The Dawning of a New Era? Women's Work in England and Wa1es at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The early twentieth-century belief that jobs for women were increasing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries belied the experience of the majority of women in earlier centuries and proved over-optimistic in its prognosis for the coming decades. The author sets out to discover what changes were observable in women's workfrom a series of individual-level census retumsfrom the 1891, 1901, 1911, and 1921 censuses, taken from a selection of 13 registration districts across England and Wales. Examination of the published census reports, the instructions on the census schedules, and individual replies reveals that women did not likely experience a rise in full-time paid employment which they could report as their main occupation. There is a spectrum of "home duties", however, about which the census remains stubbornly silent.La croyance du début du XXe siècle voulant que le nombre d'emplois pour les femmes augmentait depuis la fin du XIXe siècle démentissait l'expérience de la majorité des femmes des siècles précédents et traduisait un optimisme exagéré face aux décennies à venir. L'auteur essaie de déterminer que les changements pouvaient s'observer chez les femmes en examinant pour ce faire un ensemble de résultats des recensements de 1891, de 1901, de 1911 et de 1921 provenant de 13 districts d'enregistrement de l'Angleterre et du pays de Galles. Il apparaît peu probable, à la lumière des données publiées, des instructions sur les bulletins de recensement et des réponses individuelles, qu'il y ait eu chez les femmes de l'époque une augmentation du nombre d'emplois à temps plein qu'elles auraient pu déclarer comme leur travail principal. Le recensement demeure toutefois obstinément muet sur un large éventail de « tâches domestiques »

Mortality, work and migration: a consideration of age-specific mortality from tuberculosis in Scotland, 1861-1901

This paper provides an examination into some of the most enduring debates regarding tuberculosis mortality during the nineteenth century: those related to gender, geographic and temporal variations. We use populations reconstructed from individual census and civil register data for the period 1861 to 1901, comparing a growing urban area with a declining rural area, both with around 20,000 inhabitants in 1861. Our analysis shows that among young adults tuberculosis was linked to excess female mortality in the urban area and excess male mortality in the rural area. We demonstrate that in the town textile workers of both genders had particularly high mortality from tuberculosis, and that the only reason for higher overall female mortality was the predominance of young women in the textile labour force. We show that the age and gender-specific pattern of mortality in the rural area is consistent with higher male than female out-migration together with return migration of those who had contracted the disease elsewhere and needed care during their lengthy illness. We argue that the observed patterns are difficult to reconcile with the 'bargaining-nutrition' account of gendered patterns in tuberculosis mortality, and that they provide little support for nutrition as a key influence on the disease. However, our findings do reinforce Andrew Hinde's recent (2015) argument that geographical patterns in sex-specific tuberculosis mortality rates were largely determined by migration patterns, and we discuss the implications of this for our understanding of the decline of the disease over the late nineteenth century.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, RES-000-23-0128, ‘Determining the demography of Victorian Scotland through record linkage’ (to Dr Alice Reid, University of Cambridge); Wellcome Trust Award, 082200/Z/07/Z, ‘Doctors, deaths, diagnoses and data: a comparative study of the medical certification of cause of death in nineteenth century Scotland (to Prof. Richard Smith, University of Cambridge); and Wellcome Trust Award 103322, 'Migration, Mortality and Medicalisation: investigating the long-run epidemiological consequences of urbanisation 1600 - 1945' (to Prof. Richard Smith, University of Cambridge)

Mortality, Work and Migration. A Consideration of Age-specific Mortality from Tuberculosis in Scotland, 1861-1901

This paper provides an examination into some of the most enduring debates regarding tuberculosis mortality during the nineteenth century: those related to gender, geographic and temporal variations. We use populations reconstructed from individual census and civil register data for the period 1861 to 1901, comparing a growing urban area with a declining rural area, both with around 20,000 inhabitants in 1861. Our analysis shows that among young adults tuberculosis was linked to excess female mortality in the urban area and excess male mortality in the rural area. We demonstrate that in the town textile workers of both genders had particularly high mortality from tuberculosis, and that the only reason for higher overall female mortality was the predominance of young women in the textile labour force. We show that the age and gender-specific pattern of mortality in the rural area is consistent with higher male than female out-migration together with return migration of those who had contracted the disease elsewhere and needed care during their lengthy illness. We argue that the observed patterns are difficult to reconcile with the ‘bargaining-nutrition’ account of gendered patterns in tuberculosis mortality, and that they provide little support for nutrition as a key influence on the disease. However, our findings do reinforce Andrew Hinde’s recent argument that geographical patterns in sex-specific tuberculosis mortality rates were largely determined by migration patterns, and we discuss the implications of this for our understanding of the decline of the disease over the late nineteenth century

Adapting the Own Children Method to allow comparison of fertility between populations with different marriage regimes.

