THE UNION OF SEX IN THE HAVERHILL SHOE STRIKE OF 1895.

MASSACHUSETTS; HAVERHILL (Mass.); UNITED States

Female industrial labor is generally understood to have been unskilled, low-wage, young, unmarried, living with their families and foreign-born or of foreign parentage in the late nineteenth century in the U.S. Women in the shoe industry in eastern Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York established a long history of union and strike activity beginning in the 1830s. The women workers in the shoe industry depended strongly on a linkage between sex and craft to provide a power base for their unions. The women who led the strike action also led efforts by the community of Haverhill to resist changes in its factory system and in its relationship with the native-born shoe workers. Their militant support for an industry-wide federation of crafts was reinforced by an unusual pattern of geographical mobility for a female work force, a mobility shaped by the economic requirements of an extremely seasonal industry. The work in the shoe industry was highly sex-typed. No women worked as cutters, lasters, or bottomers, a very few men worked as vampers, attracted by the wages, and a few women worked as finishers, trimmers and packers.