Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/356

 342 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the highest or the lowest wage: about the same number of men were employed for wages ranging from thirty-five cents to $1.83, but few received less than seventy cents, or more than a dollar a day. From Boston it was reported that the industry there was so intimately connected with that of the neighboring counties, Essex and Norfolk particularly, that it could not very well be separated. Many of the principal establishments in Boston also had shops in the country to which they furnished the stock and from which they received the manufactured product.

For the state as a whole the most reliable estimate of the number of persons employed in the industry is found in the industrial census of 1837. According to the Tables of Industry for that year, 15,000 women were engaged in the manufacture of boots and shoes, and in the same year there were only 14,757 women employed in the cotton factories. While it might appear from this census, therefore, that shoebinding had become numeri- cally a more important occupation for women than work in the cotton mills, it was really much less important when con- sidered from other points of view. Binding shoes like other kinds of home work was done irregularly. This was due in part to the fact that many women binders worked only in the inter- vals of household duties, and in part because work was not always furnished regularly by the factories and "bosses." It is of course always true that employers make a much greater effort to provide work constantly for factory employees than for home workers, since the latter are not paid for any of the time which is unemployed.

A large proportion therefore of the 15,000 women reported to be engaged in the manufacture of boots and shoes worked only in the interval of other duties, and their earnings were cor- respondingly small. The data for 1831 which have been given show that some of these women binders did not average more than eight or nine cents a day, and while many more earned from thirty to forty cents, very few earned as much as fifty or sixty cents. Women cotton operatives on the other hand worked in factories, and were regularly employed at what were then con- sidered very good wages for women. Moreover, in the cotton