Women at Work: Tess (Cobbler/Shoemaker)

Editor’s Note: I’m excited to present our third interview in the series! (Check out 1 and 2 as well!) We talked to Tess, who works in a rather unusual industry—as a cobbler’s apprentice. As someone who knows basically nothing about the handcrafts industry, it was cool to talk to someone who is following such a unique path. Read on below:

What do you do for a living?

I’m a cobbler’s apprentice right now. Cobbling doesn’t have an educational requirement/school, so everyone tends to start as an apprentice.

What does a typical day on the job look like for you?

I am admittedly still learning and there is an insane amount of little things to memorize. Typically, I come in and am shadowing someone for the day, whether that is on the glueing side of the shop, or the finishing side. I often am helping someone work through their rack of shoes, and in down time, I am doing a lot of varied shop prep work. This has included stuff like cutting and glueing new rands for rock climbing shoes, cutting down large leather pieces into small leather heel pads, taking the stock order weekly, preparing halfsoles to be used for those day’s shoes, etc.

Something that I really love about the work is the variety and that I have yet to have one day that was the same as the one prior.

How did you decide to become a cobbler’s apprentice? How much longer do you have as an apprentice, and then what is the process like after that? How much do you make?

Last year, I was working in a handmade papermaking mill, doing mostly bookbinding type work, across the country from where I live currently (which is also where I grew up). I had a partner back home, I wasn’t feeling fulfilled at work, and I was just ready to leave town. I knew I wanted to keep working a workshop environment but I was hoping to keep away from heavy trades (like carpentry, welding, etc) because those don’t interest me much. I ended up cold calling a bunch of cobblers in the city I wanted to live in, and it worked out for me!

As it is, somedays I am given a few pairs to do repairs on. Right now, it’s mostly simple stuff, basic hand-sewing and glueing, sanding things down, etc. When I am fully trained, it will look pretty similar to what I do now, except more work and more complicated work. In the morning, I’ll be assigned a much bigger pile of shoes to work through, aha.

Right now, I make 12$CAD an hour (9$USD) but I’m told that gets raised pretty regularly, after training and assuming I’m still doing solid work.

I’m definitely the baby of the shop still, so it’s hard to say how long I will be apprenticing for! Probably six months to a year, if I had to estimate.

Very cool! I feel like not many people our age are in touch with this kind of smaller-scale craft work. Are you worried about the growth of your industry, or are you not planning to stay in it definitely?

I’ve had a pretty niche set of jobs and I really strive to stay connected to smaller crafts, because I think they are really valuable as an industry (even if it’s a small one). I’m definitely intending to stick with cobbling. In school, I actually studied papermaking but when I went to do it as a “career”, it just wasn’t for me. So it’s been really encouraging to find something with some familiar hand-skills, that I really love.

In regards to growth, I am not so worried. There has been a big push on online fashion communities, that appears to be trickling into the mainstream culture, that we should be buying buy-it-for-life and better quality products in general. Ideas like this are imperative to cobbling continuing to strive, so I am very grateful for a shift.

Was cobbling traditionally a male-dominated field, and how does it compare today? Do you see any gap in wages between men and women in your field, or any other areas where you think the conditions for women could improve? (I.e. Things like maternity leave?)

Cobblers themselves are mostly men, I’d say. It’s hard to say why exactly, other than it’s a blue collar industry. And realistically, it’s also one that isn’t very innovative or having changed much, so I sense it isn’t one that has really made a shift to encouraging women to get involved. As well, lots of people aren’t sure how to break into the industry. Our shop is about 20% women, which is pretty low compared to other industries.

Something that our shop does that I really appreciate is always having a cobbler on the front intake counter. This position rotates every shift and that person is also working on shoes in between customers. As a woman, this feels like it reinforces that we are not just cashiers or front-of-house people, but that we also are the ones doing the dirty work.

I would say that the majority of cobbling shops are one-man-stands, ran by slightly older gentlemen who have been doing it a really long time. It’s going to be really interesting to see how the industry evolves over the next 20 years.

I don’t see any wage gaps, but it may also be because the industry is so small and there are so few people really vying to get into it. Most people are hired as apprentices by a man in his one-man-stand, so there aren’t a lot of fellow female coworkers to compare wages with, unfortunately.

Tess is making a pair of shoes from scratch and documenting the process on tumblr. You can follow along here!

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Women at Work: Amy (Nonprofits/LGBTQ Task Force)

Editor’s Note: Today we continue with the second interview in our Women At Work series, which is focused on a diverse range of working women and their experiences. Amy’s interview provides a companion piece to our first interview, with her mother Eileen. If you haven’t read that piece, I highly recommend it!

Weekly Dance Break: Ain’t Your Mama (J. Lo)

Jenny From the Block takes on working women tropes and unequal divisions of labor, all while wearing a pair of ass-less chaps (no comment). Other gems? A serious purple power-suit, a nod to BumbleBFF, and a crowd of awakened women dancing in the streets. But seriously, about the oppressive men in this video—where did she even find those living Ken-dolls? 😂

 

Reel Women: Working Girl

Melanie Griffith changing into professional uniform as Tess in Working Girl (1988)

 

Welcome to our new series: Reel Women! Every month, we’ll offer a few films—classic, indie, campy, award-winning, forgotten, beloved, bad—that feature powerful, resolute, angry, conflicted, hilarious, shallow, deep women. This series stretches beyond the Strong Female Protagonist trope—our leads can’t kick ass in heels without smudging their lipstick. They don’t throw off pithy one-liners after they’ve pulverized the foolish men that Underestimated Them, and their strength doesn’t serve as justification for their presence in a male-driven movie. They’ve got bad hair and mean families and do stupid things in pursuit of guys that aren’t good for them. We’re here to celebrate the results—sometimes brilliant, sometimes cringe-worthy—when women are given the opportunity to carry a movie.

