Census Records and Group Biographies as a Tool for Researching Women’s Citizenship

For almost a decade, I have been researching the appearance of women on English criminal juries after 1919, and I have always struggled to get close enough to these women to understand who they actually were. In this post, I reflect on the many different ways in which we can approach a subject using a range of data sources and how this might help us to identify and understand these women.

While women had been empanelled for centuries on the special jury of matrons (a special type of jury tasked with certifying pregnancy where the courts needed formal notice of this, e.g., following conviction for a capital crime), their consistent appearance on trial juries was not possible until shortly after the First World War. Some women had secured the parliamentary vote under the Representation of the People Act 1918, and others were added to the pools of people qualified for jury service by the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919. A year later, the Juries (Emergency Provisions) Act 1920 ensured that the women covered by the 1919 legislation were a subset of the women in the 1918 Act, and that being a woman for these purposes was a single unified category at law, rather than — as it had briefly been from 1919 — a set of frequently overlapping categories.

My research has been concerned with the question of what sort of woman counted as such for the purposes of their new place on the jury system, as well as the legal and bureaucratic processes involved in realising the promise that a legally constrained subclass of  ‘women’ could now be jurors. This has largely been a question of trying to wrest more information out of the limited sources available to me.

My earliest work here asked how many women were named on juries in the provincial assize courts (broadly the equivalent of today’s crown courts). I found regional variations, so I consulted electoral registers held at local archives. I thought that perhaps there were simply more women with the requisite qualifications in some places. But that didn’t explain the differences I was seeing. I also found women were systematically kept off certain types of trial, in ways which appeared to amount to a legal and administrative enforcement of the stories being told at this time about women’s capacities as judges and their status as citizens. One of these tropes said that women should never be summoned because they were far more likely than men to try to get out of jury service, and, therefore, it was a better use of everyone’s time if we only summoned men to begin with. By exploring local records concerning the people who were actually summoned (juror summoning records and census records), and of these, the people who were excused, I was able to show that this cultural construction was not grounded in the actual practices of these summoned women.

My concern is that by working with these sources, I have avoided engaging with the question of who these women actually were, and that too much of the ongoing project has collapsed into variations on ‘I have counted how many feminine names appear on this or that list.’ More recently, I started asking myself how we might supplement this method by consulting census records, and by doing so, starting to construct group biographies of the women who were summoned to a particular court at a particular time. I have so far only considered Bristol’s jurors in this connection, but this biographical approach has allowed me to ask questions about these women’s family and living arrangements, about whether they were listed as the head of their household, whether they ran a business, and so on. I have been able to start pulling together what may well have been pre-existing networks, charting, for example, how regularly women on juries were seated near neighbours, often from families working in similar trades. I have also been able to show how the legal rules around maximum and minimum age limits were more real for women than for men, with both unlawfully young and unlawfully young men seemingly posing no problem for administrators who nonetheless wished to select them.

On reflection, there is still a danger here that the analysis collapses into a dehumanised numerical form. But by adding an analysis of census records, I argue that we can come much closer to the actual human people who were being constructed into and out of this developing facet of legally constructed womanhood, and in particular of women’s citizenship. But ultimately, this is an inherent problem with any empirical work: we’re always only just starting and never seem to find enough.