A Twentieth-Century Economic Historian on Colonial Women's Employment: Comment on Alford

Abstract

Katrina Alford's recent article in this journal is largely a polemic aimed, among other things, at male orientated biases inherent in twentieth-century economic histories of 'adult women's market work in colonial Australia'.1 Polemics are an effective form of presenting an argument especially when demystifying the 'purity' of statistical 'facts'. However, Alford's argument is strong on assertion and misdirected in emphasis. In particular, in this comment I shall (i) defend what Alford calls my 'stupendous' adjustment of colonial census labour force data on women and (ii) go beyond the numbers from colonial censuses or twentieth-century adjustments therefrom, toward suggesting in a more positive, constructive manner than Alford, a means of overcoming significant distortions in the historical record of women's work in general in colonial Australia. It is my contention that Alford's attempt to place the weight of her argument on twentieth-century economic historians' inadequate treatment of women's market work is misguided, and serves only to weaken the case for rewriting the history of women's work in the nineteenth century. Alford finds it 'difficult to avoid the conclusion that censuses are indeed social constructions, which reflect dominant philosophies and ideologies as much if not more than they provide realistic accounts of the incidence and nature of women's paid employment' (p. 2). Per contra, such a conclusion is trivial since numerical observations are not merely selected at random by pointing an index finger; they have a theoretic foundation however rudimentary, and