426 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE women of access to apprenticeships, eroded the family economy, and impoverished small farmers and cottagers by the enclosing of com mons. She assumes that economic function or “the opportunity for productive work” (p. 262) conferred a rough equality between the sexes, an assumption about which feminist historians should always be wary. Her attitudes on the importance of women’s productive work to female status and rights reflect contemporary (and postindustrial) feminism as did Pinchbeck’s more cautious evaluation of the impact of industrialization on women’s lives that reflected attitudes in the 1920s toward women’s work. Mary H. Blewett Dr. Blewett, professor of history at the University of Lowell, is the author of Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780—1910 (University of Illinois Press, 1988) and is at work on a study of English immigrant textile workers in mid-19th-century New England textile centers. Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780—1910. By Mary H. Blewett. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Pp. xxii + 444; illustrations, notes, appen dixes, bibliography, index. $29.95. Focusing on the interrelationships of men and women shoe workers in Essex County, Massachusetts, Mary Blewett fundamentally refash ions our understanding of what has been the standard story of industrial and technological change in the New England shoe indus try in the 19th century. Except for the much-reproduced picture of women marching in tbe Great Shoe Strike of i860, female workers have been largely missing from previous works on the industry. In her prizewinning book, Blewett does more thanjust add the experience of working women; the sexual division of labor and gender relationships are the core of the story. Male and female shoe workers performed different tasks almost from the beginning of the shoe industry in Essex County. In the late 18th century, men worked together in shops or ten footers, either lasting (shaping the upper and inner sole to size) or bottoming (fastening the sole, heel, and upper together). Women worked in the home as binders, sewing by hand a shoe’s leather uppers. With the emergence ofcentral shops in the 1830s, merchant capitalists hired an extensive network of female outworkers throughout the New En gland countryside. The women were paid in cash, their earnings contributing to the family’s economic well-being. Still, the amount of work that each woman agreed to undertake was determined more by the state of her family larder than her own needs. Mechanization transformed shoemaking in Essex County in the 1850s. While the factory became the common workplace for both men 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...