The economic position of women

by Academy of Political Science in the City of New York

The bindery trade in New York employs about five thousand women, a third of all the women at work in binderies in the United States. A few are at work in hand binderies, where craftsmen of two or three centuries ago would find tools and methods not entirely unfamiliar. Others work in “edition binderies,” where machines bind books by the thousands. Others work in pamphlet binderies, or magazine binderies. The methods and conditions differ in these different branches of the trade.

Whether a book is bound by hand or machine, whether it is covered with levant or paper, whether it is sewed with linen thread or stitched with wire, certain processes are necessary. The sheets must be folded into portable size, the folded sections must be held together in proper order, and the whole must be covered. It is in the matter of the covering that the branches of the trade differ most widely. The making of the hand-bound book, designed to last longest, demands the most numerous processes. At the other extreme is the paper-covered pamphlet.

The machine method of binding books omits many processes of hand binding, and combines others into one simple operation. In hand binding, one book is the center of attention until it is finished, and each volume requires slightly different treatment. In machine binding, the method is to repeat one process thousands of times, adopting the factory system with its division of processes and its labor-saving machines. A pamphlet should be folded and its sections placed in proper order as accurately as a book bound in cloth or morocco, but as it is to be covered only with heavy paper, it requires no such careful pressing, trimming, and retrimming, rounding and backing, glueing, lining-up, drawing-in, and all the other diverse manipulations by which the artistic binder assures the preservation of the sheets in a solid and substantial cover made by hand. A periodical is a species of pamphlet, but it is distinguished by uniformity of size week after week or month after month. Thus it lends itself admirably to machine production.

Women are standing on the threshold of the bindery trade. All the work of preparing the sheets is theirs, folding, placing them in sequence, and attaching them together with paste, thread or wire. In pamphlet binding they put on the covers, but in edition binderies, they have no share at all in the important work of the forwarding department, and they enter the finishing department only in order to lay the gold on the covers and to examine and wrap the completed volumes. Will the process of change give them greater or less opportunities?

The machine is the great fact which looms large before the eyes of bindery women, when they describe changes in their trade. They accept it as they would accept a rainy day but it usually spells “out of work” for someone in the bindery, and the calamity of unemployment is more immediate and real to the workers than are the advantages of better methods of production.

The different methods of folding sheets illustrate the development of machinery. Often these different methods are found together in one workroom. For example, in an edition bindery in New York the sheets are fed into one of the six point folding machines or placed in the automatic folder or, very rarely, folded by hand. In the first case, girls sitting on high stools feed each separate sheet into the machine, placing the printed dots on needle-like points, which serve as guides, while their helpers, the learners, take out the folded sections and “jog” them straight on tables. If the pages are to be folded by the automatic machine, they are placed in the proper position under two rubber knuckles, which push them toward the folding rollers. The forewoman, in addition to her other work, keeps watch to see that the folding is properly done, but no hand work is required except to pile the sheets under the rubber fingers and to lift the folded sections from the boxes into which the machine delivers them. Between the “point” machine and the “automatic” was another invention not found in this bindery. In it the points gave place to automatic gauges, and the girl who fed it need only flick the sheet from the pile so that the machine could grip it. By dispensing with the points on which each sheet must be fitted much time was saved. Obviously the next step was to supply an automatic feeder.

The stories of displaced workers illustrate what happens when new machines are introduced. One girl had been employed in bindery work three years. As a learner, she had “knocked up” sections folded by the “point” machine. She was paid three dollars a week, and continued the same process one year. Then when a vacancy occurred, she was given a chance to operate the machine. It was not easy to learn, nor could it be done in a day or a week. At first she received a weekly wage of four dollars and fifty cents, but “advanced rapidly” until she was earning nine dollars.

One day an automatic machine appeared in the workroom and proved so successful that it was used in preference to the point folders. This girl was given hand folding, which is “terrible work.” It is hard to earn a living wage by hand folding. The worker is paid a cent or a cent and a half for folding one hundred sheets if one fold is necessary. If the sheets are large and heavy like those in a dictionary the work of folding is very exhausting, although the pay may be higher. If one is paid four cents for one hundred sheets, she must fold nearly three thousand sheets in a day or seventeen thousand five hundred in a week to earn seven dollars. Moreover, each sheet must be folded three times, and each fold creased smooth by drawing the bone folding knife across the heavy paper. This girl was paid four cents a hundred for folding the pages of an encyclopedia, but she could not earn more than seven dollars a week, in spite of her efforts to work rapidly. She left because she was not needed for hand folding and the forewoman thought that there would be no more work for “point feeders.” She advised her to learn some other process.

An employment bureau sent her to a bindery where a point feeder was needed, but the machine was not the same make as the one which she had been operating, and therefore she was not employed. After a fruitless search for work in her trade, she was employed by a manufacturer of neckwear as a learner without wages. Later, as an experienced operator, she earned seven to nine dollars a week.

Another girl had operated a point folding machine in a large edition bindery. Newer inventions were introduced, and gradually more and more work was transferred to them. This girl was a piece worker, and her wages were depressed steadily as the machine which she was operating fell into disuse. She had learned only two other processes, hand folding and filling the boxes of the gathering machine. There was no gathering machine in this bindery, and the prices for hand folding were not high enough to yield a living wage. This girl and her sister, also a bookbinder, lived alone, and were dependent on their own earnings. She had decided to look for work in another bindery, when the forewoman offered to teach her to gather by hand. Gathering is not easy work. “At first,” she said, “I was so tired at night I could hardly keep my eyes open at supper. I said yesterday I wished I had one of those things you put on your feet to measure the distance you walk; I’d like to know how many miles I walk in a day. There’s no boys to carry our work. The folding machines are at the other end of the bindery, and we carry the work the distance from one street to another. That’s a block. If there are forty sections in a book, we walk it forty times for that one book.” Nevertheless her experience in handling sheets made it possible for her to learn the new process easily, so that by the end of six months she was earning approximately ten to eleven dollars a week piece work, whereas the point folding machine had yielded her a maximum of nine or ten dollars.