In 1851, householders were asked to give more precise details of the places of birth of each resident, to state their relationship to him or her, … Although there is much to these arguments, it should however be noted that such problems must have applied to some extent to men and boys as well as to women and girls. 13 Edward Higgs, Making Sense of the Census: the Manuscript Returns for England and Wales, 1801–1901 , London, 1989, p. 81. Camberwell stands out for sheer novelty, being home to 181 different occupation titles, including burlesque actresses, some dancers and an electrical primer tester. 60 Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: a Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian London (Oxford 1971), London, 2013 p. 100–1. 94–5. 59 Clementina Black, Married Women’s Work (1915), London 1983, p. 93. What is less clear, however, is where the factual evidence for this conclusion with respect to the British censuses, at least in terms of occupational titles, is to be found. It was the top occupation in that area for Irish men as well. 26 The author wishes to thank Professor Sir Tony Wrigley for permission to quote this material from his forthcoming work The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution . Age next birth day. Lieu de naissance. The percentage of married and widowed women in Bethnal Green, Camberwell, Saffron Hill and Spitalfields recorded as having an occupation in the census. 16 Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Diverse Experiences: the Geography of Adult Female Employment in England and the 1851 Census’, in Women’s Work in Industrial England: Regional and Local Perspectives , ed. Whilst this could be described as a match of employment status rather than of occupation, this in itself is still a valuable result, since it is important to match those who were not working as well as those who were, if a full picture of employment status is to be obtained through the study of the censuses. 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’. Census enumerators, we argued, overlooked their employment because it was often casual, seasonal, part-time and intermittent and patterns of employment varied with the life-cycle. 39–67. 11, It is clear, therefore, that there is a considerable body of opinion that holds that the censuses under-enumerated the work of women during the Victorian era. An entry was considered a match if the details of occupation given in the patient register corresponded exactly with those in the CEBs, and ideally both in terms of address and kin. 54 Census of England and Wales 1861: Pebmarsh, TNA, RG9/1111. It might be argued that all this is a study in language, in what people were called, and that such studies must always be trumped by those that compare census data to records that deal with actual employment, wherever they exist. Box 434, Union, IL 60180 Phone: (815) 923-2267. Summary Tables arranged and compiled by L. Wyatt Papworth M.A. In 1851, much greater detail was asked about people's occupations than in previous censuses. 56. In Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire, Michael Anderson described how in households working in mills in Preston, when the parent was over the age of thirty-five, sixty-nine percent had at least one co-residing child in employment. 41. The following information was requested: Name of street, place, road, etc. These were St Andrew’s Hospital near Norwich, St Audry’s in Melton near Ipswich, and Warley Hospital near Brentwood in Essex. 1–152. 8 Edward Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work in the Nineteenth-century Censuses’, History Workshop Journal 23, 1987, pp. Whether all women who were in work on the night of the census stated their occupation can never be known. 139–55. 22. 63 When comparing this figure with the graphs presented here it is immediately noticeable that for 1891 (and 1901) the proportion of married and widowed women in employment in the areas studied also averages around thirty percent. 44 The relationship between new estimates of the female working population taken from the CEBs and the figures given in the contemporary Census Reports will be the subject of a future monograph. I expressed similar reservations in Making Sense of the Census two years later. Source : Censuses of England and Source: Censuses of England and Wales, 1851—1901 . His occupation was occupation. Implicit in some of what I and others argued about the under-enumeration of women in the Victorian censuses was the belief that how male householders, census enumerators and the census authorities treated women’s work was influenced by the Victorian view that woman should be the domestic ‘angel in the house’ rather than entering the external, masculine world of work. This article is in two parts. Research on the villages around Halstead shows that straw plaiters most certainly were present, and in great numbers. For background information please see the Library and Archives Canada Census of 1851 site. We are looking primarily at the very poorest women in society, and perhaps unsurprisingly these were the women who were suffering in the majority of cases with ‘exhaustion of melancholia’ (what we would probably refer to now as severe, chronic depression). 40 However, this coverage was somewhat episodic and patchy – how typical were the problems revealed, often in passing, by these local studies? The findings summarized in Graphs 2–5 suggest that the census offers a window into women’s work in London during the nineteenth century, and accurately tracks the changes in occupational opportunities that women experienced Horrell and Humphries, and Humphries and Sarasúa, also cite my work, whereas Davidoff and Hall do not back up their general statements. 14 In 1999 Michael Anderson showed from research based on samples of the CEBs for Lancashire in 1851 that large numbers of women continued to work in the textile factories after they had married. The matches shown in Graph 1 relate to women who were recorded as being married or widowed on admittance to the asylums, and include both those who were recorded as having no occupation, and those who were employed. (Swift, Gilley; Neal, 1999, p. 91,92). 15 This subsequently led Leigh Shaw-Taylor to argue that the married work of women in factories was very well recorded, and that it was unlikely that unmarried women’s work would be less well enumerated. In each of the years 1851, 1861, 1871 and in some cases 1881, more women were recorded as straw plaiters in the villages around Halstead than in any other female occupation. There is little doubt that a large proportion of women did carry out paid work in order to survive. Without a knowledge of local economic and social conditions, to give one a feel for possible problems of underenumeration, and a grasp of the shifting administrative conventions of census tabulation, the use of these sources may be fraught with dangers. Whilst they may not offer an exhaustive record of every woman in an occupation, they do offer an extremely detailed picture of the socio-economic status of the districts at the time, and are sensitive to the changes experienced by those living and working there. 1851 Census Report of England and Wales: Registration County and National Occupations Microsoft Access 2000 database providing data on male and female occupations in England and Wales for persons at all ages in five-year bands at registration county level and at national level (England and Wales together) in 1851. 57 However, it is not at all clear that this is the case. 64–7. Âge au 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. Sandra Burman, Oxford and New York, 1979, pp. 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. Given that the problems with women’s employment in the Census Reports have been well chronicled already, and that the British CEBs for the period 1851 to 1911 are now available in a single machine-readable dataset, 43 the published census tables are less vital for historical research. _____ _____ OF Profession, Trade or Occupation. These claims were based on the authors’ own research (some published, some in process) on agricultural work and on Victorian London, and were a riposte to the claims of much labour history that married women in the nineteenth century did not work.