TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 427 and women shoe workers, the sexual division of tasks persisted. Among women workers a further division emerged. Young, single female factory operatives earned three times as much as their married co-workers, who continued to work at home as hand binders. In Men, Women, and Work, the 1860 strike remains on center stage. Yet Blewett provides a more complex and nuanced account of the event. Male artisans fought back against the shoe bosses in defense of decentralized production and against subjection to impersonal market forces. But these same craftsmen were unwilling to forge an alliance with female operatives as fellow workers. Hoping to safeguard the traditional order, male strike leaders tied the strike to the preservation ofthe family wage system. Female homeworkers allied themselves with the men, resisting appeals from the female factory operatives that they work together to raise wages as well as protect homework. In 1860, family solidarity triumphed over gender solidarity. Later in the century, however, the image of the “Lady Stitcher,” a legacy of the 1860 strike, was effective in unifying a female wage force divided by age and ethnicity so that they might achieve their rights at work and in society. The sexual division of labor, a factor present at the industry’s outset, now came to define an essentially female tradition of labor activism. Once beyond the 1860 strike, Men, Women, and Work becomes more heavily institutional, a study of female shoe workers’ often-difficult relations with organized labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A more important problem is that despite its many strengths the book remains a study of a single industry. To complete the picture we will need to know more about all of the participants, especially the bosses, and the changes in shoemaking outside New England as well as in other industries. Nevertheless, Blewett has made us appreciate the complexity and diversity of these working-class women’s lives. Brian Greenberg Dr. Greenberg teaches in the Department of History at Monmouth College. Apprenticeship: From Theory to Method and Back Again. Edited by Michael W. Coy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Pp· xv + 310; illustrations, notes, indexes. $54.50 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). Anthropologists have long used fieldwork, which requires both observation and participation, to study non-Western societies. One important subject of study concerns work—its habits, techniques, and philosophy. Scholars, however, have discovered that participation in the workplace produces both irritation at outsiders offering compe tition and resistance to the yielding of craft secrets. Accordingly, 428 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE anthropologists have turned to fieldwork through apprenticeship, which provides the opportunity to “learn by doing” and to gain craft secrets without competing economically. Reports from anthropolo gists who have served apprenticeships are the core of this insightful and remarkable volume. The essays, wide-ranging both geographically and intellectually, show that apprenticeship thrives under many different conditions. Apprenticeship in a Japanese pottery, according to John Singleton, is rigorous: the apprentice’s first 10,000 sake cups are not fired but thrown back into the clay pot. In contrast to this extravagant use of labor in the relentless pursuit of technical perfection, apprentice artisans in poverty-stricken Bolivia, described by Hans Buechler, worry how they can afford the tools needed to practice their trades. Cultural differences are also important. Lisa Aronson, Linda Deafenbaugh , and R. M. Dilley were apprentice weavers in Africa. Aron son learned that different tribes had markedly different attitudes about teaching outsiders their crafts. In the tribes that she investi gated, females did the weaving. Deafenbaugh became an apprentice among the Hausa, who normally employed only male weavers. Perhaps because she was an outsider, her gender was not an issue. According to Dilley, the Tukolor tribe in Senegal contained two distinct classes of weavers. Some men merely wove cloth, but others attained mystical powers along with weaving skills by serving a “powerful” master. Taken collectively, these essays show that apprenticeships fre quently share characteristics. Religion occupies a prominent place, whether it is the mystical power of masters, noted both by Dilley and by Michael Coy among Kenya’s blacksmiths, or the use of apprentice forms in...
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Sep 16, 2021
Johannis Tsoumas 
Open Access
