1851 census occupations

Harold J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, London, 1976, pp. The preponderance of lower working-class occupations is, of course, to be expected, since the public County Asylums were intended for those who were unable to afford medical treatment. The percentage of women in Bethnal Green who were enumerated as working or having no occupation. Summary Tables arranged and compiled by L. Wyatt Papworth M.A. 21 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, pp. Enter one or more search terms. Hill and Rose appear not to have carried out any research on the source itself, Hill basing her comments on the work, primarily, of Davidoff and Hall, and a 1987 article of mine in History Workshop Journal , ‘Women, Occupations and Work in the Nineteenth Century Censuses’. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. In my 1987 HWJ article I identified what I regarded as a number of shortcomings in the recording of the work of women in the Victorian censuses. 56. 48 Since these women were admitted over a considerable period of time, it is not possible to compare the percentages with specific census populations. Farming has always been important in and around Coates. 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). OCCUPATIONS PERSONS MALES FEMALES; 1851 1861 1851 1861 1851 1861; Total of Agricultural Order: 2,011,447: 1,924,110: 1,559,762: 1,545,667: 451,685: 378,443: Land Proprietor: 30,315: 30,766: 17,047: 15,131: 13,268: 15,635: Farmer, Grazier: 249,431: 249,735: 226,515: 226,957: 22,916: 22,778: Farmer, Grazier's wife: 164,618: 163,765 : 164,618: … 39–67. 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. Despite extensive searches through the wage books and employment records held in regional record offices across the east of England and London, very few suitable sources have been found. Enumerators could be women from 1891. The London censuses do, however, match closely other sources from the time, and they also clearly show the myriad positions, both regular and casual, that were open to women. and Dorothy M. Zimmern M.A. 25 Raphael Samuel, ‘Comers and Goers’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 55 This left something in excess of ninety percent of such households requiring a supplementary wage in order to escape the workhouse or starvation. 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. 40 However, this coverage was somewhat episodic and patchy – how typical were the problems revealed, often in passing, by these local studies? For 1841–1901, householders (they didn't have to be male but often were) filled out household schedules, which were then copied, and probably simplified, by enumerators into the special enumeration books for dispatch to the Census Office in London. Many of the unoccupied married women were recorded as being ‘wife of labourer’, or ‘wife of agricultural labourer’, indicating their low social standing. 6422 Main St., P.O. 59 Clementina Black, Married Women’s Work (1915), London 1983, p. 93. Tony Wrigley’s examination of the published results of this enumeration shows that nearly two thirds of the manufacturing population in England were to be found in as few as twenty-four out of the nearly 700 hundreds (county subdivisions), or their equivalents, in the country as a whole. For more information on the history of the UK census, visit the National Archives website. You don’t need to fill in all the boxes. However, despite such problems, in my 1987 article I counselled using the census returns with care, rather than steering clear of the source a together: The conclusion to be drawn from this work is that it is necessary to treat the occupational information in the manuscript census enumerators’ books with caution, and that the historian’s use of the published census reports should be even more circumspect. As regards the types of job shown in the census, if the CEBs were not recording casual and irregular women’s work as has been suggested, then it might be expected that a relatively small number of occupations would appear: perhaps some tailoresses, a few shop-keepers, laundresses, charwomen, the odd nurse or midwife, a teacher or two per school, and so on. However, by 2005, when a revised and updated version of this work was issued as Making Sense of the Census Revisited, although still cautious I struck a more positive note, claiming that ‘in the absence of alternative sources, the census enumerators’ books are still our best source for understanding the economic activities of women in the Victorian period’. 10 Returning to the subject of the usefulness of the census in an article with Carmen Sarasúa in Feminist Economics in 2012, Jane Humphries again claimed that the work of women was ‘left off the record’ in censuses across the world, including those in Britain. For instructions on how and where to apply, see the Recruitment Bulletin on the job page for each position. In 1911 the census authorities in England and Wales dispensed with the enumeration books and worked directly from the household schedules, although the Scots continued to use enumeration books. There was a significantly greater number of occupations listed on the 1851 census than in 1841 and they are shown below. Anderson, Michael (2007 a) “ Mis-specification of servant occupations in the 1851 Census: A problem revisited, ” in Goose, Nigel (ed.) Research on the villages around Halstead shows that straw plaiters most certainly were present, and in great numbers. 