Year: 1989
Type: article
Abstract: In 1878 the officers of the Association for the Advancement of Women wrote a letter the U.S. Congress protesting the U.S. census's notion that home-keepers were not gainful workers. We pray your honorable body, their letter read, to make provision for the more careful and just enumeration of women as laborers and producers. . In 1976, a group called Social Scientists in Population Research circulated a short report criticizing the census term head of household. This term, the report concluded, has a subjective, intuitive meaningsuggesting which person rules the roost or who lives in whose housebut no objective validity. These documents, spanning a period of almost a century, speak for a tradition of feminist criticisms of gender bias in putatively objective sources of social statistics. In this paper, we review and advance these criticisms, detailing serious problems with the ways women's work and women's households were enumerated (or, as was often the case, not enumerated) by censuses of the U.S. population before 1950. This intellectual history sheds light on continuing problems of gender bias in contemporary census data and casts doubt on conventional
Authors: Nancy Folbre, Marjorie Abel
Language: English
Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W105323465