Introduction
Through the eight papers of this series, women have appeared again and again at the load-bearing points of Tampa’s history—the Tocobaga women whose shellfish harvest built the middens, the frontier wives who ran the farms while the men went to war, the cigar workers’ wives who kept the boardinghouses and pooled the family earnings, the women at the factory bench. In each case they were noted and then, of necessity, set aside so the paper could pursue its main subject. This paper brings them to the center. It argues that the women of Tampa, across every ethnic and racial line, were not auxiliaries to the city’s history but among its principal makers—as wage-earners whose labor was essential to family survival, as organizers and reformers who shaped the community’s public life, and above all as the builders and sustainers of the voluntary institutions that this series has identified as the true engines of working-class security and advancement.
The historiography makes this recovery possible. For a long time the history of Tampa, like most labor and immigrant history, was written as though its actors were men—the cigar makers, the union leaders, the manufacturers, the politicians. Nancy Hewitt’s Southern Discomfort and related scholarship transformed this picture, demonstrating that women of every community in Tampa were active, organized, and consequential, and that the standard male-centered narrative had rendered invisible a great part of the work and activism that actually held the city together (Hewitt, 2001). This paper builds on that recovery, drawing the women of the preceding papers into a single account of their labor, their organizing, and their institution-building.
The interpretive frame carries forward the series’ central argument and gives it, in some ways, its strongest form. If the great theme of this history is that ordinary people advanced through their own labor and their own voluntary institutions rather than through the state or through dramatic confrontation, then women are that theme’s clearest illustration. The household that pooled its earnings and climbed the ladder up was managed by women. The mutual-aid societies that provided cradle-to-grave security were sustained in large part by women’s labor and women’s networks. The churches that formed the backbone of Black Tampa were filled and often effectively run by women. The daily work of keeping families and communities alive—the work least recorded and most essential—was overwhelmingly women’s work. To write the history of Tampa from below is, in very large measure, to write the history of its women, and this paper makes that explicit.
Women at the Bench: The Cigar Workers
The most visible form of women’s paid labor in Tampa was in the cigar factories, and correcting the record here is where this paper must begin, because older accounts systematically understated it. Women worked in the cigar industry from early on and in growing numbers, and their labor was not marginal but integral to the trade (Hewitt, 2001; Cooper, 1987). They worked as strippers preparing the tobacco, as bunchers and rollers making the cigars, as banders and packers finishing them. The stripping and preparation of tobacco was heavily and sometimes predominantly women’s work; but women also sat at the bench rolling cigars alongside men, doing the skilled craft labor that was the heart of the industry.
The significance of this paid labor for the family economy cannot be overstated, and it ties directly to the “ladder up” of Paper 5. A cigar worker’s family that included earning women had substantially more income than one that did not, and that additional income was often the margin that made saving, homeownership, and small enterprise possible (Hewitt, 2001; Mormino & Pozzetta, 1998). The woman’s wage was not supplementary pin money; it was a central pillar of the family’s economic strategy and a central means of its advancement. When this series argues that immigrant families climbed the ladder through their own combined labor and thrift, the woman’s earnings at the bench are a large part of what made the climb possible. Recognizing women as earners in their own right is thus not a mere addition to the story of the ladder up; it is a correction that shows how the ladder was actually climbed.
Women’s presence in the factories also shaped the labor conflicts examined in Paper 7. Women cigar workers participated in the strikes, joined the unions, walked the picket lines, and shared in both the militancy and its costs (Hewitt, 2001). The strikes bound women workers as they bound men, and women bore the resulting hardship—lost wages, hunger, the strain on families—along with, and often more heavily than, the men, since the management of a household through a months-long strike fell to them. The reconsideration of the strikes’ costs offered in Paper 7 applies with particular force to women, who paid those costs twice over: as earners who lost wages and as household managers who had to make a striking family survive on nothing.
Women’s Work Beyond the Bench
Cigar work was the most visible women’s labor but far from the only kind, and a full account of women as wage-earners must range wider. Across Tampa’s communities women worked in a great variety of paid and income-producing occupations, much of it uncounted in the formal record because it was informal, home-based, or classified as mere domestic activity (Hewitt, 2001).
