Content associated with: Registration Act, 1836
Sex and gender
Edward Higgs
In the period prior to the Second World War, the census-taking and civil registration authorities were always careful to distinguish between men and women in their various publications. Gender was, after all, one of the most important organising concepts of the period, affecting the work one did, migration patterns, life expectancy, and even one's cause of death.
In the period 1801 to 1831, a clerk of the House of Commons, John Rickman, sent the overseers of the poor in each parish in England and Wales, or 'other substantial householders', a form on which they were to indicate the number of men and women in their parishes, along with the numbers of individuals or families employed in various economic categories. In Scotland the task fell on the local schoolmaster (Higgs, 1989, 4–7). The numbers of each sex in counties, hundreds and wapentakes, was duly recorded in the published Census Reports.
On Rickman's death in 1840, responsibility for taking the British census passed to the General Register Office (GRO) in London. The GRO had been set up in the wake of the Registration and Marriages Acts of 1836, and the Registrar General appointed as head of the national system of civil registration in England and Wales. England and Wales were divided up into registration districts, based upon the Poor Law unions, and a superintendent registrar appointed for each. These areas were further subdivided into sub-districts and part-time registrars appointed to them. These officers were responsible for the registration of births, marriages and deaths within their sub-districts, and the forwarding of these data to the GRO in London (Higgs, 2004, 1–21). All that was necessary to turn this into an administrative system for the census, was for the registrars to divide their sub-districts into smaller enumeration districts and to appoint temporary enumerators for each. These collected the necessary data by giving out householders schedules on which they entered the details on the inmates of their households on Census Night. Prior to 1911, the enumerators copied these returns into enumeration books that would be sent via the registrar and superintendent to the GRO for central analysis and the publication of results in the same manner as data on vital statistics. From 1911 onwards they sent the original household schedules to London.
In the Victorian period, the recording of the sex of the population in the census was intimately bound up with age recording. In 1841 there was no separate column for sex on the householders' schedules. Instead there were two columns for age — one for males and one for females. This layout was repeated in the enumerators' manuscript returns. From 1851 onwards the household schedules contained a column for sex, in which 'F' for female and 'M' for male were to be inserted, and there was a separate age column. The enumerators' books, however, retained the former double age column. Enumerators had to combine two pieces of information, regarding sex and age, from the household schedules when copying up their books. Occasionally they made a slip and inserted the age in the wrong column (Higgs, 1989, 70–1). The 1891 Census Report noted that these slips were not random, with each enumerator having a tendency to make errors in the same column. The majority of errors tended to involve the putting of the ages of males into the column for women (Census of England and Wales, 1891. Vol. IV General Report, 25). This probably reflected the manner in which enumerators worked from left to right when filling in their books. The number of cases involved, however, was very small. In 1911, and in all the censuses thereafter, the analysis of data by the GRO was done directly from the householders' schedules. The schedule had two separate columns for age, one for men and one for women. In 1921 and 1931 there were two separate columns for indicating age and sex. This may have helped to cut down such problems. In the published census tables on age, marital status, occupations, birthplaces, medical disabilities, and so on, care was taken to give information in terms of both sexes.
Similarly, under the modern system of civil registration set up by the 1836 Births and Deaths Act, and the Marriage Act of the same year, the sex of those being born, marrying, or dying, was recorded. This was done directly by local registrars in the case of births and deaths, and indirectly in the case of marriages in the 'condition' column — 'batchelor' 'spinster', or 'widow' (Nissell, 1987, 12–36). The GRO, which administered the civil registration system, collected copies of the local birth, marriage and death certificates issued by the local registrars, and produced Annual Reports analysing sex ratios of births (e.g. Fifth Annual Report of the Registrar General, ix), the proportion of the sexes that could sign their names on marriage (e.g. Third Annual Report of the Registrar General , 8), and so on.
Much of the content of these Reports, and the Decennial Supplements, associated with them, was given over to an analysis of mortality, and once again this was distinguished by sex. The GRO realised that women lived longer than men, and often died from differing causes, especially of the consequences of childbirth. Hence, the GRO produced life tables for the individual sexes, and mortality tables similarly differentiated. The need to produce separate mortality rates for men and women by administrative area, in the form of deaths per thousand, was another reason that the census had to differentiate between men and women. Only in this manner was it possible to establish the separate base populations from which such rates could be calculated.
REFERENCES
Census of England and Wales, 1891, Vol. IV General Report, with summary tables and appendices BPP 1893–4 CVI. [View this document: General report, England and Wales, Vol. IV, 1891]
Fifth annual report of the Registrar General (1841), BPP 1843 XXI. (516) [View this document: Fifth annual report of the registrar-general]
Edward Higgs, Making sense of the census. The manuscript returns for England and Wales, 1801–1901 (London, 1989).
Muriel Nissel, People count. A history of the General Register Office (London, 1987).
Third annual report of the Registrar General (1839-1840), BPP 1841 Session 2 VI (345). [View this document: Third annual report of the registrar-general]