| Vitally linked to the Caribbean and southern Europe as well as to the Confederacy, the Cigar City of Tampa, Florida, never fit comfortably into the biracial mold of the New South. In Southern Discomfort, the esteemed historian Nancy A. Hewitt explores the interactions among distinct groups of women--native-born white, African American, and Cuban and Italian immigrant women--that shaped women's activism in this vibrant, multiethnic city. Around the turn of the twentieth century, several historical currents converged in Tampa. The city was subject to the state's newly imposed forms of legal segregation from 1885 on, and it served as a center for exiles organizing on behalf of the Cuban War of Independence and as the disembarkation point for U.S. troops heading to Cuba in 1898. The city was the entrepôt for thousands of Cuban and Italian immigrants seeking work in the booming cigar trade, and it attracted dozens of itinerant radicals eager to address locally based revolutionary clubs, mutual aid societies, and labor unions. Tampa was also home to an astonishing array of voluntary and reform organizations among Black and white native-born women. Hewitt shows how women's interests were transformed by Jim Crow, progressive reform, and homegrown and imported radicalism, and how the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain dramatically reshaped Tampa women's activism, inspiring large numbers of Latin women to enter the public sphere. Southern Discomfort emphasizes the process by which women forged and reformulated their activist identities from Reconstruction through the U.S. declaration of war against Spain in April 1898, the industrywide cigar strike of 1901, and the emergence of progressive reform and labor militancy. This masterful volume also recasts our understanding of southern history by demonstrating how Tampa's triracial networks alternately challenged and reinscribed the South's biracial social and political order.
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