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 began to hire apprentices and journeymen to help them in their work, and from this practice evolved what was called the team system. Instead of each cobbler turning out a complete pair of shoes, the men who worked together divided the work between them, each performing only one given part in the process of manufacture. It was at this point—when a division of labor had been established in the making of shoes—that women came into the industry. The village cobbler soon discovered that women could be profitably employed in stitching the uppers and in binding shoes. So he at first made his wife and daughters his assistants, and later, when his trade expanded, sent out the uppers to farmers' and fishermen's wives, to be sewed by them in their own homes. Soon a great many women took up this occupation that afforded them remunerative employment and could be done in connection with their household tasks, and during the first half of the nineteenth century stitching and binding of shoes became exclusively woman's work. In the historical shoe town, Lynn, 1,500 women were said to be engaged in stitching and binding shoes in 1829. The poetess, Lucy Larcom, has beautifully described this early wage work of women, industrial in character and yet performed in the isolation of the home, in her pretty, touching poem, "Hannah at the Window Binding Shoes." Old reports on the wages of working women show the binding of shoes to have been a much better paid employment than the sewing trades. Twenty-five cents a pair was paid for binding shoes, and it was said that "a smart woman could bind four pairs a day." But few shoe-binders actually succeeded in binding four pairs a day. Just because it was not factory work, the majority of workers were employed in binding shoes only part of their time, in the intervals of housework, particularly as married women were employed in large numbers.

The invention and application of machinery, that began to revolutionize the manufacture of shoes at about the same time when the sewing machine began to revolutionize the clothing trades, had two distinct and opposite results. First it drove the women out of this industry, and then, after an interval of thirty years, it brought them back again in greater numbers. The first machinery