Speaking out Southern women activists of the late 19th century Archived article from Mar 1, 2002 By Amy Vames   Nancy Hewitt never expected to find outspoken activists in a beauty salon in turn-of-the-century Tampa. But in researching her new book, "Southern Discomfort: Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s" (University of Illinois Press), Hewitt, a professor of history on the New Brunswick campus, discovered some surprising forces for change in that Southern city. The black women hairdressers Hewitt describes in her book are just one of the pieces in what she calls a "kaleidoscope" of women's activism in Tampa at the turn of the 20th century. Hewitt had originally planned to focus on immigrant women from Cuba, Italy and the Caribbean who worked in Tampa's booming tobacco industry in the late 1800s. But it became clear that these women's experiences could not be studied without also looking at the experiences of their white and African-American peers in the city. Nancy Hewitt studied the social and political roles played by such Cuban women's groups as Las Discipulas de Marti. "They were all competing for a voice in the public sphere, both with the men of their own ethnicity or class and with women in those other groups," Hewitt notes. "Southern Discomfort" looks at activists from all three of these groups and the impact they had on the burgeoning city. Although it had been largely rural until the 1880s, Tampa had become a truly multi-racial and multicultural city by the end of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the city was still subject to the rigid Jim Crow laws that since the late 1800s had mandated segregation. Women, as a result, often found their ability to work together constrained by racial divides. For instance, the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century certainly galvanized Latin women to become politically active, but "it also pulled black and white women into the conflict, either supporting the troops stationed in Tampa or questioning whether we should be fighting against Spanish tyranny in Cuba when blacks in the United States were under a kind of white supremacist tyranny," says Hewitt. And while native-born white women were able to volunteer their help to both the immigrant community and U.S. troops stationed in Tampa, black women could provide meals, entertainment and church services only for the black soldiers. Economic and class divisions among the communities also played a role in women's activism. Hewitt was particularly fascinated by three hairdressers in Tampa whose successful business serving a black clientele allowed them to become leaders in black women's organizations. "They could make demands on the white community and not fear for their jobs or wages," Hewitt says. These beauticians not only advocated distinctive fashions, hair care and cosmetics for their black clients, but they channeled their profits to fund efforts toward racial advancement. Immigrant women's activism centered primarily on labor issues in the tobacco industry. Hewitt opens "Southern Discomfort" with a description of Luisa Capetillo, a labor organizer and "reader" in the tobacco factories. Readers were chosen and paid by the tobacco workers to read aloud newspapers, pamphlets, books and announcements as the workers made cigars. Those readings were targeted to the interests of the listeners, who "heard the latest news on labor strife and anticolonial rebellion around the world, (and) learned of current debates among radical intellectuals on the best ways to organize such struggles," writes Hewitt. Capetillo, an anarchist, was the only woman reader Hewitt came across in her research. "She captures the outer limits of the possibilities of women's activism," says Hewitt. "She created an activist career that paid her." Her middle-class white counterparts relied on their husbands' prosperity to support their activities, while African-American and immigrant women activists had to somehow juggle jobs and volunteer efforts. Hewitt's book is filled with stories about trailblazers like Capetillo and the black hairdressers, women who embody the notion that activism can come in many different forms. Hewitt says she wanted to study not only women who were involved in traditional, mainstream groups, such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union or the National Association of Colored Women, but also women who took part in short-lived or grassroots efforts. In doing her research, Hewitt was particularly impressed with the immigrant women's commitment to working women all over the world. "Most of them didn't go to school beyond the fifth grade, but they were as concerned about women in other parts of the world as we are today," she notes. "They saw their rights as workers tied to what happened to workers in Cuba, Mexico, Spain, Argentina or Italy. I think we can learn a lot from these working-class women who dealt with issues of imperialism and the global economy in the late- 19th and early 20th centuries, but who weren't coming from a position of power, at least not as we traditionally think of power." Although many of Tampa's women activists thought globally, they also acted locally. For instance, both black and white women worked for woman suffrage in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Before they gained that right in 1920, women of all ethnicities and classes had to use what little political power they had to help improve their communities. Many women activists, particularly those in the poorer classes, helped establish mutual aid societies, which provided health care and burial benefits for those who couldn't afford them. Hewitt says that her research on women activists in Tampa and her previous work on women activists in Rochester, N.Y., made her realize that "if you look at any city seriously, even before women get the right to vote, you'll find that women were crucial community activists," providing, through churches, unions, schools and other arenas, the much-needed social services that would eventually be assumed by the government. Hewitt found that Tampa was "the perfect laboratory" for determining how these women activists claimed their various identities. "These women recognized they had multiple identities and they were often quite strategic in choosing which one to claim at a particular moment," she says. For example, during the Spanish-American War, both middle- and working-class women devoted their energies to the independence movement. But as soon as the war ended, a major strike in the cigar factories forced working-class women to differentiate them-selves from their wealthier counterparts who owned the factories. Once the strike was settled, the tobacco stemmers, all of whom were women, protested the fact that the male cigar rollers received more benefits. "In a very short span of time, they went from organizing around their ethnic identity, to organizing around their class identity, to organizing around their gender identity," Hewitt notes. "These women activists shifted which aspect of their identity to emphasize, depending on their immediate situation, but they didn't give up their other identities. Instead, they maintained multifaceted identities that allowed them to respond to opportunities or oppressive conditions strategically." The activist arsenal Suffrage actually proved a relatively weak weapon in the activist arsenal of Tampa women from any racial or ethnic group in the 1920s. Most continued to rely on voluntarism rather than voting as the best vehicle for promoting social reform in the city. Anglo women continued to vote, but widespread corruption made voting in local elections practically meaningless for men and women until the 1950s. Moreover, all but a handful of the African-American women registered to vote in 1920 were knocked off the rolls by 1924 as white officials imposed racist literacy and poll tax requirements. --From "Southern Discomfort" by Nancy Hewitt

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