How Tampa Changed American Women’s History
Nancy A. Hewitt
Rutgers University
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a generation of scholars was trained in the new field of women’s history. The generations before us—pioneers Anne Firor Scott, Gerda Lerner, and Natalie Zemon Davis, and those who followed immediately after, including Joan Scott, Louise Tilley, Barbara Welter, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Darlene Clark Hine—had to teach themselves the field. Oddly, perhaps, those who were self-taught ranged much more widely in their interests than those first trained in the field. Among American women’s historians, for example, the early generations offered path-breaking scholarship on white and black women, living in the North and the South, from the middle-class and the working-class, and active in domestic spheres and social movements from the seventeeth to the twentieth centuries. At least in American women’s history, however, work on white, middle-class northeastern women came to dominate the field by the early 1980s, as the cults of true womanhood and domesticity and female worlds of love and ritual gained intellectual currency. This was due largely to scholars like Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Nancy Cott, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Mary Ryan, and others who forged a powerful body of work on nineteenth-century women’s lives that shaped the generation of scholars coming of age in its wake.[1] Moreover, the concepts and frameworks they introduced, developed largely for the mid nineteenth century Northeast, were quickly carried into other times and places. For example, Suzanne Lebsock applied them to antebellum Petersburg, Virginia; Glenda Riley to the western frontier; and Estelle Freedman to turn-of-the-twentieth century social movements.[2]
Those of us who followed just behind this explosion of work in American women’s history sought both to expand upon and challenge some of its core assumptions. I received my PhD in 1981, and my dissertation and first book, Women’s Activism and Social Change, focused on three groups of white women activists in Rochester, New York, from the 1820s to the 1870s.[3] This project sought to demonstrate, first, that the cult of domesticity and true womanhood did not keep women confined to the private sphere, not even middle-class white women. Indeed, increasingly severe admonitions to domesticity developed alongside women’s growing public efforts. To make this argument, it seemed important to focus on white women of the middle class, since the notions of sisterhood and women’s culture that dominated the literature were purportedly built on their experiences. Challenges to these conceptualizations emerged in part from scholars whose experiences in antiwar and feminist movements made it seem unlikely that women of any era could agree on a common social or political agenda simply because they were women. Indeed, social movements, many of us argued, multiplied precisely because women, like men, differ fundamentally on goals, strategies, and priorities.[4]
The northeastern US in the antebellum era, roughly 1820-1860, served as the backdrop for much early work in American women’s history. With less overt distinctions by class than in later periods and with far less attention to race than in histories of the South, it was possible to make arguments for common bonds of womanhood. Yet differences of class, race, residency, and religious affiliation certainly existed, and they shaped women’s lives in profound ways. In Rochester, NY, for instance, three competing networks of women activists could be traced over several decades. While most of these women were broadly middle-class and almost all of them were white, they came from very different segments of that emerging class (the bottom rungs to its upper reaches); they embraced distinct religious traditions and values, from high Episcopal to evangelical to Quaker; they grew up in far flung communities before converging in Rochester; and they held conflicting views on critical issues like poverty, moral reform, race, and woman’s rights. An examination of these distinct and competing networks of women activists could challenge the dominant narrative in which women, relegated to the domestic sphere, bonded with each other and then moved together into the public sphere, first, to uplift the less fortunate and, later, to defend themselves against patriarchal victimization.
When Women’s Activism and Social Change and a companion article, “Beyond the Search for Sisterhood,” were published in the mid-1980s, they were part of a broader shift in the field of American women’s history.[5] Scholars, especially historians of African American, immigrant, and working-class women, argued with growing force that differences among women were at least as important as those between women and men in understanding the gender dynamics of American history.[6] My early work was intended to be part and parcel of that paradigmatic shift, yet within ten years, whatever cutting edge it initially had, had been blunted. Increasingly my work on Rochester was cited only in that first fat footnote on the bad old days of women’s history when scholars focused solely on the lives of white, middle-class northeastern women and a homogeneous women’s culture. That is, over time, Women’s Activism and Social Change was viewed as being of a piece with Barbara Welter, Nancy Cott, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and others whose fundamental assumptions it sought to challenge. Apparently it was impossible to work on white, northern middle-class women and difference simultaneously.
