Female entrepreneurship: business, marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851–1911

Abstract

This article offers a new perspective on what it meant to be a business proprietor in Victorian Britain. Based on individual census records, it provides an overview of the full population of female business proprietors in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. These census data show that around 30% of the total business population was female, a considerably higher estimate than the current literature suggests. Female entrepreneurship was not a uniform experience. Certain demographics clustered in specific trades and within those sectors employers and own-account proprietors had strikingly different age, marital status and household profiles. A woman's life cycle event such as marriage, motherhood and widowhood played an important role in her decision whether to work, the work available to her and the entrepreneurial choices she could make. While marriage and motherhood removed women from the labour force, they had less of an effect on their levels of entrepreneurship. Women who had young children were more entrepreneurial than those who had none, and entrepreneurship rates rose with the arrival of one child and continued to rise the more children were added to the family.

Business Entry and Exit: Career Changes of Proprietors in England and Wales (1851–81) Using Record-Linkage

“…The effect of age on entry to own-account traders was marginally lower than for employers, but married and widowed status had larger effects. This confirms other analyses based on crosssections of the census (Bennett et al 2019b;van Lieshout et al 2019), that own account was more accessible at most ages, was particularly available to women, especially married women, and in some sectors offered many more women a route to proprietorship that men, though this was often stimulated by necessity of increasing family income. Switching into own account was less likely from being a CFU member; i.e.…”

Changes in Victorian entrepreneurship in England and Wales 1851-1911: Methodology and business population estimates

“…Assessment of female participation has been bedevilled by poor recording in historical records. The UK census has its own limitations for assessing female participation (Anderson, 1999;Higgs, 1987), but these are radically reduced by using the original records rather than published census tables that clerically screened much women's work Wilkinson, 2016;van Lieshout et al, 2019;You, 2020). The census is generally as good as, or better than, other sources for identifying women as proprietors.…”

The British business census of entrepreneurs and firm-size, 1851–1881: New data for economic and business historians

“…The BBCE also allows an analysis of gender, thus contributing to an increasing understanding of female entrepreneurship patterns in the nineteenth century (see e.g., Kay 2009;Aston 2016;Van Lieshout et al 2019). The BBCE also shows that, despite previous well-known criticisms of the census as a source for identifying women's business activities (see e.g., Higgs 1987;Anderson 1999), use of the CEBs overcomes that most of the deficiencies that derive for the editing of the data by GRO in publications; the original census responses provide much more complete coverage.…”

“…Just like the impact of the Minnesota Historical Census projects (Ruggles and Menard 1995), the availability of census digital microdata has made possible new insights in British demographic, economic and social history. Over the past five years, the I-CeM data containing census records of the full population of England, Wales, and Scotland have been used to develop new interpretations of childhood mortality (Jaadla and Reid 2017;Atkinson et al 2017), family structure (Sch€ urer et al 2018), fertility Reid et al 2019), business proprietors (Bennett, Smith, and Montebruno 2018;Bennett et al 2019;Van Lieshout et al 2019), business partnerships (Bennett 2016), agriculture (Montebruno et al 2019a), women's occupations (You 2019), portfolios in farming (Radicic, Bennett, and Newton 2017), migration (Sch€ urer and Day 2019;Smith, Bennett, and van Lieshout 2019), and urban structure (Smith, Bennett, and Radicic 2018), and have been visualized and further made available in the online atlas Populations Past ). These analyses have considerably improved on scholarship based on the only source that was previously available with national coverage: the published tabulations created by the census administrators (the General Register Office: GRO) at the time of the censuses.…”