WOMEN IN INDUSTRY: THE MANUFACTURE OF

BOOTS AND SHOES *

EDITH ABBOTT

Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy

Unlike the manufacture of cloth, the making of boots and shoes was not, historically, a woman's industry. Shoemaking or cobbling was considered "men's work" almost as universally as spinning was looked upon as work for women. Yet in this country, throughout the nineteenth century, women found one of their most important occupations in the manufacture of boots and shoes and in the 1905 Census of Manufactures it ranks second after the textile industries in the number of its women employees. Women, however, were never "shoemakers" in any proper sense of that term, and their relation to the industry only begins with the introduction of the system of division of labor which was in use for more than half a century before machinery and the factory system revolutionized the industry.

The application of labor-saving machinery to the manufacture of boots and shoes belongs to a comparatively recent chapter in our industrial history. There is no other of our important manufacturing industries in which machinery has so recently displaced hand methods, and in which the displacement has been so swiftly successful and complete. Although for more than fifty years after the establishment of the first cotton mill in Massachusetts, shoes continued to be made after primitive hand methods, at the present time even the smallest details of the process of manufacture are done by machinery.

The history of the manufacture of boots and shoes in this country divides itself into three different periods: (1) the colonial period in which the work was done entirely by men—

*This article is one chapter in a book entitled Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic History, to be published this month by D. Appleton & Co., New York. For assistance in the preparation of this as in the other chapters of the book, the writer wishes to acknowledge her obligations to the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

village shoemakers, or cobblers, or cordwainers; (2) a period which extended, roughly, from the latter part of the fifteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth, and in which, under a system of division of labor, women became an important factor in the industry; (3) the modern period which has witnessed the introduction of machinery and the establishment of the factory system, and in which women's labor has become increasingly important.1

Of the first period little need be said. Boots and shoes were made by the village shoemaker who kept a shop or went from house to house repairing and making shoes for the family once a year. Sometimes he procured a little leather and made it into shoes which were bartered at a neighboring store, and it gradually became customary for storekeepers to carry a few readymade shoes for sale.2

In the latter half of the eighteenth century more of this ready-made work was done and a considerable wholesale trade developed. During the revolutionary war the domestic industry was able to furnish shoes for the continental army, and southern planters began to depend on Massachusetts to supply the brogans which were worn by the negroes. By 1795, 300,000 pairs of ladies' shoes were produced in Lynn, and it was estimated that 200 master workmen and 600 journeymen were employed there. From 1800 to 1810 the population of Lynn is said to have increased 50 per cent., an increase attributed to the growing opportunity for employment in the boot and shoe industry.

3

1In Mr. H. P. Fairchild's article on shoemaking in Shaler's United States of America, pp. 178 ff., these periods are more exactly defined. The first period, the period of the cordwainer, is said to extend from 1629 to 1750; the second period, "from a trade to a manufacturing industry," from 1750 to 1850; third period, "the steam-power factory," from 1850 to 1892. See also, the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor on "Hand and Machine Labor," I, 113, for a somewhat different account of the periods through which the industry has passed.

403.

2 Bradford Kingman, History of North Bridgewater, Boston, 1866, pp. 402,

3 One Hundred Years of American Commerce, II, 567. The article on the "Boot and Shoe Trade" is by William B. Rice.

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 became manufacturers in a small way by hiring a few neighbors to work with them in the shop. It was natural, under the circumstances, to make some division of labor, and it became customary 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 carried 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 exclusively women's work during the first half of the nineteenth century. 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.

1810, it was reported that the women binders of Lynn alone had earned $50,000 in the course of that year. From the beginning, Lynn shoemakers made a specialty of the manufacture of ladies' shoes, and this perhaps accounts in part for the large proportion of women always employed there; for the work of these Lynn shoeworkers was much lighter and less fatiguing than the heavy work of the old cobblers, or of the makers of men's shoes."

A change of some importance followed the invention of the wooden shoe peg in 1811. Nearly all shoes were sewed before this time and premiums had been offered for the invention of machines which would enable shoemakers to work in a standing position and thus relieve the pressure upon the breast which came from holding the shoe and the fatigue caused by the stooping position which was necessary while sewing; but improvements came slowly. After the introduction of the pegging machine, however, the work of "bottoming" became much easier, so that boys and even women could peg shoes while they could not be advantageously employed on the heavy sewed work."

With the impetus given by the success of the attempts at a division of labor, the industry grew rapidly and many so-called "factories" were established in the large centers. These factories, however, were merely small buildings from which the large dealers gave out materials to be worked up by shoemakers on the domestic or commission system, very much as the early cotton "manufactories" gave out the yarn to be woven by weavers in their own homes. 10 These shoe dealers, or manufacturers as they were called, used the factories as a place where they accumulated materials, had the different kinds of leather cut into "uppers" and understock, and from which they gave out work to be made up all through the surrounding country in shoemakers' shops or binders' homes. The finished shoes were then

"Hurd, History of Essex County, I, 284.

The work of making ladies' shoes is still kept more or less segregated. Just as Lynn has always been the center of the manufacture of ladies' shoes, Brockton makes a specialty of manufacturing men's shoes.

T

Johnson, Sketches of Lynn, p. 4.

8 1905 Census of Manufactures, III, 242.

See pp. 342, 358, for a description of this system.

9

Kingman, p. 402.

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 little, 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 sometimes the girls, were taught this branch, and still another the eye setting, but all was done by hand."11

While much of the work was given out by "factories" which employed a large number of workpeople and marketed the product 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.12

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 regularly 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

11 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.

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