Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/351

 WOMEN IN INDUSTRY: BOOTS AND SHOES 337

This large and prosperous trade, however, could not have been worked out on the village-cobbler system alone. Along with the expansion of the industry, a system of division of labor was developed which greatly increased the possible output. This system came into existence very gradually, and the latter half of the eighteenth century was a time of transition from the period of the individual shoemaker making the whole boot and shoe, to the period of the "team" when the work was subdivided and one man carried on only a single process.*

During the first period and, for the most part, during the experimental time of transition, the industry was exclusively in the hands of men. Journeymen and master workmen alike were exclusively men and no women were employed at any part of the work. Shoe shops large enough to accommodate the three or four workmen who constituted a team soon became common in the more enterprising shoe towns. Prosperous shoemakers be- came manufacturers in a small way by hiring a few neighbors to work with them in the shop. It was natural, under the cir- cumstances, to make some division of labor, and it became cus- tomary to have the cutting of the leather done by one man, the work of fitting and sewing the uppers done by another, and to have still another exclusively employed in fastening the uppers to the soles. This system, in which each workman car- ried on a single process, was found to be vastly superior to the more primitive method of having the whole shoe made by a single workman.

Shoemakers were not slow in discovering that, under the new system, the labor of the women and children in the family could be utilized by giving them the uppers to be stitched and bound in the home, and then returned to the shop to have the soles put on by the men. "Stitching and binding" thus came to be exclu- sively women's work during the first half of the nineteenth cen- tury. Work in the shops was confined to cutting, bottoming, finishing, and packing to send to market ; and all through eastern Massachusetts women in or near the "shoe towns" became in a measure self-supporting by getting shoes to bind. As early as


 * See 1905 Census of Manufactures, III, 242.