These films are best experienced with other women. So assemble your coven, and queue it up!

Megan Fox in Transformers, proving she’s hot and strong by fixing a car (!!)—what she lacks in midriff she makes up for in mechanical skill

First up to bat: Working Girl.

In many ways, Working Girl is the wicked step-daughter of 9 to 5. Produced only 8 years later, it seems already to be looking back with contempt at intra-office sisterhood. In less than a decade, the secretary’s fantasy transforms from righteous punishment of a boneheaded misogynist male boss to the strategic usurpation of the job and boyfriend of a Mean Girl female boss. In some ways, this represents a kind of progress—women can be bosses now as well as secretaries. At the close of the 70s, even after so much feminist agitation for workplace reform—over the course of a few decades, The Equal Pay Act  and Fair Labor Standards Act (1963), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964), Title IX (1972), and the Pregnancy Descrimination Act (1978) among others were instituted to address gender inequity—women were still relegated more or less to the role of secretary and subject to all sorts of violence and discrimination in the workplace. But by the end of the 80s the Working Girl, with her sneakers and shoulder pads, had become a powerful trope that suggested both women’s increasing professional power as well as the fear that their desire to “have it all” might undermine their femininity. As Harrison Ford’s character Jack says to Melanie Griffith’s Tess during their first encounter, “You’re the first woman I’ve seen at one of these things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.”

But in other ways, the rise of the Working Girl at the expense of the secretarial sisterhood signals a shift away from professional equality toward an ethos of individualist success that has no room for something like community. Where three women in 9 to 5 not only teach a much-needed lesson to an incompetent man but also successfully run a corporate department as a team, Working Girl represents the heights an ambitious woman may reach when she’s willing to leave other women behind.

Behold the sisterhood of Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda in 9 to 5 (1980)

There are moments in Working Girl of non-competitive female connection, but they are few and far between. Tess’ best friend Cynthia, played by the sparkling and wacky (and so much better than her brother, I don’t care what any of you say!) Joan Cusack, sticks by her side and throws down tough truth bombs when Tess’ ambitions seem to outpace reality. “Sometimes I sing and dance around in the house in my underwear,” she tells Tess, “Doesn’t make me Madonna. Never will.” But, for the most part, Cynthia is there to remind us with her Midwestern solidity and real talk that a girl with green eyeshadow and feathered hair will never make it in the world of double-breasted power suits.

The lesson of Working Girl is that sisterhood is best left to the secretaries.

Joan Cusack rocking that green eyeshadow as Cynthia in Working Girl (1988)

The film actually rehearses the language of female solidarity only to reveal it as stale and empty. The central female relationship between Tess and her manipulative boss Katherine, played by Sigourney Weaver, is one predicated on deep animosity and competition veiled—at least at first—by the rhetoric of sisterhood.

During their first meeting, Katharine lays out some “ground rules” which include a dress code authorized by Coco Chanel—“Dress shabbily,” Katharine declares while eyeing up Tess’ jewelry, “they notice the dress. Dress impeccably, they notice the woman. Coco Chanel.”—And an emphasis on teamwork. “I consider us a team. Tess. I want your input. I welcome good ideas and I like to see hard work rewarded….It’s a two-way street on my team.” But female teams in Working Girl don’t seem to work. Katharine steals Tess’ ideas and Tess steals Katharine’s clothes, house, job and boyfriend. It is the All About Eve of the yuppie generation, and like many things that don’t surprise me about the yuppie generation, this version celebrates Eve Harrington dethroning Margot Channing.

Rather than sisterhood, we’re offered male partners and mentors whom Tess can trust and run to when the women in her life get too catty. The business plot includes a fatherly corporate type who can see through Katharine’s machinations and finally gives Tess the credit (and the job) she deserves. This is a far cry from 9 to 5 in which both the bosses and the husbands are witless at best, and downright malevolent at worst. In Working Girl, there is only room for one woman in the corner office, and you can either be her or be her secretary.

Harrison Ford as the moderately charming but pretty forgettable love-interest/trophy is the least interesting part of this movie. He exists, on one hand, as the reward for Tess’ plucky go-get-‘em attitude, and on the other, as the heaterosexual object of desire that secures her femininity in the midst of her ambitious ladder-climbing. He might be the least suave rich investment executive in Manhattan in the late 80s. He mixes Scotch with Tequila, he has the smallest bed any bachelor living in a historic walkup has ever owned, and his closed-mouth kisses look deeply uncomfortable. His character is, in other words, the embodiment of what a pubescent boy thinks game looks like.

The most pitiful bed ever to grace a bachelor pad, Working Girl (1988)

Sigourney Weaver’s Katharine is, for me, the best thing about Working Girl. She is the Mean Girl par excellence, and in the version of this movie in my head, she is Christian Grey to Tess’ Anastasia Steele. She wears full-length mink coats, uses fainting as a business tactic, and proves just how milquetoast Harrison Ford is standing next to her.

Full cougar, even with a cast, Sigourney Weaver is perfection itself in Working Girl (1988)

Her scenes with Melanie Griffith sizzle because the chemistry born of female aggression, in the world of Working Girl, is so much more potent than the desire born of heterosexual love. This movie conjures up the very thing it attempts to discipline: a world in which female relationships—competitive, destructive, erotic—are more vital and compelling than the men offered to replace them.