A married woman who was head of household rather than her husband in the 1921 census

[Another2Cats]

I've been tracing someone that was proving to be rather complicated to find but then suddenly got distracted by some writing that I noticed on one census form that I was looking at.

I noticed that it had the wife as the Head and the husband as "husband".

At the bottom of the page is some text from the Census Enumerator explaining why the census says what it does .

I think it says a lot to the attitudes of the times and I can just imagine exactly how that conversation went.

"In this case the woman insists upon being described as "Head". All the household goods were her own property and her name was on the rent book. Her husband had left her upon one occasion & she had taken him back upon trial"

This is the first time I've seen anything like this. Has anyone else seen anything like this?

How wonderful!

They do pop up again in the 1939 Register - but it's complicated.

To give some background, they married in 1894 and had two children.

The husband, Matthew, spent 14 days in prison in 1909 (I can't read what the offence was but it couldn't have been too serious) and then in the 1911 census he is living back home with his parents about five miles away from Elizabeth and the children.

He is then back with Elizabeth in 1921.

The 1939 Register doesn't give a definitive answer. They are both still alive but Matthew was working as a night watchman. So the address he is registered at in 1939 was the place where he was working.

Elizabeth is shown on her own at an address in Farnworth, Bolton and Matthew spent the night working as night watchman at the Kings Gate Institution Casual Ward, Bolton.

This was associated with the Bolton Workhouse and was a sort of night shelter for homeless people.

So, they may have stayed together but we'll never know.

Ah yes, of course!

[that was about Tolkien's handwriting]

@Another2Cats sounds like they didn't stay together.
All very interesting history 🙂

This is fascinating because so often women were “downgraded” on the census making the work situation for women so unreliable (unless they were professionals).

I can remember my mother being annoyed at listed as “housewife” when she was working, because she had a family and her paid work was considered secondary to her right and proper role at home. If she had been a professional woman apparently her work would have been recorded.

Do you remember the 'family passport' @C8H10N4O2? Nothing to stop a married woman obtaining her own, but it was much more economical for a family to obtain and travel on one. The problem was, there was only one 'passport holder', if I remember rightly, and this was the head of the family - almost always the man. So it was his passport; he could travel alone on it, but his wife couldn't. This state of affairs continued until the 1990s, as my mother found out the hard way! She was furious.

Yes I do remember it, my mother had “views” on that as well 😀

I remember being shocked at meeting women my own age travelling on family passports in the 90s as I’d assumed it was already a legacy thing. It had never occurred to me that any woman my age would sign up for such a thing and made me realise just how limited progress really was in women’s rights when it came to social attitudes.

Bloody awesome