At least by the mid 1980s, to focus on difference meant in large part to focus on women whose race and class identities were outside the white middle class. Having moved to Tampa, Florida in 1981 to take a position at the University of South Florida (USF) History Department, I, too, turned my attention away from white middle-class women and focused instead on local Cuban, Italian and Spanish immigrants. Others were already mining the riches of Tampa’s past, pursuing projects on male cigar workers, Italian immigrant families, exiled Cuban rebels, African American civic leaders, and native-born white vigilantes. The women’s history angle was largely missing, however, and I leapt in to fill the gap, drawing on the work of colleagues and local history enthusiasts, on oral histories and other archives, and on the wealth of information in the journal Tampa Bay History.
This project on Tampa women’s history was both shaped by and contributed to larger changes in the field of American women’s history. First and foremost, paralleling the new interest in differences among women, distinctions of race, class and region shaped competing experiences of womanhood and women’s activism in Tampa. Largely ignored by women’s historians before the 1980s, the South in general and Florida in particular provided a seedbed for exactly the kinds of analyses now demanded. Located at the intersection of global movements of capital and labor and marked by the severe racial segregation that defined the post-Civil War South, Tampa served as a cauldron for a range of social and political movements that engaged native-born white, Cuban, Italian and Spanish immigrant, and African American women and men. By 1900, the city’s population was roughly one-third native-born white, one third native-born black, and one-third immigrant. Tied to Reconstruction, the Wars of 1898, progressive reform, woman suffrage, labor militancy, and a host of other critical events in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US history, the city offered a perfect place for studying differences among women.
Yet little scholarship focused on Florida women’s history and almost none on Tampa specifically. Nor was it clear that there were sources adequate to uncovering the lives and activities of Anglo, African American and Latin women in the city. The group that seemed most well documented was immigrant women, largely as a by-product of the incredible interest that the Latin community of Ybor City had generated among local historians—popular and academic. Ybor City was the center of South Florida’s booming cigar industry, and thus home to large numbers of Cuban, Spanish, and Italian immigrants, who collectively formed a Latin enclave in South Florida. My interviews with elderly Italian and Cuban women cigar workers were eased by the extensive oral histories already collected on their male counterparts. Memoirs of Ybor City residents, many published originally in Spanish, records of mutual aid societies, Spanish and English-language newspaper coverage of the ethnic enclaves, particularly of revolutionary clubs and strikes, and studies by resident expert Tony Pizzo, scholar Glenn Westfall, and MA student Joan Marie Steffey provided critical resources.[7] In addition, a number of faculty at USF and University of Florida were working on aspects of Tampa’s immigrant history, including Robert Ingalls on anti-radical violence, Gary Mormino and George Pozzetta on the Italian community, and Susan Greenbaum on Afro-Cubans.[8] At the same time, USF theatre professor Denis Calendra was writing a play, Cuban Bread, about the 1931 cigar strike, and independent scholar Doris Weatherford had launched a popular history of Tampa women for the local Athena Society.[9]
Not only did the history of immigrant women in Ybor City seem the most accessible, but it also fit well with the surge of interest in women’s labor and immigration history across the country. A book on Latin women workers and activists would complement studies that focused on immigrant women in New York City, Lawrence, Massachusetts, Chicago, and other northern cities.[10] A dozen interviews with women cigar workers, a night course in Spanish and research in Spanish-language newspapers and memoirs, immersion in English-language newspapers, city directories and city council records, and a trip to Cuban archives in 1986 illuminated a range of activities among Latin women. Revolutionary clubs in the 1890s, organized and spontaneous strikes in the early 1900s, temperance and missionary efforts in the Latin enclaves, and alternating currents of class solidarity and gender conflict in the cigar unions reflected a complex world of ethnic, labor and gender struggle rooted in the Cigar City of Tampa.
