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5 One of the first studies of women wage-earners living away from home, Carroll Wright's The working girls of Boston, largely ignored domestic servants, explicitly excluding them from calculations of the number of young women living away from home.

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21 For a more detailed account of the evolution of the concept of ‘headship’ in the US Census, see Nancy, Folbre and Marjorie, Abel, ‘Women's work and women's households: gender bias in the US Census’ Social Research, 56, 3 (Autumn, 1989), 545–69.Google Scholar

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24 See for instance, the report by the Statistical Society of London on a survey of working class households in the parish of St George in the East, in Richard, Wall ed., Slum conditions in London and Dublin (Farnborough, Hampshire, 1974)Google Scholar. Claudia Goldin's research on Philadelphia shows that the percentage of households headed by women ranged up and down between about 9 and 20 per cent over the 1790–1860 period, increasing slightly during periods of economic downswing, and diminishing slightly on the upswing. See her ‘The economic status of women in the early republic: quantitative evidence’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XVI (1986), 375–404Google Scholar. Furstenberg et al. contrast the incidence of female headship among households with children in Philadelphia in 1880, about 10 per cent, with much higher incidence of 25 per cent among households with lower than average wealth. See Furstenberg, Frank F. Jr., Theodore, Hershberg and John, Modell in Theodore, Hershberg ed., ‘The origins of the female-headed black family: the impact of the urban experience’, in Philadelphia: work, space, family and group experience in the 19th century (New York, 1981).Google Scholar

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32 Two notable exceptions to this lack of attention deserve mention. Richard Wall examines the number of households without females aged 20 and 59 in the ‘Introduction’ to Wall, R., Robin, J. and Laslett, P., eds., Family forms in historic Europe. (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In her study of Boston households in the late nineteenth century Elizabeth Pleck notes that one-parent households headed by men were disadvantaged by lack of access to women's earnings and women's domestic labour. See her ‘The two-parent household: black family structure in late nineteenth-century Boston’, in Gordon, M. ed., The American family in social historical perspective (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

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36 Ruggles, , Prolonged connections, 142–9Google Scholar; Smith, Daniel Scott, ‘Averages for units and averages for individuals within units: note’, Journal of Family History 4 (1979), 285–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Susan, Watkins, ‘On measuring transitions and turning points’, Historical Methods 13 (1980), 181–7.Google Scholar

37 The sample was constructed as follows. Every fifth household on the manuscript census was chosen, and all men aged 15 + in that household were included. As a result, men in large households are over-represented. Ideally, men should have been sampled, rather than households. However, this limitation does not vitiate the comparisons between Montague and Easthampton.

38 Mason, Vinovskis and Hareven, ‘Women's work and the life course in Essex County’.

39 For further discussion of revised estimates of female market participation based on these data, see Marjorie Abel and Nancy Folbre, ‘Female market participation in the United States before 1940: methodology for revising estimates’ forthcoming in Historical Methods.

40 Two factors suggest that a high percentage of married women without co-resident spouses should be considered separated. In the first place, enumerators of the 1880 Census were instructed to list all those who were ‘normally resident,’ whether or not they were actually present. Indeed, the instructions went so far as to stipulate that sailors should be listed as residents, even if they had been away for a long period of time (Wright, 1900: 171). In the second place, the labour force participation patterns of these women closely resembled those of single women, and a logit model of labour force participation showed significant differences in the probability that single women and married women would have a listed occupation but no significant differences between single women and married women with no husband resident.

41 The form in which the data were collected makes it impossible to calculate the number of women overall, as opposed to women heads of household, who lived in households without men.

42 By way of comparison, aggregate figures for the US as a whole for 1940 (the first year in which relationship to head of household was tabulated), show that about 17.7 per cent of all women aged 15+ lived on their own: 10.7 per cent headed households, 3.3 per cent were lodgers in private families, 1.4 per cent were servants and 2.3 per cent lived outside private families. It is interesting to note that the percentage of women lodging, living in as servants and living outside private families was lower than in Montague and Easthampton sixty years earlier, but the percentage of households headed by women was higher. This comparison reiterates the point that trends in female headship do not necessarily parallel trends in the broader measure of female independence. Calculations are based on tables 10, 11 and 12 of the 1940 Census of Population, vol. IV, ‘Characteristics by age, marital status, relationship, education and citizenship, Part 1’, US Summary, 27–38.