The Rise of Individual Occupations

The terminology of national censuses, as well as the numbers produced by them, reveals the gradual process of individuation. In 1801, the first census of the British population attempted to collect information on individual occupations of individuals.

Not until 1851 was the concept of an individual worker engaged in the provision of goods or services for the market fully enshrined in the British census.⁷ Discussion of the census results in that year noted that households were now no longer considered the same as families. “Formerly,” explained an article in the Westminster Review, ‘‘the groups of inhabitants in separate houses were called families; but now, on account of the great number of single persons keeping house, the denomination is changed to households, under a head or occupier.’’⁸ The Census enumerated 26 percent of those with paid occupations in agriculture. Persons engaged in ‘‘art and mechanic productions,” represented 39 percent of all those tallied with paid occupa­tions. The remainder was engaged in services of various kinds.⁹

The imprint of industrialization on the French labor force was less conspicuous. In 1851, the percentage of those with occupations who were engaged in agriculture was more than twice as high as in Britain, at 60 percent. Further, factories remained less prominent than small-scale enterprises. When the Paris Chamber of Commerce undertook a statistical analysis of local industries in 1851 it emphasized both the economic significance and the moral centrality of family-based enterprises, express­ing discomfort with the concept of individual employment.¹⁰ The French national censuses grouped entire households by occupation far longer than Britain or the U.S.

At mid-century, the structure of employment in the U.S. resembled that of France, with 65 percent of the official labor force engaged in agriculture.¹² But farmers in the U.S. were far less dependent on inherited family property or use-rights than those in France—the relative abundance of land (among other factors) turned agriculture into a more entrepreneurial enterprise. It also increased the mobility of labor, literally stretching and thinning family ties. The Eastern seaboard in general and the New England states in particular traded extensively with Britain, and the relative scarcity of labor in those regions speeded adoption of new factory technologies. The 1850 census queried the ‘‘profession, occupation or trade of each male person over 15 years of age” and extended this query to women in 1860.1³

As industrial employment shifted from cottage industry to factory work, mothers found it harder to combine productive employment with child care, and the growth of opportunities for women outside the home increased the amount of income foregone when they chose to stay at home. The payment of a wage based on the output of one worker meant that a man with five children would earn the same as a man with one. Furthermore, the eco­nomic insecurity and restless mobility fostered by factory employment may have discouraged family commitments among the least prosperous members of the working class. 1⁴

A majority of emigrants from Britain to the colonies were young men, a factor that both reduced parental control and tilted sex ratios. 1⁵ The 1851

Census of Great Britain warned of a growing ‘‘spinster problem.”¹⁶ In the United States, internal migration to the West was predominantly male, leaving the more densely settled Eastern states with many young women relative to men. One result was lower marriage rates. In the 1830s the percentage of native-born adult women in Massachusetts who never married was far higher than the national average.¹⁷ All these factors help to explain why an ethos of individual self-interest developed more rapidly in Britain and the U.S. than in France.1⁸