Nearly everyone who works on the Cigar City, or on the cigar industry in Key West, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Spain or elsewhere, becomes entranced with el lector, the reader. In most factories, however, the readers are all men so, initially, they seemed tangential to my study. Then in 1989, playwright Jose Yglesias and his sister Dalia Corro mentioned in an interview that a woman had once worked as a reader in Ybor City.[11] That woman turned out to be Luisa Capetillo—an anarcho-syndicalist Puerto Rican who wore men’s clothes and advocated vegetarianism, free love, and woman suffrage along with union organizing. She spent a little more than a year in Ybor City, but her presence loomed large there, and in the new women’s history being written in Puerto Rico, where she served as a kind of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Emma Goldman rolled into one. Capetillo added a new dimension to women’s history in Tampa by linking local developments to wider movements for women’s rights, working class rights, and social justice.[12]
Still, a project on Latin women in Ybor City might be too narrow or too late, or both. During the mid-to-late 1980s, a dozen studies of women workers, mostly immigrants, had been published, or were on the verge of being published. It seemed that every occupation imaginable was being scrutinized, from store clerks and waitresses to garment workers, cannery workers and domestic servants, and many of them were framed as community studies. Although women cigar makers did not yet have their champion, Patricia Cooper had published a wonderful study on male cigar workers and masculinity.[13] Could another book on a single occupation in a single community make much of an impact on the rapidly growing field of women’s immigrant and labor history?
The other area in which books and articles were proliferating was African American’s women’s history. Again community studies proliferated as did studies of specific occupations, churches, and social movements.[14] And certainly there was still plenty of work on middle-class white women, though much more of it now was set in the South or the West rather than the Northeast. In fact, one of the most popular topics was women’s activism in the Progressive era, that is the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period in which Ybor City’s women were most active.[15]
This compelling and voluminous literature suggested that another perspective on Tampa women’s history might be more valuable than a focus on Ybor City alone. Perhaps Women’s Activism and Social Change in Rochester could provide a model. An exploration of three competing networks of women activists in one city, this time differentiated by race, ethnicity and class, could expand the ways women’s historians thought about difference. Such a study would demonstrate not only the ways that race, ethnicity and class shaped each group of activists, but also how the interplay of race, ethnicity and class across groups shaped women’s activism in Tampa as a whole.
Fortunately, there was a growing body of work on native-born white and African American women in Florida and in Tampa, much of it written by graduate students at USF, University of Florida and Florida State University. There was growing interest as well in the interactions between African Americans and Latins, especially Afro-Cubans, and in the radical impulses that tied members of both groups to international networks of anarcho-syndicalists, socialists and communists.[16] This interest converged with explorations of borderlands by historians of the West and of globalization by American historians more generally.
Tampa was a borderland, between the United States mainland and the Caribbean basin, and it was marked by various global connections. Cuban exiles used South Florida as a launching pad for the Wars for Independence in the 1890s; Luisa Capetillo and other anarcho-syndicalist women traveled to Ybor City to join in revolutionary and union movements there; native-born white women missionaries and temperance advocates in Tampa took their message to Latin immigrants and to inhabitants of Cuba, Puerto Rico and other American territorial extensions; and African American radicals joined their Afro-Caribbean counterparts in the local branch of the United Negro Improvement Association.
It seemed that Tampa women could speak to nearly every issue, debate and framework that emerged in American women’s history in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps they spoke to too many. For despite all the calls for studies of race, class and gender, borderlands and globalization, Progressive reform and working–class radicalism, most studies, wisely, took on only one or two of these issues or focused on only one racial or ethnic group. Moreover, those that focused on interactions between ethnic and racial groups were framed almost wholly as confrontations between white, middle-class reformers or social workers and their immigrant or African American clients or victims. Much of this work was compelling, but it left one with the sense that African American, immigrant and poor women were incapable of organizing on their own behalf. At the same time, studies that focused on women of color celebrated the ingenuity and agency of their communities but often ignored conflicts within them and alliances with outsiders. One way to balance these competing claims for subordination and agency among diverse groups of women was to highlight internal community dynamics for white women and women of color as well as their interactions with each other across time. The history of Tampa allowed this kind of analysis, indeed begged for it. The existence of three distinct, though overlapping, communities would assure that no easy dichotomies, no bifurcated categories, could dominate the analysis.
