Numbers often seem less easily twisted than mere words. Census reports and national income accounts lend an aura of objectivity to economic history, generating numbers that trace consistent narratives of increased female labor force participation along with economic growth.

But the categories behind the numbers tell their own story, reflecting philosophical assump­tions, economic theories, and collective interests.¹ Ironically, economic growth itself seems to unleash forces that can retrospectively affect its measurement and interpretation.

At the outset of the nineteenth century Britain, the U.S., and France began to invest considerable time and money in regular censuses to enu­merate their citizens and workers through regular censuses. As noted earlier, Britain and the U.S. moved more rapidly than France to ask individuals rather than households to designate an occupation. Small dif­ferences also categorized the treatment of the family work that remained, for the most part, the mainstay of wives and mothers. Beneath these differences, however, a fundamental similarity emerged: family work would not be categorized as work at all, because it took place in the sacred, rather than the selfish sphere.

This categorization did not go uncontested. Early advocates for women's rights recognized its perverse implications. But once established in the national censuses, the concept of the ‘‘unproductive housewife” carried over into the national income accounts, and even into calculations of the value of a human life. Some feminist thinkers, conceding that non-market work within the family was unproductive—or, at the very least disempowering—urged women to move as quickly as possible into wage employment. Others insisted on the need to revalue family work as a step toward demanding more generous public support for it.