123–60. Source : Censuses of England and Source: Censuses of England and Wales, 1851—1901 . After these, dressmakers, charwomen, laundresses, washerwomen and school mistresses seem to have been the most likely candidates for suffering mental illness. In 1851, much greater detail was asked about people's occupations than in previous censuses. The variations, I suggested, might ‘again reflect a particular enumerator’s habit of ignoring the paid work of women rather than a low economic participation rate’. But it is therefore important to establish the reliability of the CEBs above all else. Most of Spitalfields was home to weavers, which explains why the proportion of women in work was so much higher than in neighbouring Bethnal Green. 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. 1861 Census of Canada. The percentage of women in Camberwell St. George enumerated as working or having no occupation. FreeCEN volunteers are currently working on the 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, and 1891 census. 1851 Canadian Census Form PERSONAL CENSUS—ENUMERATION DISTRICT, NO. 64–7. Even this may have been taking the argument too far since, as Michael Anderson subsequently showed, the clerks at the Census Office in London seem to have been aware of such problems and made allowance when abstracting data for the published Census Reports . This database is an index to individuals enumerated in the 1851 Census for England. From this she and Sarasúa argue that the apparent U-shaped curve in women’s participation rates in the economy over the period of industrialization is a simplistic rendering of the reality of women’s lives, and in part a ‘statistical artefact’ of official tables. Masters in trade and manufacture were asked to state the word "master" after the description of their occupation and to state the number of men employed on the day of the census. 64–97. 42 Edward Higgs, Making Sense of the Census Revisited. Search: Census of 1851 This census includes Canada East (Quebec), Canada West (Ontario), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The asylum records examined for the present study covering the main provincial towns of East Anglia – Norwich, Colchester, Brentwood and Ipswich – contained information on every woman admitted to the County Asylums. 44 Here new evidence on the reliability of the census returns in East Anglia and London will be presented first, and problems with examining women’s work via small-scale studies will also be addressed. It is still Camberwell here that has the smallest proportion of married and widowed women in work, one third that of Spitalfields in 1851. 28 Some of these authors however, as already noted, draw directly upon my own work to point to the supposed problematic nature of the census as a source. Per year, then, the numbers of observations were not large, but a general trend emerges. The 1851 Census of New Brunswick Index is also available. Share your THOUGHTS! Thus, it was not that straw plaiting was being ignored by the enumerators as she suggested, rather it was that Lown was looking in the wrong place for them. The probable reason for the high match rate between the two sets of sources, is explained by some of the Warley records for 1871. Amanda Wilkinson’s evidence regarding women’s employment in the British census based on case studies, given below, covers a wider geographical area, and approaches the issue with new techniques of analysis. Local Population Studies: 260 –68. 40 J. C. Holley, ‘The Redivision of Labour: Two Firms in nineteenth century South East Scotland’, unpublished PhD, University of Edinburgh, 1978, p. 183. House number or name; Name of each person that had spent the night in that household; Relationship of person enumerated to the head of the family; Person's marital status 17 As Nigel Goose has recently summarized the situation, ’the more informed critics of the census data have concluded that the jury is out on the question of under-enumeration [of women’s employment]’. 9. 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, … Place of Birth. 26 Perhaps when conceptualizing occupational structures in the period we ought to think as much about the worlds of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor , as about that of Friedrich Engels’s Manchester. The fact that the figures are as high as they are makes it improbable that there were large numbers of women whose formal work had gone unrecorded by the census. Profession, commerce ou occupation. These were St Andrew’s Hospital near Norwich, St Audry’s in Melton near Ipswich, and Warley Hospital near Brentwood in Essex. June Purvis, London, 1995, pp. The census returns contains: name, age, occupation, relationship to the head of household, date of marriage, education/literacy, absent family members, family members who died since 1841 and other information. 63 Life and Labour of the People in London , 17 vols 1889–1903, ed. 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. The 1851 classification was described by Farr in the 1851 census report. Out of these workers, 575 were female, most apparently single. 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. Robert Beachy, Beatrice Craig and Alastair Owens, Oxford, 2006, p. 154. It was then possible to use this information to trace many of these women in the relevant censuses, and to compare how well the occupational details in the registers matched those in the CEBs. ... 1851 England & Wales Census. Finally, Saffron Hill shows an intriguing pattern with both married and widowed women who worked, and also those who were not employed, dropping as a proportion of the women in the district, whilst single women formed a greater percentage of the women working recorded in the district overall. 45 We assume that women who were given occupational titles were employed in the appropriate work: it is difficult to see why they would have lied since there is no suggestion that women would get better treatment if they worked. 