In alternately responding to and anticipating shifts in the field of American women’s history, I spent far longer researching and writing the study of Latin, African American and white women’s activism in Tampa than I had ever imagined. However, the long gestation period for the project turned out to be a blessing. By the time the book Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s appeared in 2001, American historians and especially women’s historians were eager to think about their work in more global contexts; studies of African American women were giving way to studies of women of color; there was increasing interest in ethnic differences among Blacks; and migrations and diasporas—of people and ideas—were suddenly hot. In addition, the history of Tampa touched just enough major events and developments in US history, from Jim Crow to the Wars of 1898 to woman suffrage, that more traditional scholars who felt compelled to engage race, class and gender could find comfortable hooks in Southern Discomfort. But perhaps most importantly the idea of placing three different racial/ethnic groups in conversation with each other worked to challenge received wisdom about each of the groups individually and about how women of different racial and class backgrounds interact.
To give just one example, the discussion of woman suffrage in Southern Discomfort highlights the particular meanings that the vote had for native-born white women, African American women and Latin working-class women.[17] The first two groups wielded the ballot in the 1920 elections, and the large number of white and African Americans who did so suggest that notions of faint-hearted southern white women and disfranchised southern black women need to be reconsidered. Despite their shared interest in voting, however, it appears that white and African American women generally supported opposing sides in the contest over at-large versus ward-based elections. Moreover, soon after the fall election, without significant protest from white suffrage leaders, Florida’s state legislators closed the loopholes that allowed black women to vote and disfranchised them alongside the state’s black men. Clearly there was no unified women’s political bloc in Tampa.
At the same time, most Latin women, even those who were citizens, chose not to vote in local elections in 1920, but they did wield ballots in what they considered a more important site—the union hall─where they supported an industry wide strike that fall. The strike, as much as the elections, shaped Tampa’s economic and political landscape that year. The debates over unionization and woman suffrage also had a global dimension. In the 1910s, Luisa Capetillo advocated both; other anarcho-syndicalists dismissed woman suffrage as useless given the repressive political regimes in the city and state; while some native-born white suffragists traveled to Cuba and Puerto Rico to promote democratic principles there, though within limits of course. In both cases, middle-class white women from the US joined middle-class Puerto Rican and Cuban women to advocate suffrage for educated women only.
Shortly after Southern Discomfort appeared, the stories of Tampa women began to find their way into American women’s history more generally. Editors of guides to women’s history began to incorporate Tampa into larger narratives of women’s labor, immigration and activism. Thus, I was asked to write the essay on Progressive reform for a guide that highlighted race, class and gender as critical components of women’s experiences. Women’s history encyclopedias, too, began including entries on women cigar workers and individual Tampa activists, like Blanche Armwood Beatty and Luisa Capetillo.
A number of scholars seem to have “discovered” Capetillo about the same time, and a mini-industry has developed in articles, dissertations, MA theses, and documentaries about her life.[18] I authored one article on her for Latina Legacies, an edited collection by Vicki Ruiz and Virginia Sanchez Korrol that highlights the lives of sixteen Latino and Chicano women in the United States. An encyclopedia on Latinas, to appear in fall 2005, not only includes articles on Capetillo but also on cigar workers Dolores Patino Rio and on Latin women’s involvement in cigar unions and strikes in South Florida.
Not only have individual characters in the Tampa story been incorporated into American women’s history, but the larger framework of comparative women’s history has been embraced as well. Scholars of Latina/Chicana, African American, Asian American, and Native American women have begun to work together, across the disciplines, to explore common and distinct experiences among women of color. An interdisciplinary three-year project on Representations and Realities of Women of Color and Work was organized by scholars at University of Maryland and funded by the Ford Foundation. This project will include an article on African American and Latin women’s activism in Tampa during the 1930s. The Women of Color project also hosted a week-long conference in August 2004 at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, where U.S. scholars met with their counterparts from Africa, England and the Caribbean. The developments traced in Southern Discomfort resonated with the work of many of the historians in the group, opening a new audience for work on Tampa women.
Perhaps most importantly, Southern Discomfort is part of a whole series of wonderful studies on Tampa and on Florida more generally, published over the past two decades. Together, these books and articles illuminate a wide range of histories and engage a variety of scholarly debates, including those related to women and gender. It appears that Tampa and Florida will finally get their due among American historians.
