In this image, Miss Alene Gilmore poses with her horse and 1940 Census folio as she enumerates households in Powder River County, Montana. In 1940, Miss Gilmore helped count some of Montana’s 559,456 residents. The state’s population has grown every decade since and in 2010, its population was 989,415.
Women have worked as census takers since 1880, and, in 1950, they outnumbered men in the field for the first time at 64% (men 36%) out of 142,962.