ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN the profession, and write history in defiance of principles accepted in mainstream historical studies for several decades A far more progressive stance involves looking beyond the West End of London to suburban and provincial centres and encompassing the broadest spectrum of performing specialties that comes under the rubric of ‘actor’ as the term was colloquially understood in the nineteenth century: including, in other words, specialties that range from tragedienne to danseuse, marionette manipulator to serio vocalist, Negro comedian to patentee, and equestrian artiste to heavy villain The terms themselves reflect prejudicial stratifications which are the historian’s responsibility to uncover, not perpetuate Sanderson acknowledges that dramatic performers liked to promote the separateness of their specialties, but the fact remains that all these types performed in the theatre and they were all actors, which makes substituting the elite of the legitimate stage for the whole industrial work force a rather dubious exercise Demographic historians are justifiably suspicious of the comprehensiveness, taxonomic peculiarities, and tabulations of the decennial censuses Nevertheless, the censuses provide the only alternative to anecdotal and elitist accounts of the constitution of an occupation as territorially dispersed and socioeconomically stratified as that of performing By examining the census records, one draws on a sample of performers that is as true to the social, economic, sexual, and professional demography of the theatre as possible Furthermore, the records of any area of Britain can be chosen for scrutiny Technically, the occupational statistics in the published censuses of England and Wales should provide the most comprehensive samples possible The reports of 1841 to 1911 show a regular increase in the raw numbers of performers, with an average decennial increase of 45 per cent overall (see Table 1, page 10) The increase in the number of actresses is especially remarkable, as the ratio of females to males jumps from 27 per 100 in 1841 to 108 per 100 in 1881, levelling off to 101 per 100 in 1911 This implies that the number of actresses increased by 764 per cent in the forty year period between 1841 and 81, with an astounding aggregate increase of 2,958 per cent in the seventy year period from 1841 to 1911 This is in a profession which, theoretically, had been wide open to women since the Restoration If the 1841 and 1851 data is put aside (for the science of gathering and tabulating the census was comparatively crude prior to 1861), an increase among actresses of 1,029 per cent is evident 40