2, 1891, pp. 12 Although earlier research had raised issues about particular aspects of the problem, my article was one of the first works to confront directly the problems of women’s work in the nineteenth-century British censuses. In Saffron Hill a truly staggering 218 different occupation titles are given, including ‘milk business’, looking-glass maker, gold-chains maker, gold-leaf maker, and japaner. 34 Michael Anderson, ‘Mis-specification of Servant Occupations in the 1851 Census: a Problem Revisited’, Local Population Studies 60, 1998, pp. In Camberwell, however, the variations are very slight and the working patterns show little change over sixty years beyond a slow but steady increase in the percentage of women who were married or widowed and had an occupation. 19. made to group the occupations ‘under definite rules and on uniform lines’. Source : Census of England and Wales – Spitalfields, 1851—1901 . After 1911 the household schedules were used. A system of orders and sub-orders Nevertheless, he too noted apparent differences in how far census enumerators were prepared to include the work of women in the returns, and claimed that this made his figures for women’s labour-force participation a low estimate. Therefore, the numbers given in the census for married and widowed women in work in the districts studied were consistent with those found by Booth. The CEBs certainly do not pick up all casual, seasonal, and other irregular employment. After all, I did not list all the local studies that did not meet similar problems and thus had not raised such methodological issues. Such work, they concluded, was ‘invisible’ to male observers. 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. 139–55. The census contains detailed information on each individual who spent the night in each household including name, relationship to the head of the family, marital status, age at last birthday, gender, occupation, and birthplace. Ross argued in 1993 that ‘the large married women’s work force in London, often unlisted by census enumerators either because the male “household head” failed to mention it, or because the census taker viewed the wife’s work as insignificant, has remained largely invisible even today’. 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. 27, Much recent work has also undermined the concept of a strict separation between the work of men and women, at least among middle-class women, offering empirical evidence on women’s business roles in nineteenth-century Britain. Data for analysis of the 1851 census was obtained from several on line sources, which were then compared and combined to obtain a final data set. Horrell and Humphries, and Humphries and Sarasúa, also cite my work, whereas Davidoff and Hall do not back up their general statements. The image of the angel in the house, the domestic goddess of Victorian domestic ideology, was something that those living in the slums of the East End could only dream of, if it occurred to them at all. 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 number of well-documented flaws’, and turned instead to the use of insurance records. Therefore, she suggested that the women concerned were not considered to be fully engaged in employment, and that their occupations thus did not need to be reported in the census returns. When researching your ancestors using census data, please remember that ages in years of individuals were rounded down to the nearest five up until the 1851 Census. The 1851 Census for England was taken on the night of 30 March 1851. Simon Szreter, Arunachalam Dharmalingam and Hania Sholkamy, Oxford, 2004, pp. Also, since the published census tables could only deal in single occupations, the multiple activities of women were underestimated. 21 My broader point was that the census recorded occupational titles, which were as much social designations as the modern concept of ‘gainful employment’ – occupational titles recorded what people were called or designated as much as what they did. In the course of her research, Lown attempted to cross reference the details of the workers she had found in the Courtauld employment registers with the census returns of 1861. 1 For a description of processes at each census and the Census Reports created, see Edward Higgs, Christine Jones, Kevin Schürer and Amanda Wilkinson, The Integrated Census Microdata (I–CeM) Guide ( http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/research/ICeM/documents/icem_guide.pdf ), pp. 10 Hannah Barker, The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England 1760–1830, Oxford, 2006, p. 45. 285–309. The analysis undertaken here requires more follow up, but with new sources becoming available it will soon be possible to examine women’s work in the census at the national level. 1–152. Source: Census of England and Wales 1851—1901: Norwich, Ipswich and Essex Asylum Records.46 . In 1998 John McKay noted that the published Census Reports indicated that there was consistently higher employment for married women in nineteenth-century Lancashire than elsewhere, and in industrial areas within that county rather than in rural area, all of which pointed to the usefulness of the source. In the same period the wives of innkeepers, lodging-house keepers, shopkeepers, butchers, farmers and shoemakers, were included under special terms (with ‘wife’ added to the husband’s occupation as in ‘shoemaker’s wife’) in the appropriate section of the tables because they were ‘supposed to take part immediately in their husband’s business’. In Norwich, on average, fifty-one percent of women recorded as having an occupation were married or widowed, while for Ipswich and Colchester the figures are thirty-eight and forty percent respectively. . In the London working class Andrew August, through an analysis of late Victorian census enumerators’ books from the East End, showed already in 1994 that ‘many married women’ rather than embracing the ‘separate spheres ideology, and the male breadwinner ideal’, had ‘earned wages when their household economies were relatively stable’. 