Women, Work and the Census: a Problem for Historians of Women

Abstract

The UK Census that is collected once every decade occupies millions of people all over the country. Thus on the night of the last Census 22 April 1991 the details of those living in every household had to be recorded: age, occupation, and so on. A local enumerator that is an official appointed on behalf of the Registrar General to distribute the Census Questionnaires to all inhabitants over a certain defined area, and to collect them in again immediately after the Census date told me that before they distributed the Census they had been warned that if, for whatever reason, one inhabitant was omitted by every enumerator throughout the country, it would amount to the equivalent of a large town for the country as a whole. Thus apparently small errors can contribute to a major distortion in the conclusions of the National Census however well they are conceived. The nature of the Census Questionnaire was instructive. The British census is now 190 years old and since its beginning the method of compilation has been steadily refined, made more informative, more scientific and, we are told, more accurate. The Questionnaire nevertheless remains a challenging set of questions not always easy to understand and often ambiguous in meaning. As another member of the temporary staff employed on the Census commented, 'householders had to be fairly well educated and literate to fill them in without making mistakes'. The forms, it was suggested, had been 'designed for the convenience of those feeding the statistics into the computer rather the consumers'.' Many householders enlisted the help of the enumerators in completing the form. A worrying feature of the preliminary census figures released is that the population of the UK appears to be going down for the first time since 1801 .2