Abstract
The British Business Census of Entrepreneurs provides data on all employers and self-employed sole proprietors between 1851 and 1911. This chapter uses those data to provide the first whole-population study of female entrepreneurship in England and Wales during that period. It gives the aggregate totals of female business proprietors as well as the totals broken down by sector. It also considers the geography of female entrepreneurship and how age and marital status affected the probability of women running a business. The chapter shows that female entrepreneurship was more common in England and Wales than previous studies have suggested, but that, as with male entrepreneurship, a range of factors, including the labour market, demography and household structure, restricted their activities.
This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under project grant ES/M010953: Drivers of Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses; extraction of the 1881 data was undertaken by Gill Newton, supported by the Leverhulme Trust grant RG66385: The Long-Term Evolution of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs). The data used are derived from two related sources. The first is Kevin Schürer, Edward Higgs, Alice M. Reid, and Eilidh Garrett, Integrated Census Microdata, 1851–1911, version V. 2 (I-CeM.2) (2016), [data collection]. UK Data Service, SN: 7481, https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-7481-1; enhanced version of; Edward Higgs, Christine Jones, Kevin Schürer and Amanda Wilkinson (2015) Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM), Essex: UKDA, SN-7481 (2014). A special acknowledgement is made to Kevin Schürer, Alice Reid, Eilidh Garrett, Joe Day, Hanna Jaadla, Xuesheng You, Leigh Shaw-Taylor and other members of the Campop I-CeM group who, with the authors, have collectively worked on the new versions of I-CeM. The Geographic Information System (GIS) boundary files for Registration Sub Districts (RSDs) were constructed by Joe Day for the ESRC funded project ES/L015463/1: Atlas of Victorian Fertility Decline. They were created from Max Satchell, Peter Kitson, Gill Newton, Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, 1851 England and Wales Census Parishes, Townships and Places, an enhanced version of Nick Burton, John Westwood and Paul Carter, GIS of the Ancient Parishes of England and Wales, 1500–1850, Colchester, Essex: UKDA (2004), SN-4828, which is a GIS version of Roger Kain and Richard Oliver, Historic Parishes of England and Wales: An Electronic Map of Boundaries Before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata, Colchester, Essex: UKDA (2001), SN-4348. Thanks are due to Philip Stickler for preparing the maps and figures.
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Notes
- 1.
The 1901 manuscript Census Enumerator Book (CEB), Catherine Leyland, RB13/3618, The National Archives, London (TNA); 1891 manuscript CEB, Catherine Leyland, RG12/3122, TNA.
- 2.
The 1911 manuscript CEB, Catherine Leyland, RG14/ piece 23,409, TNA.
- 3.
ESRC project grant ES/M010953. At the time of writing, only the data for England and Wales were available, but the Scottish data are included in the data deposit as well.
- 4.
Robert J. Bennett, Harry Smith and Piero Montebruno, ‘The Population of Non-corporate Business Proprietors in England and Wales 1891–1911’, Business History (early view, 2018).
- 5.
This is a very imperfect comparison, and it is likely that many non-responses were from the owners of corporations who would treat their employees as employed by their company not themselves. It is believed that almost complete returns were made by non-corporate employers.
- 6.
Robert J. Bennett, Piero Montebruno, Harry Smith and Carry Van Lieshout, ‘Reconstructing entrepreneur and business numbers for censuses 1851–81’, Working Paper 9, Cambridge, 2018; Robert J. Bennett, Harry Smith, Carry van Lieshout, Piero Montebruno and Gill Newton, The Age of Entrepreneurship: Business Proprietors, Self-Employment and Corporations Since 1851 (London: Routledge, 2019).
- 7.
Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Off the Record: Reconstructing Women’s Labor Force Participation in the European Past’, Feminist Economics 18, no. 4 (2012): pp. 39–67.
- 8.
Edward Higgs and Amanda Wilkinson, ‘Women, Occupations and Work in the Victorian Censuses Revisited’, History Workshop Journal 81, no. 1 (2016): pp. 17–38.
- 9.
Edward Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work in the Nineteenth-century Censuses’, History Workshop Journal 23, no. 1 (1987): pp. 59–80.
- 10.
Michael Anderson, ‘What Can the Mid-Victorian Censuses Tell Us About Variations in Married Women’s Employment?’, Local Populations Studies 62 (1999): pp. 9–30; John McKay, ‘Married Women and Work in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire: The Evidence of the 1851 and 1861 Census Reports’, in Nigel Goose (ed.), Women’s Work in Industrial England: Regional and Local Perspectives (Hatfield: Local Population Studies, 2007): pp. 164–81; Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Diverse Experiences: The Geography of Adult Female Employment in England and the 1851 Census’, in Goose, Women’s Work, pp. 29–50.
- 11.
Higgs and Wilkinson, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, p. 22.
- 12.
Higgs and Wilkinson, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, p. 27; Sophie McGeevor, ‘How Well Did the Nineteenth Century Census Record Women’s “Regular” Employment in England and Wales? A Case Study of Hertfordshire in 1851’, The History of the Family 19, no. 4 (2014): pp. 489–512.
- 13.
Shaw-Taylor, ‘Diverse experiences’; McGeevor, ‘Women’s regular employment’; Catherine Bishop, Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2015).
- 14.
This is in contrast to the situation in Canada, see Chap. 13 by Buddle, this volume.
- 15.
Robert J. Bennett, ‘Interpreting Business Partnerships in Late Victorian Britain’, Economic History Review, 69, no. 4 (2016): pp. 1199–227.
- 16.
Xuesheng You, ‘Women’s employment in England and Wales, 1851–1911’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014), p. 216.
- 17.
