schedules for England, it has four aims. First, it gives a provisional assessment of how widespread was suffragette evasion of the census (escaping the notice of the enumerator) and of resistance (defying the requirement to provide information). It maps patterns across the English regions and communities to suggest the scale of the census boycott. Second...