At the same time, for American women’s historians, the model of multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-class analyses of women’s lives seems to be, slowly, catching on. Graduate students and young scholars are particularly excited about viewing race and class as more than dichotomous categories—black and white, rich and poor. In 2004, two young historians, Alison Parker and Stephanie Cole, co-edited a volume entitled Beyond Black and White, which brought together a number of articles on multi-racial communities in the South and Southwest, including three focused on women. In colonial American women’s history, some of the best recent work, by Kathleen Brown, Kirsten Fischer, Juliana Barr, and Gwenn Miller, explores relations among various Native American, African American, and/or European peoples.[19] And the forthcoming collection to be published by the Women of Color and Work Project noted above will highlight multi-racial and multi-ethnic relations in several sites, including Tampa.
Finally, the history of Tampa has dramatically transformed the way I see American women’s history—both as a scholar and a teacher. The perspectives I gained from Tampa regarding globalization, hemispheric connections and conflicts, and the complex interplay of race, ethnicity, class and gender have forced me to think anew about more traditional areas of women’s history, like the emergence of woman’s rights and the battle for suffrage. Pieces of evidence that seemed incongruous before suddenly loom large. For instance, in the same edition of Frederick Douglass’ North Star that announced the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention, there was also an announcement about an Emancipation Day celebration. Twenty years ago, I found that pairing hard to interpret. Now it appears as a window into a whole new way of viewing woman’s rights and suffrage in America.
Indeed several scholars are now rereading abolitionist newspapers, reconsidering correspondence among woman’s rights advocates in the US and elsewhere, and studying debates over property rights and suffrage among African American, Native American, Irish and German immigrant, and Mexican American as well as native-born white women.[20] It is clear that there were many discussions of woman’s rights—among working girls in New York City, farm women in upstate New York, fugitive slaves throughout their travels, religious and secular radicals in Europe and the US, Mexicans coming under the jurisdiction of US laws, Iroquois and other Indian groups being assimilated into Euro-American ways. Many of them began before the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848 and continued long afterward. Moreover, it is now clear that even when we focus on 1848, we need to set debates over women’s roles and rights in the context of larger controversies set off by the 1848 revolutions in Europe, the emancipation of slaves in the French West Indies, the Mexican-American War, the massive wave of Irish immigration, the smaller groups of German, Hungarian and other exiles, and the debates among the Iroquois and other Indian groups over written constitutions and patriarchal systems of property and political rights.
The issues raised in the 1840s would reverberate through the suffrage campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, illuminating the complex racial dynamics of “woman” suffrage. For instance, every legislature that passed woman suffrage at the state level before 1920─whether in the supposedly progressive West or the reactionary South─restricted voting rights by race. In the West, it was generally Mexican American, Native American, and Asian American women who were disfranchised rather than African Americans, but the effect was the same. And when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, granting women suffrage at the Federal level, women of color continued to be disfranchised for years to come. After African American women voted in southern towns and cities in 1920, legislatures closed the loopholes that allowed this aberration. Many Mexican American, Native American, and Asian American women never even gained this one-time opportunity from the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Puerto Rican women, too, were excluded from the ballot into the 1930s, despite being a US protectorate since 1898.
It is clear in rereading newspapers and correspondence and the minutes of meetings and conventions that participants in the Emancipation Day Celebration in Rochester, New York on 1 August, 1848, and the Rochester Woman’s Rights Convention on 2 August viewed their efforts in the context of more global and hemispheric developments. And when the counter-revolutions set in across Europe, women radicals worried that this might mark a general defeat for their visions of class, racial and gender justice. Although these women could have predicted the complicated path of suffrage victories and defeats, few historians were as insightful about the racial and class divisions within suffrage ranks until recently. For me, the revelations occurred directly as a result of immersing myself in the study of Tampa.
Clearly other scholars studying Florida are having the same experience. Historians of women and slavery, Jim Crow, immigration, unionization, the New Deal, socialism and communism, civil rights, second wave feminism, sexuality, and numerous other topics are mining the Florida archives like never before. They will change History, or at least our understandings of it.