The boardinghouse, described in Paper 5, was frequently a woman’s enterprise, and it was real economic activity: a wife taking in boarders ran a business, managing lodging, meals, and accounts, and producing income that could accumulate into savings and capital (Mormino & Pozzetta, 1998). Women ran small shops, groceries, and cafés, often as family enterprises in which the woman’s labor was central. They took in laundry and sewing, kept gardens and animals that fed the family and supplied small sales, and performed the countless forms of home-based income work that sustained working households. Among Black Tampans, women worked heavily as domestics in white households—among the few paid occupations open to them under Jim Crow—as well as in the businesses and institutions of Central Avenue and The Scrub (Howard & Howard, 1994).
This wider world of women’s work matters for the series’ argument because so much of it was entrepreneurial and self-directed—the boardinghouse, the shop, the home enterprise—and because it fed directly into the family strategies of saving, property, and advancement that this history places at its center. The woman who ran a boardinghouse or a small store was climbing the ladder up as surely as the man at the bench, and often she was the one whose enterprise moved the family upward. And the vast unpaid domestic labor that underlay all of this—the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and care that made every household function—was the indispensable foundation on which the entire economy of the community rested, a foundation laid, day after uncounted day, by women.
Women and the Mutual-Aid Societies
The mutual-aid societies of Paper 6 were the crowning achievement of Tampa’s immigrant working class, and women were essential to them in ways the formal records, focused on the male officers and members, tend to obscure. This paper insists on women’s central role in the institutions that were the series’ strongest evidence for the power of voluntary cooperation.
Women participated in and sustained the mutual-aid societies through their own labor, their own auxiliary organizations, and their own networks (Hewitt, 2001; Greenbaum, 2002). They organized the social and cultural life that filled the great clubhouses—the dances, dinners, performances, and celebrations that made the societies centers of community life and not merely benefit funds. They ran fundraising and mutual-support activities that undergirded the societies’ finances and their charitable work. Through women’s auxiliaries and committees, they extended the societies’ care to the sick, the bereaved, and the needy, doing much of the actual work of mutual aid—the visiting, the nursing, the provisioning—that gave the societies’ benefits their human substance. The society might pay a sick benefit from its fund, but it was often women who actually cared for the sick member and his family.
This matters greatly for the series’ argument, because it shows that the voluntary institutions that provided working-class security depended heavily on women’s labor and women’s networks. The mutual-aid society was not simply a male fraternal fund; it was a community institution sustained by the whole community, and the sustaining work—the care, the culture, the social fabric—was disproportionately women’s. When this series holds up the mutual-aid societies as evidence that people can provide for themselves through voluntary cooperation, it should be understood that a great part of that voluntary cooperation was women’s cooperation, and that the societies’ success rested substantially on women’s often unrecorded labor. The strongest evidence for the series’ central thesis is, on close inspection, evidence of women’s work.
Women and the Churches: The Backbone Within the Backbone
If the Black church was the backbone of Black Tampa, as Paper 8 argued, then women were the backbone within that backbone, and the same held across the religious institutions of every community. This paper gives that reality its due.
In the Black churches of The Scrub and Central Avenue, women were the majority of the membership and the mainstay of the church’s work (Howard & Howard, 1994; Hewitt, 2001). They filled the pews, sustained the congregations, and did much of the labor that made the churches the community institutions they were—organizing the mutual aid, running the auxiliary societies, supporting the schools, caring for the needy, and holding together the social fabric that the church anchored. The church’s many functions beyond worship—the education, the mutual aid, the community organization that Paper 8 credited as the backbone of Black Tampa—depended heavily on the labor of its women. The men might hold the formal offices of pastor and deacon, but the ongoing work of the church as a community institution was carried in large part by women.
The pattern extended to the religious and benevolent life of the other communities as well. Among the immigrant communities and the native white community alike, women were central to the religious institutions and to the charitable and benevolent work associated with them (Hewitt, 2001). Across Tampa, in every community, the institutions of faith and mutual care that this series has identified as central to community survival were sustained in great measure by the labor of women. This is the same finding as with the mutual-aid societies, and it points the same way: the voluntary institutions that provided what the state and the market did not were, to a degree the male-centered records hide, women’s institutions, built and sustained by women’s work.
