Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 103

This collection of fifteen papers grew out of a 1996 Local Population Studies conference. It contains seven chapters that have been published elsewhere and eight new ones. All examine women’s work in nineteenth-century England, if the nineteenth century is stretched a bit to include the very end of the eighteenth century and the very beginning of the twentieth century. The previously published chapters are already important papers in the field, and a student of women’s history will find it convenient to have these works easily accessible. The new chapters add breadth and depth to our knowledge of women’s work in the nineteenth century.

While edited volumes are often difficult to review because the chapters are so varied, in this case my work is easy. The chapters are so closely linked that they meld together into a book that has one clear thesis and two additional themes. The book argues that the nineteenth-century censuses are reasonably accurate and the information they provide about women’s work should be trusted and used. In addition, it also examines the labour force participation rate of married women, and the wide variety of work that women engaged in during the nineteenth century.

The book as a whole makes the case that the censuses are generally reliable and should be used. The most strident critic of the census data is Edward Higgs, who argues that the number women counted as domestic servants is seriously over-estimated because some women labelled with terms such as ‘housekeeper’ were family members who kept house and not servants, and because some women counted as domestic servants were actually farm servants. Higgs’s chapter, however, is followed immediately by a chapter in which Michael Anderson refutes his claims. Anderson shows that examining a national sample, rather than a local one, reduces the extent of the problem, and argues that the clerks who calculated the aggregate totals seem to have been aware of the ambiguity in the term ‘housekeeper’ and did not include all women so designated in the aggregate totals. Leigh Shaw-Taylor also concludes that Higgs’s concerns about domestic servants are exaggerated.

The book contains other chapters that criticize the census. Like Higgs, John McKay criticizes the census for over-stating employment, but for a different reason. He notes that dropping married women with occupations such as ‘farmer’s wife’ or ‘shoemaker’s wife’ from the employed category greatly reduces the measured rate of married women’s labour force participation in 1851 and 1861, making the decline in married women’s labour force participation in the late nineteenth century appear much less dramatic. Other authors, such as Eilidh Garrett, suggest the censuses under-count rather than over-count women’s work.

Other chapters in the book specifically defend the census. Shaw-Taylor argues that census enumerators accurately recorded the regularly-employed women; they did miss casual female labour, ‘but largely because the G[eneral] R[egister] O[ffice] did not want to know about such work’ (p.40). In addition to the chapter directly critiquing Higgs, the book contains another chapter by Anderson in which he argues that ‘many of the concerns about reliable reporting are exaggerated’ (p.185), and that work in textile factories in particular was well recorded in the censuses. The high rates of female participation evident in certain industries also argue against the under-recording of female labour. Nigel Goose finds participation rates for married women as high as 74 per cent in Harpenden. Most of the chapters use the census as their source, which by itself suggests confidence in the accuracy of that data. Thus, while the book contains both criticism and defences of the census data, it seems to favour the defences and encourage use of census data.

Reading the various arguments about the accuracy of the census presented in this book, it becomes clear that the debates about how well the censuses measure women’s work are in large part debates about the definition of what it means to be ‘working’. Shaw-Taylor argues that the censuses did a good job of recording regular employment, and only missed the casual employment that they never intended to record, though he admits that it is not entirely clear what ‘regular’ means. While it may be true that the censuses were not intended to record casual labour, I am still uncomfortable about the accuracy of a count of female labour that excludes such work. The term ‘employment’ itself might be ambiguous; Garrett notes that the definition of employment seems to change during the late nineteenth century. The census, ‘changes from gathering information on “tasks in which one’s time was spent” to “tasks for which one received financial remuneration”’ (p.327). This is one example of how changes over time in the instructions to enumerators make it problematic to compare employment totals across censuses.

The employment status of wives is often ambiguous. Both Anderson and Garrett calculate what participation rates would be if women in households with lodgers were counted as employed. This addition assumes that these women were generating income for the household by providing services for lodgers, and thus should be counted as employed. McKay and Christine Jones both remove from employment wives who were given an occupational title that describes their husband’s occupation. However, it may be that a farmer’s wife did a great deal of farming work and really should be counted as employed. While such categories disappeared in the late nineteenth century, this disappearance could be the result of changes in women’s work patterns. As Higgs notes, ‘At the heart of the matter lies the definition of an occupation and work, and the relationship between economic work and the home’ (p.259).

In addition to the accuracy of the censuses, the labour force participation of married women is an important theme in many chapters, and this book provides a valuable resource in this area. As we have already seen, McKay argues that the occupational aggregates from the census overstate married women’s labour force participation because they include relational ‘occupations’ such as ‘farmer’s wife’. Removing these categories, McKay concludes that married women’s labour force participation was only about 13 or 14 per cent in the mid-nineteenth century. Goose, Anderson, Osamu Saito, Jones, and Garrett all measure the participation rates of married women in different populations, and we find that participation rates varied substantially by industry and location. Anderson finds an above-average participation rate of 26 per cent for married women in Preston in 1851. For the late eighteenth century, Saito finds much lower rates of participation for married women in Corfe Castle, Dorset (nine per cent) than in Cardington, Bedfordshire (68 per cent), a difference which was still evidence in 1851. While participation rates were generally low for married women, certain industries seem to have drawn a large number of married women. Nicola Verdon concludes that most of the women employed in agricultural day-labour were married. The straw industry also employed many married women. Goose finds that, among the registration districts of Hertfordshire, the presence of the straw industry increased married women’s labour force participation. He finds that, while there was substantial variation, for the county as a whole one-fifth of married women were employed. Jones looks only at women over 45, and finds that ever-married women had participation rates of 22 per cent.

A few chapters examine changes in participation over a married woman’s life-cycle and find that children affected married women’s labour force participation more through the income they produced than through the demands they put on their time. Instead of reaching its lowest point when she had young children, a married women’s labour force participation declined as her children aged. Anderson, examining Lancashire and Cheshire in 1851, finds that participation rates for married women declined with age, and that wives with working children were less likely to be in the labour force than women with children too young to work. Garrett finds that in 1921 the labour force participation of married women still declined as they aged, just as Anderson found for 1851. Marguerite Dupree shows that female employment in the pottery industry rose when children’s employment in the potteries was prohibited, which also suggests that child labour was a substitute for married women’s labour.

In the opening chapter Goose notes that The factory as a locus for female employment dominated contemporary discussion out of all proportion to its significance, and, in consequence, until relatively recently historians of industrial England have also tended to concentrate their attention upon the employment of women in factories (p.5).

This book helps to correct that tendency by providing information on a wide variety of women’s occupations. Goose demonstrates the importance of the straw-plaiting industry in Hertfordshire, and argues that normally the wages in this industry were reasonably good. Owen Davies examines the work of women as healers, which was marginalized but persisted in spite of increased requirements for formal medical credentials. Stana Nenadic examines the businesswomen of Edinburgh and suggests that, while businesswomen did well financially, business ownership did not draw in many women from the middle class because it was not considered feminine. Dupree examines women’s work in the pottery industry, and Verdon notes that women were extensively employed in the growing of hops, particularly in shaving poles, and in tying and picking hops. For those interested in agricultural employment the book includes two chapters. Pamela Sharpe’s chapter discusses the work and wages of women in agriculture before 1850, while Verdon’s chapter on Sussex examines the period after 1850.

There are other links between the chapters as well. Both McKay and Garrett argue that there was little change in female labour force participation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both Dupree and Anderson discuss child care arrangements. The reader is invited to find more connections. Anyone interested in measuring women’s work in the nineteenth century will find this book a rich source.