348 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
various labor difficulties in the industry, this one is of special interest because the shoebinders were also on strike. A con- temporary account relates that in several instances, at one time during a snowstorm, "large bodies of females appeared in the ranks." On one occasion hundreds of women "in grand proces- sion" with the striking shoemakers formed "an imposing specta- cle." 28
Other labor-saving inventions had been introduced in the industry in the years between 1845 and i860 — "rolling," "buff- ing," "splitting," and "racing" machines for preparing sole leather, the machines for cutting soles, taps, and heels, cable-wire nailers, sand-papering, heel-making, burnishing, and pegging machines ; and with all of these the general substitution of steam for hand power. ^^ No invention, however, changed the work of men as completely as the sewing-machine had changed the work of women. For binding and stitching had ceased to be a by-employment which women could carry on in as leisurely a fashion as they wished, and earn a few cents a day in their own homes. Women who worked at the sewing of uppers must now go to a factory and work regularly during a long working day. An account of a Haverhill factory in i860 after the introduc- tion of the pegging machine describes the various processes by which a shoe was then manufactured, all of which were carried on under one roof. The fourth story of one of the buildings was used as a stitching-room "occupied by ladies who tend the stitching-machines which are also run by steam, thus saving them from what otherwise must prove a laborious and fatiguing operation. "^*^
As the machine came to be more and more generally used, the piecework rates for work done at home must have been greatly reduced, and binders who could not go into factories and continued to do hand work, must have found their lot a very hard one. A Philadelphia shoebinder complained in 1862 that
- See the account in the History of Lynn, by Alonzo Lewis and James R.
Newhall (Boston, 1865), p. 459.
- These inventions and others are enumerated in the 1905 Census of Manu-
factures, III, 242.
- ° Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, LIU, 471.