See also Catherine Bishop, ‘When Your Money Is Not Your Own: Coverture and Married Women in Business in Colonial New South Wales’, Law and History Review 33, no. 1 (2015): pp. 181–200.
- 18.
See Hannah Barker, The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Joyce Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Alison C. Kay, Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship. Enterprise, Home and Household in London, c. 1800–1870 (London: Routledge, 2009); Jennifer Aston, Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century England. Engagement in the Urban Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
- 19.
Béatrice Craig, Women and Business Since 1500. Invisible Presences in Europe and North America? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 99–100.
- 20.
Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages, p. 32.
- 21.
Aston, Female Entrepreneurship, p. 67.
- 22.
Kay, Foundations, p. 52.
- 23.
Kay, Foundations, pp. 46–7. Chandlers don’t appear in the top ten occupations in similar studies based on trade directories; see, for example, Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages, pp. 36–8 for Midlands cities.
- 24.
Craig, Women and Business, pp. 101, 118, 122.
- 25.
Janette Rutterford, David R. Green, Josephine Maltby and Alastair Owens, ‘Who Comprised the Nation of Shareholders? Gender and Investment in Great Britain, c. 1870–1935’, Economic History Review 64, no. 1 (2011): pp. 157–87; John Turner, ‘Wider Share Ownership?: Investors in English and Welsh Bank Shares’, Economic History Review 62, no. s1 (2009): pp. 167–92.
- 26.
Kay, Foundations, p. 43.
- 27.
This is a major source of information for firm size for this period which has not been possible to access until the availability of e-records and the extraction of employer responses. The GRO published tables mainly excluded women and did not include all businesses even for men. Table XXX Employers (with number of men) in Census of Great Britain, 1851, Population Tables, II, Vol. I, Parliamentary Papers, LXXXVIII (1852–1853), pp. cclxxvi–cclxxix.
- 28.
The 1871 manuscript CEB, Eliza Tinsley, RG10/3004, TNA.
- 29.
Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy. The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860–1930 (Chicago: Chicago University Press: 1997), pp. 158–228; Stana Nenadic, ‘The Social Shaping of Business Behaviour in the Nineteenth-Century Women’s Garment Trades’ Journal of Social History, 31, no. 3 (1998): pp. 625–45, p. 628.
- 30.
The RSD is a census spatial unit and represents the smallest scale at which business owners can be currently accurately mapped.
- 31.
Harry Smith, Robert J. Bennett and Dragana Radicic, ‘Towns in Victorian England and Wales: A New Classification’ Urban History 45, no. 4 (2018): pp. 568–594.
- 32.
Robert J. Morris, Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870: A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies Amongst the Leeds Middle Classes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 142–177.
- 33.
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, revised edn. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), pp. 198–228.
- 34.
Aston, Female Entrepreneurship, pp. 204–5.
- 35.
Pat Thane, ‘The Experience of Retirement in Britain, Past and Present’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschictswissenschaften 22, no. 3 (2011): pp. 13–32, pp. 14–17; Leslie Hannah, Inventing Retirement: The Development of Occupational Pensions in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1986), pp. 5–14.
- 36.
Morris, Men, Women and Property, pp. 142–178; David R. Green, Alastair Owens, Josephine Maltby and Janette Rutterford, ‘Lives in the Balance? Gender, Age and Assets in Late-Nineteenth-Century England and Wales’, Continuity and Change 24, no. 2 (2009): pp. 307–35.
- 37.
Dudley Baines and Paul Johnson, ‘Did They Jump or Were They Pushed? The Exit of Older Men from the London Labor Market, 1929–1931’, The Journal of Economic History 59, no. 4 (1999): pp. 949–71.
- 38.
The economically active population included all people with an occupation enumerated in the census aged 15 or over; ever married included all people who were married, divorced or widowed.
- 39.
This is an ambiguous category: while many of these women were indeed married and their husband was away on business, family visits or served in the navy, there were also women who claimed married status for purposes of respectability. In addition, it is not known how many of these spouses were away just for the night or absent for a longer term.
- 40.
- 41.
Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (London: Macmillan, 17 volumes 1902–3), second series, III, p. 48.
- 42.
Anon. The Guide to Trade, The Dress-maker, and the Milliner (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1843), pp. 5–6.
- 43.
Patricia E. Malcolmson, English Laundresses: A Social History, 1850–1930 (Chicago: Chicago University Press: 1986), p. 5.
- 44.
Booth, Life and Labour, second series, IV, p. 266.
- 45.
A further 20 per cent were other younger female relatives, and another 20 per cent were live-in servants and boarders, the remainder was made up by older female relatives and the very occasional male householder. Competition form steam laundries became significant only from the early 1900s.
- 46.
Although the house used need not have been owned by the lodging housekeeper themselves, many were rented given that the majority of people rented accommodation; see Martin Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City: Working-Class Housing, 1850–1914 (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), p. 198.
- 47.
Aston, Female Entrepreneurship, p. 111.
- 48.
Craig, Women and Business, p. 1.
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Baines, Dudley and Johnson, Paul, ‘Did They Jump or Were They Pushed? The Exit of Older Men from the London Labor Market, 1929–1931’, The Journal of Economic History 59, no. 4 (1999): pp. 949–71
Barker, Hannah, The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
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Bennett, Robert J., Smith, Harry and Montebruno, Piero, ‘The Population of Non-corporate Business Proprietors in England and Wales 1891–1911’, Business History (early view, 2018)
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van Lieshout, C., Smith, H., Bennett, R.J. (2020). Female Entrepreneurship in England and Wales, 1851–1911. In: Aston, J., Bishop, C. (eds) Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33412-3_12
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