Women's work and family-building patterns during the First Demographic Transition: A longitudinal study of Derbyshire, 1881-1911

Abstract

This thesis examines the impact of women’s employment on marital fertility during the First Demographic Transition in late nineteenth-century Derbyshire by creating a novel dataset of linked census, civil registration, and archival records from between 1881 and 1911. Previous research on fertility decline in England and Wales has been limited by the cross-sectional or retrospective nature of available data. The fertility survey included in the 1911 census established that marital fertility was falling from the 1870s, and that births per couple differed substantially between social classes and occupational groups. Previously, these characteristics have been measured only for husbands and not wives, reflecting the biases of historical sources. The recent release and digitization of individual-level data allow more detailed examination of diversity within these broad categories. My study of Derbyshire provides a comparative perspective on marriage and fertility in districts with textile mills, coal-mining and agricultural districts, and growing urban centres. In addition to demographic data from the census enumerators’ books, I collect material from the archive of the Strutt cotton spinning mills in Belper which provides granular information on employment, including job titles, wages, and hours worked. By working with a sample of records from one county, I create a sufficiently large dataset which I use to demonstrate new and adapted methodologies which have wider applications. In the first chapter, I present new automated methods for linking both women and men across censuses by incorporating indexes to marriage registers to capture women’s transitions from maiden to married names. I reduce the gender gap in record linking, creating a more representative sample, and retrieve information about women’s pre-marital households and occupations. In addition to enabling a life-cycle perspective on women’s work, the linked data also augment the fertility information contained in the 1911 census. The next chapter of the thesis describes the reconstruction of complete birth histories for married women using imputed birthdates for children who are not observed with their mothers because they had died or left the household before the census date. This information is crucial for evaluating changes in the timing as well as the total number of births. In the next chapter, I use the linked data and reconstructed birth histories to define childbearing sequences for three cohorts of women. I characterize these sequences into groups using cluster analysis and demonstrate that both husbands’ and wives’ occupations before marriage had significant effects on the likelihood of following a low fertility trajectory. I argue that the combined effects of couples’ occupational histories are important for explaining the low levels of fertility found in textile districts, which were defined by a high degree of assortative mating between textile workers as well as high levels of women’s labour force participation. I also find, contrary to some hypotheses about the vertical diffusion of birth control, that women formerly employed as domestic servants had the largest families of any female occupational group. I discuss these results within a theoretical framework concerning the ability of couples to negotiate and act on changing fertility goals, conditioned on their relative ages, social backgrounds, and contributions to the family wage economy. In the final three chapters, I examine the transitions to marriage and to each birth using cure models, also known as split population models, to analyse the factors related to the timing and occurrence of each event separately. These models distinguish between groups which took relatively longer to marry or had longer birth intervals from those who were more likely to remain unmarried or who stopped childbearing at a particular parity. Previous research suggests that postponing first births was an important characteristic of textile districts, but scholars have struggled to demonstrate this conclusively with existing data. I find that the differences in average birth intervals between female occupational groups are significant but only partly explained by the likelihood of continuing in work after marriage. In contrast to their adoption of family limitation within marriage, I also find that female textile workers were advantaged on the marriage market within textile districts. I examine these dynamics more closely using the Strutt factory records to identify family employment groups and to contextualize the age, sex, and wage structures of the workforce. This research reveals the intersections of labour markets, marriage markets, and the family economy through their effects on demographic outcomes.