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 manufac- ture of boots and shoes belongs to a comparatively recent chap- ter in our industrial history. There is no other of our impor- tant manufacturing industries in which machinery has so re- cently 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: (i) 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. Apple- ton & 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.
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