Conditions were perhaps at their worst at about the middle of the last century. In 1845 the New York Tribune estimated that in New York City alone there were 10,000 sewing women. A majority of these worked anywhere from ten to sixteen hours a day to earn from two to three dollars a week. In the squalor and misery of wretched, insanitary tenement homes, women made shirts at six cents a piece. As late as 1870—according to newspapers of the time—out of 70,000 women wage earners in New York City, 20,000 were in a constant fight with starvation, 7,000 lived in cellars. These deplorable conditions could not fail to arouse public attention. Various philanthropic enterprises, such as cheap boarding houses for working women, industrial schools, exchanges for woman's work, etc., came into existence at this time, and early agitators for equal opportunities for women, as Virginia Penny, Gail Hamilton, Catherine Cole and Mathew Carey, helped to arouse the public conscience. The misery of the needlewomen and of other unskilled women workers was a powerful factor in opening to women the skilled trades and learned professions they have since invaded. It acted like a wedge from below, driving those on the top, favored with larger opportunities, to venture upon new fields of employment.
MANUFACTURE OF SHOES
The census of 1900 reported 34,490 women engaged in the manufacture and repairing of boots and shoes; yet shoemaking was traditionally not woman's work but man's. It is one of those industries into which women have been drawn by the invention of machinery and the division of labor. At the time when every woman was occupied at home with the making of garments for her family, shoes were the only article of clothing that she did not make nor even help to make. Each pair of shoes was the product of the skilled labor of one man, a master workman at his trade. The village cobbler either made shoes to order in his own workshop, or he travelled about from farm to farm, making and repairing shoes for the farmers and their families. When the population increased and with it the demand for shoes, the master workmen
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