[1]Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1(1975),1-29; Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); and Mary P. Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1780-1865 (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
[2]See Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (NY: Norton, 1984); Glenda Riley, Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825-1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984); Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930,” Feminist Studies 5(1979), 512-29.
[3]Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984; reprint Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
[4]On the links I saw between politics and scholarship, see Nancy A. Hewitt, “The Emma Thread: Communitarian Values, Global Visions,” in Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds., Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, the Political, the Professional (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 234-247.
[5]Nancy A. Hewitt, “Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women’s History in the 1980s,” Social History 10 (1985), 299-321.
[6]See, for instance, Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1978); Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzuldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983); Barbara Smith, ed., Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology (NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983); Dolores Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender and Class in a New South Community (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke,” Signs 14(1989), 610-33; and Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), to name just a few of the central works that influenced me.
[7]Tony Pizzo wrote a number of books on Tampa and Ybor City history and collected massive amounts of primary material, now archived at the Special Collections Department at USF Library, Tampa, Florida. See especially, Anthony Pizzo, Tampa Town, 1824-86: The Cracker Village with a Latin Accent (Tampa: Trend House, 1968). See also, L. Glenn Westfall, “Don Vicente Martinez Ybor, The Man and His Empire: Development of the Clear Havana Cigar Industry in Cuba and Florida in the Nineteenth Century” (Dissertation, University of Florida, 1977); and Joan Marie Steffey, “The Cuban Immigrants of Tampa, Florida, 1886-1898” (MA Thesis, University of South Florida, 1975). In addition, numerous articles in Tampa Bay History, established in 1979 by USF historians Steven Lawson, Robert P. Ingalls, and Gary Mormino, proved valuable as I began my research.
[8]See, for instance, Robert P. Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa, 1882-1936 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988); Gary Mormino and George Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885-1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Susan Greenbaum, Afro-Cubans in Ybor City: A Centennial History (Tampa: Tampa Printing Co., 1986).
[9]Cuban Bread was written and staged by Denis Calandra in 1991 and in 2005 was revised and restaged. Doris Weatherford published A History of Women in Tampa for the local Athena Society in 1991, which provided the first overview of women’s lives in the Tampa area from its early settlement into the late twentieth century.
[10]I began my work as other scholars were completing studies on immigrants in other, mostly northern, cities. These included Judith E. Smith, Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985); Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1985); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives; Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage-earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
[11]Interview with Jose Yglesias and Dalia Corro, by Nancy A. Hewitt, 19 December, 1989, Tampa, Florida.
[12]My early knowledge of Luisa Capetillo came from Yamile Azize, La mujer en la lucha (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cultural, 1985).
[13]On immigrant women, see note 10 above. On women workers, see, for example, Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nissei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives; Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl; Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Miriam Cohen, Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration (NY: Kodansha International, 1996); and Patricia Cooper, Once A Cigar Maker: Men, Women and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
[14]Among many examples, see, Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (NY: Basic Books, 1985); Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness”; Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolinam, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Tera Hunter, “To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
[15]See, for example, Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg; Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women’s West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Authority in American West, 1874-1939 (NY: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, eds., Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) for just a sampling of a huge literature.
[16]The literature on Afro-Cubans and African Americans was especially important to my work on Tampa. See, for example, Lisa Brock and Digna Casteneda, eds., Races and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (NY: Verso, 1998); Aline Helg, The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Susan D. Greenbaum, More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).
[17]Nancy A. Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 234-247.
[18]See references to this work in Nancy A. Hewitt, “Luisa Capetillo: Feminist of the Working Class,” in Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sanchez-Korrol, eds., Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community (NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), 120-34.
[19]Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker, eds., Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2004); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Juliana Barr, “The ‘Seductions’ of Texas: The Political Language of Gender in the Conquests of Texas, 1609-1803” (Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1999); and Gwenn Miller, “Contact and Conquest in Colonial North America,” in Nancy A. Hewitt, ed., A Companion to American Women’s History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 35-48.
[20]See, for example, Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Louise M. Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (NY: Oxford University Press, 1999); Bonnie Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860 (NY: Oxford University Press, 2000); Lori Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Nancy A. Hewitt, “’Seeking a Larger Liberty’: Remapping First Wave Feminism,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, eds., Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).