Stitching department — Vigevano shoe factory

In Vigevano's 1930s shoe district the orlatura — the stitching of shoe uppers — was an almost entirely female department: most of the sector's 12,000 women workers were employed here or in the home-piecework attached to the factory.

In 1951 the average female industrial wage in Italy was 60-65% of the male wage, a gap explicitly written into collective contracts until 1960. Vigevano's stitchers fell entirely on this lower rung.

The standard model of Italian factories had entirely female departments on repetitive machines (stitching, assembly, finishing) supervised by male foremen: gender hierarchy was reproduced by the very architecture of work.

Between December 1943 and February 1944 short strikes in Vigevano's shoe factories drew in around 1,500 workers, men and women: the shoe district was one of the first in Lombardy to answer the Republic of Salò in the language of labour.