Women as Organizers and Reformers
Beyond their labor and their institution-building, the women of Tampa were active organizers and reformers who shaped the city’s public life, and Hewitt’s central contribution was to recover the full range of this activism across the city’s divided communities (Hewitt, 2001). This paper follows that recovery.
Women across Tampa’s communities organized for a wide array of purposes. Immigrant women organized within and alongside the labor movement and the mutual-aid societies. Native-born white women organized through clubs, churches, and reform associations for civic improvement, charity, temperance, suffrage, and social welfare. Black women organized through their churches and clubs for the survival and advancement of their community, for education, and for mutual aid, carrying on this work under the added weight of Jim Crow (Hewitt, 2001; Howard & Howard, 1994). Across these lines, women were the organizers of much of Tampa’s associational and reform life.
Hewitt’s crucial insight, which this paper adopts, is that these women’s activisms were shaped by the sharp divisions of race, ethnicity, and class that ran through Tampa, and that the women of different communities did not simply form one sisterhood but pursued differing and sometimes conflicting agendas rooted in their differing situations (Hewitt, 2001). This is consistent with the series’ anti-romance discipline: just as there was no seamless working-class solidarity and no seamless Latin racial harmony, there was no seamless sisterhood. The women of Tampa organized as members of their particular communities, and their activisms reflected the interests and divisions of those communities. The reform impulses of comfortable native-born white women were not the same as the survival organizing of Black women under Jim Crow or the labor militancy of immigrant cigar workers, and honesty requires seeing these as distinct and sometimes opposed rather than merging them into a single women’s movement.
This diversity of women’s organizing also bears on the series’ skepticism toward certain kinds of top-down reform. Some of the women’s activism of the era, particularly among the native-born white reformers, ran toward the Progressive-era faith in organized benevolence and, eventually, state action to solve social problems (Hewitt, 2001). This series has raised questions elsewhere about whether the expansion of organized and state provision displaced the voluntary self-help institutions that had served working people well. The women’s reform movements are part of that larger story, and a full account would ask, here as elsewhere, whether the professionalized and state-directed benevolence that some reformers championed served working people better than the voluntary mutual aid that working women themselves sustained through their societies and churches. The paper raises this question in keeping with the series’ method, without forcing a single answer, and notes that working-class women’s own institutions of mutual aid have a strong claim to have served their communities at least as well as the reform programs directed at them from above.
The Double and Triple Burden
A fair account must register the weight that women’s central role placed upon them, because the recovery of women as makers of history should not sentimentalize the cost. The women of Tampa carried a double burden of paid labor and unpaid domestic labor, and for many the burden was heavier still (Hewitt, 2001; Mormino & Pozzetta, 1998).
A cigar worker’s wife might roll cigars at the bench all day and then return home to cook, clean, and care for children and often boarders as well. The woman running a boardinghouse labored from before dawn to after dark at the endless work of feeding and housing her lodgers on top of her own family’s needs. The Black domestic worker labored in a white household by day and sustained her own family and church by night. Layered onto the paid and domestic labor was the community and institutional work—the mutual-aid society, the church, the organizing—that this paper has credited. Women did all of this, and they did it while bearing and raising the children who were the community’s future. The load was immense, and it fell disproportionately on women across every community.
For Black women the burden was triple, compounded by the oppression of Jim Crow that Paper 8 described. A Black woman in Tampa carried the labor of her own household and community, the paid labor by which she earned, and the additional weight of a racial caste system that denied her the protections and opportunities extended to others and exposed her to particular dangers and indignities (Howard & Howard, 1994; Hewitt, 2001). That Black women sustained their families, their churches, and their community’s institutions under that triple burden is among the most remarkable achievements in this whole history, and it should be honored as such, without any softening of the injustice that made the burden so heavy.
Registering this weight is part of the fairness this series practices. To credit women as central makers of Tampa’s history is right, but it must be done with full acknowledgment of what that centrality cost them. Their institution-building and their community-sustaining labor were achievements wrung from lives of relentless work, and the honor owed to the achievement includes honest recognition of the burden.
