Women's employment in England and Wales, 1851-1911

Xuesheng You

This thesis - submitted in September 2014 - offers a quantitative and systematic analysis of women's work in England and Wales from 1851 to 1911. Previous studies on women's working experience, drawing evidence from sources such as autobiographies, parliamentary reports and wage books etc., have focused on issues such as the gender gap in wages and skills, the relationship between women's domestic role at home and their gainful employment in the labour market, and women's diverse experiences in different industries. However, limited by the scope of their evidence, most of these studies have been confined to particular locations or industries. In terms of women's labour force participation rate, the regional diversity of women's employment, female occupational structure and the determinants of women's labour force participation, we still know surprisingly little.

In this thesis, I have used two substantial bodies of data that have never been systematically utilized by historians before, namely the aggregate tabulations at a variety of spatial levels from the published British census reports from 1851 to 1911 and c. 26 million records of individual level data from a 100 per cent sample of the 1881 Census Enumerators' Books (hereafter CEBs). I can therefore, for the first time, provide a geographically and sectorally comprehensive quantitative account of women's employment in England and Wales 1851-1911 and can do so in unprecedented detail.

With the published censuses, the issues covered in this thesis include female labour force participation rates, changing patterns of female occupational structure, the regional diversity of female employment, the age structure of female employment, and female employment by marital status. With the nominal evidence in the 100 per cent sample of the 1881 CEBs, I extended and deepened the analysis of the aforementioned issues to the most detailed and spatially disaggregated level. I also identified and corrected the biases in the recording of women's work in the census. This allowed me to re-construct female participation rates in an empirically more reliable manner. Moreover, I also analyzed the relationship between women's work and household structure as well as other household members' occupation to shed light on the driving forces behind women's labour force participation.

Several important findings emerge from my research. First, the orthodox consensus (Tilly & Scott, Roberts, Davidoff, de Vries) that female labour force participation rates declined from the mid nineteenth century onwards is based on a misreading of the census. In fact women's labour force participation rate remained remarkably stable over the second half of the nineteenth century (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Unrevised and revised adult female LFPR in England and Wales, 1851-1911

Second, the orthodox view (Burnette, Land, de Vries) that married women's labour force participation rate in particular experienced a sharp decrease from the midcentury onwards is groundless. In his influential 'breadwinner-homemaker' model during the second phase of the Industrious Revolution, De Vries argues married women voluntarily withdrew from the labour market back to the home. My work demonstrates this did not happen. Married women's labour force participation rate remained remarkably constant. Third, the existing literature identified conditions from the supply side of the labour market, such as household poverty and domestic responsibilities, as the factors of primary importance affecting women's participation rates. My work shows, instead, the demand side of the labour market, particularly the availability of female employment opportunities, played the major role in determining the very striking, but generally neglected regional variations in women's labour force participation rates. Fourth, the regional diversity and geographical concentration of women's employment in different economic sectors at various geographical levels have been fully identified for the first time. This lays the foundations for future national, regional and local studies (see figure 2).

Figure 2: Female LFPR by marital status in England and Wales, 1881

Fifth, it has always been vaguely suggested that female occupational structure varied by age, location and marital status. However, actual empirical evidence remained sparse. My research, for the first time, delineates these relations precisely for the whole country in unprecedented detail. Last but not least, my research restores our confidence in the census as a broadly reliable source for studying women's regular employment. The criticism of the accuracy of the census recording of female employment has been a recurring theme in the historiography (Higgs, Hill, Davidoff, Sharpe, Humphries). My work shows much of this criticism is exaggerated. Despite the problematic issues pertaining to married women's irregular employment and female employment in agriculture, the census recording of women's regular employment in general is reliable. Higgs, one of the first scholars criticizing the accuracy of the census recording of female employment, has also recently moved to a fundamentally more positive assessment of the census.