The Own Children Method (OCM) is an indirect procedure for deriving age-specific fertility rates and total fertility from children living with their mothers at a census or survey. The method was designed primarily for the calculation of overall fertility, although there are variants that allow the calculation of marital fertility. In this paper we argue that the standard variants for calculating marital fertility can produce misleading results and require strong assumptions, particularly when applied to social or spatial subgroups. We present two new variants of the method for calculating marital fertility: the first of these allows for the presence of non-marital fertility and the second also permits the more robust calculation of rates for social subgroups of the population. We illustrate and test these using full-count census data for England and Wales in 1911

Medical provision and urban-rural differences in maternal mortality in late nineteenth century Scotland.

This paper examines the effect of variable reporting and coding practices on the measurement of maternal mortality in urban and rural Scotland, 1861-1901, using recorded causes of death and women who died within six weeks of childbirth. This setting provides data (n = 604 maternal deaths) to compare maternal mortality identified by cause of death with maternal mortality identified by record linkage and to contrast urban and rural settings with different certification practices. We find that underreporting was most significant for indirect causes, and that indirect causes accounted for a high proportion of maternal mortality where the infectious disease load was high. However, distinguishing between indirect and direct maternal mortality can be problematic even where cause of death reporting appears accurate. Paradoxically, underreporting of maternal deaths was higher in urban areas where deaths were routinely certified by doctors, and we argue that where there are significant differences in medical provision and reported deaths, differences in maternal mortality may reflect certification practices as much as true differences. Better health services might therefore give the impression that maternal mortality was lower than it actually was. We end with reflections on the interpretation of maternal mortality statistics and implications for the concept of the obstetric transition

Evaluation measure for group-based record linkage

Traditionally, record linkage is concerned with linking pairs of records across data sets and the classification of such pairs into matches (assumed to refer to the same individual) and non-matches (assumed to refer to different individuals). Increasingly, however, more complex data sets are being linked where often the aim is to identify groups, or clusters, of records that refer to the same individual or to a group of related individuals. Examples include finding the records of all births to the same parents or all medical records generated by members of the same family. When ground truth data in the form of known true matches and non-matches are available, then linkage quality is traditionally evaluated based on the classified versus the true matches (links) using measures such as precision (also known as the positive predictive value) and recall (also known as sensitivity or the true positive rate). The quality of clusters generated in record linkage is of high importance, since the comparison of different linkage methods is largely based on the values obtained by such evaluation measures. However, minimal research has been conducted thus far to evaluate the suitability of existing evaluation measures in the context of linking groups of records. As we show, evaluation measures such as precision and recall are not suitable for evaluating groups of linked records because they evaluate the quality of individually linked record pairs rather than the quality of records grouped into clusters. We highlight the shortcomings of traditional evaluation measures and then propose a novel approach to evaluate cluster quality in the context of group-based record linkage. We empirically evaluate our proposed approach using real-world data and show that it better reflects the quality of clusters generated by a group-based record linkage technique

Revisiting the Fertility Transition in England and Wales: The Role of Social Class and Migration

Funder: University of CambridgeAbstract: We use individual-level census data for England and Wales for the period 1851–1911 to investigate the interplay between social class and geographical context determining patterns of childbearing during the fertility transition. We also consider the effect of spatial mobility or lifetime migration on individual fertility behavior in the early phases of demographic modernization. Prior research on the fertility transition in England and Wales has demonstrated substantial variation in fertility levels and declines by different social groups; however, these findings were generally reported at a broad geographical level, disguising local variation and complicated by residential segregation along social class and occupational lines. Our findings confirm a clear pattern of widening social class differences in recent net fertility, providing strong support for the argument that belonging to a certain social group was an important determinant of early adoption of new reproductive behavior in marriage in England and Wales. However, a relatively constant effect of lower net fertility among long-distance migrants both before the transition and in the early phases of declining fertility indicates that life course migration patterns were most likely factor in explaining the differences in fertility operating through postponement of marriage and childbearing

Linking Scottish vital event records using family groups

Funding: This work was supported by ESRC Grants ES/K00574X/2 “Digitising Scotland” and ES/L007487/1 “Administrative Data Research Centre – Scotland.”The reconstitution of populations through linkage of historical records is a powerful approach to generate longitudinal historical microdata resources of interest to researchers in various fields. Here we consider automated linking of the vital events recorded in the civil registers of birth, death and marriage compiled in Scotland, to bring together the various records associated with the demographic events in the life course of each individual in the population. From the histories, the genealogical structure of the population can then be built up. Rather than apply standard linkage techniques to link the individuals on the available certificates, we explore an alternative approach, inspired by the family reconstitution techniques adopted by historical demographers, in which the births of siblings are first linked to form family groups, after which intergenerational links between families can be established. We report a small-scale evaluation of this approach, using two district-level data sets from Scotland in the late nineteenth century, for which sibling links have already been created by demographers. We show that quality measures of up to 83% can be achieved on these data sets (using F-Measure, a combination of precision and recall). In the future, we intend to compare the results with a standard linkage approach and to investigate how these various methods may be used in a project which aims to link the entire Scottish population from 1856 to 1973.PostprintPeer reviewe