The U.S. and Massachusetts Censuses

The federal census of the U.S. never conceded the economic significance of family work. Although the forms filled out in longhand by census-takers often listed ‘‘housewife’’ as married women’s occupation, these results were never tabulated.

This assumption was directly challenged by the officers of the Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW), an eminent group of women scholars sometimes dubbed the ‘‘Ladies Social Science Association.’’¹⁰ In a letter sent to Congress in 1878 they insisted on the need to ‘‘make provision for the more careful and just enumeration of women as laborers and producers.’’ They complained that women’s domestic efforts were ‘‘not even incidentally named as in any wise affecting the causes of increase or decrease of population or wealth.’’¹¹ In other words, they quarreled with the official assumption that housewives and mothers were unproductive work­ers. But the federal census never budged from its assumptions. In 1900 it deployed a new term, ‘‘breadwinners,’’ to describe persons who earned market income. As in England and Australia, wives and daughters without paying jobs officially became ‘‘dependents’’.

The consensus of the U.S. Census was briefly challenged by the state of Massachusetts, which conducted its own surveys using categories influenced by the British example. In 1875, housewives and unmarried women who performed housework without remuneration were included in the larger category of Domestic and Personal Office, along with subcategories for paid employment such as housekeepers, servants, nurses, and washerwomen.

Rather than simply assuming that all married women were housewives the enumerators inquired into the actual nature of their daily activities. Some were described as ‘‘having nothing to do but superintend the house­holds,’’ and some as doing even less than that. The census enumerated ‘‘4,786 wives of heads simply ornamental.’’¹³ One wonders if they all wore feathers. In any case, they amounted to less than 2 percent of all wives. In 1885, the state modified its terminology, redefining housewives as ‘‘the female heads of household, that is, the wife or some person in the family who has general charge of the domestic affairs.”¹⁴ This definition seemed to exclude the possibility of a purely ornamental wife. Still, the term “house­work,” used to describe the work of unmarried persons who performed unpaid domestic labor, retained a specific meaning at least somewhat inde­pendent of gender. Of 89,062 people so engaged, 77 were males.

The 1889 report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor emphasized the economic value of this unpaid domestic labor. 1⁵ But in 1905, the Massachusetts Census surrendered its distinctive approach, placing housewives and housework in the ‘‘not gainful” class, along with scholars, students, retirees, those unemployed for twelve months, and dependents. The Domestic and Personal Service category was limited to those who received a wage or salary. In 1900, a woman named Flora Thompson won first prize in a contest for best essay on ‘‘the servant” question in Cosmopol­itan. As she put it, ‘‘Women have forced economic recognition of their labor in men's spheres, but especial woman's work remains the economic cipher.

The mind of political economy remained divided, but most dissenters offered, at best, glancing remarks. Richard Ely, founder of the American Economics Association, noted that failure to take the decline of women's non-market work into account overstated the rate of economic growth.¹⁷ Carroll Wright, director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor and later, of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost certainly sympathized with this point, but did not explore it in any of his published work.

The little-known Scottish economist William Smart deserves credit for the most forthright analysis. Like the nameless authors of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics Report, he insisted that non-market work generated implicit income:

the value of which might be guessed if we imagine what we should have to pay to servants for doing work now done by wives, sisters, and daughters, and how entirely impossible it would be to get similar work done for money. If such women went to the factory or into professional life, we should have to withdraw probably a much greater number from the factory or professions to take their place, and should lose something with it all.¹⁸

Smart went on to dispute the claim that men should be paid more than women because they had more dependents to support. If men's pay was to be determined by the value of what they produced, women's pay should be determined by the same principle. He chided his colleagues in terms that made it quite clear that he understood the larger implications of their conceptual double standard: ‘‘We cannot hunt with the individualist hounds and run with the socialist hare.''¹⁹ He was, perhaps, hinting at the possibility that men were dogs.