16 However, it is perhaps unwise to base statements about all women’s work on the basis of Lancashire alone, because, as Shaw-Taylor himself stresses, the experience of women was very diverse, and ‘any simple aggregate national narrative about women’s experience of the labour market during the industrial revolution is likely to be seriously misleading’. 60 By 1860 weaving was in decline but families were still hanging on in hope of a reprieve. Census name indexes and transcripts are available online. View current Census Bureau regions/field employment opportunities on USAJobs.gov Employment vacancies currently available on the USAJobs.gov website for region/field jobs at the U.S. Census Bureau. The case books for the early years of the Warley Hospital (prior to c.1875) no longer exist, and all that remain are the ‘Notice of Admission’ forms that were used in the pauper asylum system to section the patients. 39 Celia Miller, ‘The Hidden Workforce: Female Field Workers in Gloucestershire, 1870–1901’, Southern History 6, 1984, pp. However, between 1830 and 1870 silk weaving in the area collapsed. 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. 90–8. Removing single women from the analysis and showing only married and widowed women, provides an even more dramatic picture, as seen in Graph 6 . In a compilation on female occupations produced by Frank Neal based on the 1851 census for Leigh, Lancashire, Agricultural Laborer was most frequently documented job followed by Servant, Washerwoman and Factory worker. 19 Amanda Wilkinson, ‘Women and Occupations in the Census of England and Wales: 1851–1901’, University of Essex PhD Thesis, 2012. 53 In a cluster of four villages studied in the Halstead area the only one which did not follow the trend was Pebmarsh. The ‘three month rule’ was applied to ensure that, as far as possible, the statistics would not be affected when women changed their economic status. Box 434, Union, IL 60180 Phone: (815) 923-2267. Published by Oxford University Press. However, the figures for 1901 may skew the result due to the dramatic decline in population in the area between 1891 and 1901. 8 Edward Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work in the Nineteenth-century Censuses’, History Workshop Journal 23, 1987, pp. By searching the entire asylum population for all women admitted to the asylums within the three months following a census, it was possible to ascertain the names of these women, their ages, their occupations prior to admission, secondary information on their immediate families, and the address at which they were in residence before entering the asylums. 89–117. Furthermore, in a small number of cases included in the figures under matches what could be regarded as a partial match sometimes occurred. obscure old english census occupations Below is a list of some of the more obscure occupations that you may find on the English Census during your genealogy research. I did look at some original CEBs, from Colyton in Devon, Spitalfields in London, and Matlock in Derbyshire in 1851 and 1881, and noted variations between differing enumeration districts with regard to the occupations of women, and their proportions in work. Rose, ‘Gender at Work: Sex, Class and Industrial Capitalism’, History Workshop Journal 21, 1986, p. 116. 54 Using a small sample from a single employer, or census manuscripts or reports from a single community, is thus fraught with problems, and cannot reliably represent a single area, let alone an entire nation over time. This article is in two parts. 33 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, p. 69. The 1851 census was taken on Sunday 30 March under provisions in the Census Act 1850 (13 & 44 Vict c.53) - the last before the introduction of compulsory civil … I expressed similar reservations in Making Sense of the Census two years later. I , ed. In the meantime there appears no good reason why historians should not make full use of this extraordinary source for reconstructing the social and economic roles of women in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England and Wales. See also Editorial Note above. The following information was requested: Name of street, place, road, etc. 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. For example mantle making is stated by Clementina Black to be a seasonal occupation with serious ‘slack’ times (late winter and spring), when minimal work was available. As noted above, only six of her sample households were in the villages around the town, and these were families who were linked to the mill – mill workers, not straw plaiters who tended to be the wives and children of agricultural and rural labourers. 32 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, pp. 13, There have been a number of attempts since then to rehabilitate the Victorian census as a source for women’s work as a riposte, in part, to my original arguments, and to those of historians who agreed with me. 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. The next section of this article will present evidence from the work of Amanda Wilkinson which suggests that my increasing confidence in the CEBs as a source for the history of women’s work perhaps still did not go far enough. 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