Women were the main workforce before 1840. However, by 1880 men took most of the skilled positions previously held by women due to the massive migration of Jewish men from Poland and Russia. Many of them were tailors that adapted to machine production. German and Central European immigrants to America around the mid-19th century arrived on the scene with relevant business experience and skills just as garment production was passing from a proto-industrial phase to a more advanced stage of manufacture. In the early twentieth-century a largely Eastern European immigrant workforce powered the garment trades. Russian jews recruited workers from their hometowns and broke the production into tasks able to do by less-skilled workers. Writing in 1917, Abraham Cahan credited these immigrants with the creation of American style: