Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/353

 WOMEN IN INDUSTRY: BOOTS AND SHOES 339

returned to the factory, and, after being packed in boxes, were distributed to the various markets throughout the country.

But it is clear that very Httle, if any, of the work was done in the so-called factory. Shoes were still made in the little "eight-by-ten" shops where the shoemaker and his sons, or a few neighbors, made a team ; and in the home where the women and girls did the stitching and binding and, for fancy slippers, the trimming and ornamenting. In the shop, although cutters were not needed when the stock was received from the factory ready to be made up, work was still found for a team. One man did the lasting, the necessary stretching and fitting of the upper to the sole, another did the pegging, "the boys, and some- times the girls, were taught this branch, and still another the eye setting, but all was done by hand."^^

While much of the work was given out by "factories" which employed a large number of workpeople and marketed the prod- uct on a large scale, there were many petty employers in the trade at this time. The men who, were known as "bag-bosses" were of this class, and their name originated from their custom of taking one or two dozen pairs of shoes in a bag to Boston to be traded off for whatever could be got in exchange.^ ^

With the increased efficiency which followed as a result of the improved methods of production, the manufacture of boots and shoes became a large and prosperous industry in spite of the lack of labor-saving machinery. The work continued to be done almost exclusively by hand until after the close of the first half of the nineteenth century, and during this time shoemaking was still regarded as a skilled trade, a craft to which boys were regu- larly apprenticed for a term of seven years. This fact of the boy's long apprenticeship illustrates the difference between the relation of men and women to the trade. Although the labor of women was an important factor in the development of the industry, yet they were almost exclusively employed in sewing

" One Hundred Years of American Commerce, 567. Other accounts of the industry at this period are to be found in the Twelfth Census of Manufactures, III, 754, 755, and Thirteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, I, 113-

"Johnson, Lynn, p. 14. The bag-bosses belonged to the period about 1830.