January 2016 - Parents' Occupations of Children on the Indefatigable

Post date: Jan 25, 2016 7:17:2 PM

Figures 1 and 2 show the percentage of Indy boys over time whose father’s occupation corresponded to each HISCLASS group. The ‘upper classes’ (HISCLASS numbers 1-2) are presented toward the top of the figures and the lower classes toward the bottom. Figure 1 shows that for parts of our period, the Indefatigable administrators did a pretty poor job of recording occupations. We have father’s occupation for only around 25 per cent of boys born in the 1880s. This seems to be partially related to an administrative decisions to stop recording the former occupation of fathers who had died.

Figure 1: Change in Fathers’ Occupations on the Indefatigable

However, if we exclude these unknown occupations (Figure 2), we can see that the percentage share of boys in each HISCLASS category remained fairly stable over the second half of the nineteenth century despite the fluctuations in the percentage of occupations recorded. The boys’ fathers became more skilled across the twentieth century with very few unskilled workers by the 1970s. The large increase in HISCLASS 3 relates to an increase in boys whose father’s were non-commissioned officers in the military at the end of our period.

Figure 2: Change in Fathers’ Occupations on the Indefatigable Excluding Unknown Occupations

Figures 3 and 4 provide a similar story for the children’s mothers. Figure 3 shows that mothers’ occupations were at a maximum recorded for just over 40 per cent of boys. However, this does not necessarily mean that the boys’ mothers were not working. Some were considered housewives who primarily engaged in household tasks, but most women in the nineteenth century would have had some additional money earning tasks to help pay the bills.

Figure 3: Change in Mothers’ Occupations on the Indefatigable

Figure 4 reflects how the nature of women’s work has changed over the past 150 years. In the second half of the nineteenth century most women worked as either sewers, launderers and domestic servants (HISCLASS 9) or charworkers and unskilled factory workers (HISCLASS 11). However, over time women’s employment opportunities expanded to include more sales and clerical work, which dominated the employment of mothers by the 1970s. Note that the data from 1960 onward is based on a very small sample size though.

Figure 4: Change in Mothers’ Occupations on the Indefatigable Excluding Unknown Occupations

So what does this mean for our analysis? These graphs highlight two important issues:

• The boys seems to have mainly come from urban, working class backgrounds. Almost 90 per cent of the children born in the 1850s came from working class backgrounds (HISCLASS numbers 7-12). In addition, the farm-related classes (HISCLASS numbers 8, 10 and 12) were very much under-represented in the sample, with HISCLASS number 8 and 10 barely visible in the graphs. We plan to compare these changing occupations with the occupations recorded in the census in order to establish in what ways the Indefatigable boys were and were not representative of British children in each decade.

• We will have to carefully control for each child’s socioeconomic background so that changes in the socioeconomic context over time do not cloud our understanding of other factors that might influence the children’s growth.

References:

van Leeuwen, Marco H. D., Ineke Maas and Andrew Miles, HISCO: Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (Leuven, 2002).

van Leeuwen, Marco H. D. and Ineke Maas, HISCLASS: A Historical International Social Class Scheme (Leuven, 2011).

Eric Schneider, January 2016