plied to the manufacture of shoes did that very work that women had been doing by hand, the stitching and binding. But the machines were heavy, and to operate them required muscular strength. So men began to do what had until then been woman's work. With the introduction of machinery, the percentage of women employed in this industry steadily and rapidly declined. While in 1850 women had constituted 31 per cent, of all employees, their number sank to 23 per cent, in 1860 and to 14 per cent, in 1870. But then came a second revolution in the shoemaking trade. The machines were greatly improved and adapted to the physical strength of women. A detailed system of division of labor was introduced that divided the process of manufacture into many minute parts, and as the inevitable result of these mechanical changes woman re-entered the shoemaking industry. To-day again, as at the rise of the nineteenth century, women are binding shoes, but not like "poor, lone Hannah, sitting at the window stitching in a mournful muse." The women who to-day constitute 33 per cent, of all persons engaged in the manufacture of shoes in the United States are, all of them, factory workers. Unlike the sewing trades, the manufacture of shoes has escaped the sweatshop system. Here, as in the textile trades, we behold an industry in which the transition of women from home to factory is final and complete.
CIGAR MAKING
One of the early agricultural products of the American colonies was tobacco. Farmers raised it in their fields, and their wives performed the same function that they performed in regard to other agricultural products. They took the raw material and turned it into a commodity. The first American cigars are said to have been made by a Connecticut farmer's wife in 1801. During the early years of the nineteenth century women on the farms made practically all the domestic cigars then consumed in this country, and in many places the home-made cigar was a favorite medium of exchange. The earliest cigar factory in America was established in West Suffield, Conn., in 1810 and employed only women. Indeed, women were the sole manufacturers of cigars in the United States until skilled
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