1992/03/01 by Margo Anderson · 1 citation
Mathematics · #Census and Population Estimation #Representativeness heuristic #Context (archaeology) #Narrative #Social history (medicine) #Field (mathematics) #Descriptive statistics #Reading (process) #Statistics #Narrative history #Quantitative history #History #Sociology #Social science #Political history #Mathematics #Linguistics #Law #Politics #Philosophy #Political science
paper · doi:10.1353/jowh.2010.0052
openalex publication_date 1992/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/05
The History of Women and the History of Statistics Margo Anderson Like other fields of social history, women's history needs statistics—both in the sense of statistical data and in the sense of a methodology to arrange and analyze that data. Women's history as a field needs statistics because statistics can answer crucial questions about the character and scope of changes in women's Uves over time and across place. Statistics provide information about aggregates, distributions, rates, and correlates that are absolutely essential to the corpus of women's history knowledge and, from my reading, that can be discovered no other way. Even historians who write case studies, traditional historical narrative, and biography impUcitly raise questions of context and representativeness that can only be answered quantitatively. Statistical knowledge, in other words, makes up a necessary though not a sufficient form of women's history knowledge. And despite a somewhat weightier tradition of quaUtative analysis within women's history, quantitative, social scientific, or statistical treatments of the situation of women in the past have prolif erated as the field has grown.1 Yet the "marriage," so to speak, between quantitative or social science history and women's history—my apologies to Heidi Hartmann here—has not always been a particularly happy one. Women's historians sensed that "statistics" as a field posed problems for women's history, and they were quick to discover the biases, omissions, and misrepresentations in historical data and in classification schemes and constructs that form the canon of statistical method.2 Several themes recur in these critiques. Existing historical statistical series tend to contain less information on women than that available for men. Sometimes, fewer data were coUected on women in the first place; other times, they were simply not reported. Second, data on women can suffer from undercounts. In surveys, interviewers sometimes did a worse job of collecting data from women. Third, classification schemes for recording and reporting information on women contain biases. Agency statisticians processing data sometimes excluded women from certain reporting categories—for example occupational Ustings—even if women Usted the information on the data collection form. OveraU, age cohort or occupational data might be reported in less detaU than were sirrular data for men. FinaUy, conceptions of appropriate household organization and respectable family Ufe Umited the possible range of household and family situations that would be recorded and reported about women. Much of this © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 4 No. 1 (Spring) 1992 Margo Anderson 15 Uterature is hortatory, offering warnings about problems with the data which must be fixed before one can go further, or reestimations of existing series. But a second question also arises: Why, we may ask, are the statistics so inadequate? And why have such obviously flawed data and methods been routinely pubUshed and reprinted in the major organs of statistical data—from the census, to the standard coUections of historical statistics, to texts? One answer is that historians are more sensitive to the problems of sources and the historicity of categories, since we routinely deal with these issues in aU our sources. But feminist critics from other social science disciplines make siirular critiques of official statistics and, as we shaU see, have for a very long time.3 In fact, the issue of why the statistics are problematic deserves attention in its own right if feminist scholars are going to make fuU use of statistical data and methods. One way to address it is to locate the origins of statistics as a form of knowledge, trace the history of statistics on women and gender, and hence capture the debates about statistics and the situation of women that frame the data and methods we inherit. Hakim and Deacon have provided a model and have examined the history of British and Australian census data on women. This paper wiU add the American context and examine the treatment of women's situation as housewife and worker in the American population census in the nineteenth century.4 The History of Statistics Today, statistics pervade our Uves. Yet it is important to recognize that statistics is a relatively recent form of knowledge. The earUest efforts to compile and...