Conclusion
The women of Tampa were among the principal makers of its history, and this paper has brought them from the margins of the preceding papers to the center they deserve. They were wage-earners whose labor at the cigar bench and in a hundred other occupations was essential to family survival and central to the ladder up that lifted working families. They were entrepreneurs who ran the boardinghouses, shops, and home enterprises that moved households upward. They were the sustainers of the mutual-aid societies and the churches—the voluntary institutions that this series has identified as the true engines of working-class security—doing much of the care, the culture, and the community labor on which those institutions depended. They were organizers and reformers who shaped the city’s public life, across lines of race, ethnicity, and class that divided their activism as they divided everything else in Tampa. And they carried this vast contribution under a double and, for Black women, triple burden of paid, domestic, and community labor that makes the achievement more remarkable still. To write Tampa’s history from below is, in the largest part, to write the history of these women’s work, and the series’ central argument—that people advance through their own labor and their own voluntary institutions—finds in the women of Tampa its clearest and strongest confirmation. Paper 10 turns to the collapse that would test all of this: the long decline of the cigar industry, the Depression, and the transformations of war that reshaped the working world these women and men had built.
Notes
- Nancy Hewitt’s Southern Discomfort is the indispensable foundation for this entire paper and should be engaged directly and thoroughly in drafting. Its central findings—that women of every Tampa community were active and consequential, and that their activism was divided along lines of race, ethnicity, and class rather than united in a single sisterhood—shape the paper’s structure and its anti-romance argument about the absence of seamless sisterhood.
- The correction of the record on women’s cigar-factory labor is important and should be documented with specifics (occupational breakdowns, the prevalence of women in stripping and rolling, wage data) rather than asserted. Older accounts understated women’s paid labor; Hewitt and Cooper are the correctives. The tie to the “ladder up” of Paper 5—women’s wages as the margin enabling saving and advancement—is a key argumentative move and should be grounded in the family-economy evidence.
- The paper’s strongest contribution to the series’ overall thesis is the demonstration that the voluntary institutions (mutual-aid societies, churches) that the series holds up as evidence for voluntary cooperation depended heavily on women’s often-unrecorded labor. This should be drawn out clearly: the strongest evidence for the central thesis is, on inspection, evidence of women’s work. Drafting should find the concrete detail (women’s auxiliaries, the care work, the social and fundraising labor) to support this, as the formal society records focus on male officers and will require reading against the grain.
- The treatment of women reformers and the “state provision vs. voluntary mutual aid” question (in the organizing section) applies the series’ skepticism toward top-down reform, but carefully and without forcing an answer. The point is to place Progressive-era women’s reform within the series’ larger question about whether state-directed benevolence displaced working people’s own voluntary institutions, while crediting working-class women’s own mutual aid. This should not tip into blanket hostility toward women reformers, whose work included genuine goods; the skeptical-but-fair balance applies.
- The “double and triple burden” section is essential to the paper’s fairness and should not be trimmed. Crediting women’s centrality without registering its cost would sentimentalize; the burden, and especially the compounded burden on Black women under Jim Crow, must be stated plainly. This connects back to Paper 8’s insistence on holding achievement and oppression together.
- The paper deliberately spans all communities (immigrant, native white, Black) rather than treating only the cigar-city women, following Hewitt’s comparative approach. Drafting should maintain this breadth and resist collapsing into an Ybor City-only account, since the comparative frame is what reveals the divisions among women’s activisms.
- Sources on Black women specifically are thinner in the general literature and will require drawing on the local Black-history sources (Howard and Howard) and reading the church and club records. The drafting stage should seek out this material actively, as the triple-burden argument depends on it and the recovery is least advanced here.
References
Cooper, P. A. (1987). Once a cigar maker: Men, women, and work culture in American cigar factories, 1900–1919. University of Illinois Press.
Greenbaum, S. D. (2002). More than black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa. University Press of Florida.
Hewitt, N. A. (2001). Southern discomfort: Women’s activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s. University of Illinois Press.
Hewitt, N. A. (1990). “The voice of virile labor”: Labor militancy, community solidarity, and gender identity among Tampa’s Latin workers, 1880–1921. In A. Baron (Ed.), Work engendered: Toward a new history of American labor (pp. 142–167). Cornell University Press.
Howard, W. T., & Howard, V. M. (1994). Family, religion, and education: A profile of African-American life in Tampa, Florida, 1900–1930. The Journal of Negro History, 79(1), 1–17.
Mormino, G. R., & Pozzetta, G. E. (1998). The immigrant world of Ybor City: Italians and their Latin neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985. University Press of Florida.
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