Women's Work and the Occupational Structure in Late Nineteenth-Century Sweden

Abstract

It has long been recognized that, in order to understand economies in the past, we need better information about women's work and tertiary sector work. It is also well known that, while valuable in many ways, nineteenth-century censuses give incomplete information about women's contributions to the economy. Consequently, censuses are a poor basis for estimating the occupational structure. This article offers a solution to these problems by triangulating census data with qualitative information extracted from court records. The result is a more reasonable estimate of the first-level occupational structure in a Swedish local society (Västerås and its surroundings) around 1880. This estimate suggests that just before the onset of industrialization, around eighty per cent of the adult population, women and men, were active in primary and tertiary sector work. Compared to the census, the analysis sets women's share in the primary and the tertiary sectors at higher levels. The article has a strong methodological focus and describes in detail how the court records were analysed and adjusted to be comparable with the census.