Women & Work

USF Libraries - Tampa Special Collections is home to over 500 archival collections and more than 116,000 rare or speciality books.

The stories of women's roles in the workforce are as numerous as they are diverse. Below you will find a preview of some of the primary sources from Special Collections supporting research on the history of American women and work in the long twentieth century.

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Mother's Magazine, 1833

Motherhood and domesticity defined much of women’s lives prior to 1870. The selection of articles included here are from  Mother's Magazine , a periodical aimed at teaching nineteenth century women about the responsibilities of motherhood. Notice the importance the periodical placed on religious purity and obedience. To many in the nineteenth century, teachings on motherhood and domestic life was the only form of education appropriate for women.

Arthur's Illustrated Home Magazine, 1876

This issue of  Arthur's Illustrated Home Magazine  from 1876 offers a wonderful case study of advertisements targeting women and homemakers during the Reconstruction era. From sewing machines to pens and medicines, these items offer a peak into the commercial lives of women.

How to be a Modern Mother, 1929

The 1920s were all about trying to modernize social life, and domestic work was no exception. This short pamphlet offers several details about what was and was not considered appropriate for families at the time, including commentary on clothing, feeding, and behavior.

Frigidaire Cookbook

In the 1930s, the refrigerator was a novel invention that completely reinvented how women kept and prepared food at home. As you can see in this 1931 publication of the  Frigidaire Recipe  Book, women are encouraged to use the fridge to modernize their cooking. In addition, women are shown as cooks, mothers, and scientists in the experimental kitchen.

Overworked Women and Girls, 1915

Based upon materials presented at the Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915,  this pamphlet  offers a raw and fascinating look into the 20th century movement for the legal protection of women. The inclusion of both photographs and data makes this small pamphlet an incredibly useful resource for researchers.

Margaret Dreier Robins Collection

Margaret Dreier Robins (1868-1945) is regarded as one of the Progressive Era's most most energetic and articulate proponents of the rights of unskilled working women. From 1907 to 1922, she presided over the National Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), a feminist organization dedicated to organizing women into trade unions, securing protective legislation for female workers, and and teaching the public about the needs of working women. In 1924, Robins and her husband, Colonel Raymond Robins, purchased Chinsegut Hill in Brooksville, Florida. Dreier Robins' accomplishments in Brooksville include founding the Hernando County YWCA and opening the bookshop/lending library that eventually became the Hernando County Library System.

Women in the Ybor Cigar Factories

The typical cigar factory contained five departments: tobacco preparation, leaf stripping/stemming, cigar manufacturing, packing, and shipping. Teams of workers in "casing rooms" unpacked bales of tobacco and moistened the leaves for use the following day. Unskilled women usually served as "strippers," removing the stems from tobacco leaves to be used as wrappers and filler. "Filler men" briefly cured special blends for cigars. Wrapper selectors chose the best of the de-stemmed leaves and sorted them into fifty grades of various quality. The cigar makers received the ingredients for the specific styles of cigar they were expected to produce. They then combined the wrappers and filler into specific sizes. Pickers and packers sorted the cigars and boxed them. Each cigar was banded with its brand’s logo by the workers of the packing department, who were typically women. Although women were initially excluded from the skilled jobs in the industry, this changed over time. Between 1890 and 1920, the number of women working in cigar factories doubled with women coming to make up fifty-nine per cent of all cigar workers. Child labor was quite common between 1905 and 1915, usually taking on child workers as trainees with paltry wages.   

Beginning in about 1900, large tobacco “trusts” acquired many of the most important cigar firms. As investors tried to raise profits, they sought to replace skilled, unionized, male workers with unskilled, unorganized women with the help of new devices such as the cigar mold. In the late 1890s, new technology allowed machines to automatically bunch and roll cigars, and in 1917, the automatic long-filler machine turned out higher-quality products. Between 1900 and 1940, the industry aggressively added cigar-making machines to their facilities, which dramatically changed the industry. Workers could be trained to work the machines in a week. To run the machines, factory owners tended to seek out workers new to the cigar industry with no expectations to attain a skilled position. The new workforce was female, typically young and native-born, and men claimed the new mechanic positions to maintain the machines. 

Prostitution and Sex Work

Special Collections has a large selection of published rare books detailing the history of and debates surrounding sex work, including volumes detailing prostitution and sex trafficking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The publications were often focused on the lives of white prostitutes and referred to any prostitution or trafficking as " white slavery ."

Tampa Children's Home

These dynamic photographs capture the essence of the Children's Home Network's rich history. 

Beginning as an effort to house orphaned and abandoned children in 1892, founder Carrie Hammerly could not have imagined that her initiative would create an organization that houses children and adolescent mothers and provides essential services to almost 25,000 people every year across central Florida. 

Items in this collection span from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1990s, but the majority of the organizational records ending in the 1970s.

College and University Life

Classbooks, now called yearbooks, emerged as an important part of school culture in the mid-nineteenth century and grew in popularity over the course of the twentieth century. Below are two graduation-themed classbooks adorned with photographs, collages, mementos, and even pressed flowers from more than a century ago. The first is from  Louise Watrous  who graduated in 1915, and the second is from  Lillian Clark  who graduated in 1924.

"Girl Graduate," 1915

Lillian Clark's Graduation Memories, 1924

Letter to a Sabbath School Teacher

Teaching and religious work remained a popular career path for women throughout the nineteenth century.

This published letter, written by a superintendent and addressed to a sabbath school teacher, praises the teacher’s “momentous responsibilities” to teach children about religion and the world.

Tucked into this tiny volume was a Reward of Merit awarded to a Miss Elizabeth Palmer for her "studious attention and good behavior," illustrating the long-standing practice of merit awards in school.

Gordon Keller School of Nursing Records

The Gordon Keller Memorial Hospital opened its doors on Lafayette Street in 1905, though the facility was later expanded at a new site on Davis Islands. A school of nursing was established in 1910 and its first class graduated in 1915. Over time, a strong partnership formed between the School of Nursing and what would later be known as Tampa General Hospital. The nursing program was eventually absorbed by Hillsborough Community College in 1972. 

Women at USF

As you know, USF is home to many pathbreaking women who are doing incredible work in the world of academia. Browse the finding aid for the University Archives or take a look at documents from the formation of the first Women Studies Curriculum below.

USF Status of Women Committee Annual Report

Further down, you can see excerpts from the USF Status of Women Committee Annual Report. The USF Archives are home to thousands of records related to female student, professors, and presidents throughout the institution's history.

World War I Lantern Slides

American wartime propaganda encouraged men, women, and children to do their part for the nation. The lantern slides included here depict the contributions women made to the war effort through their work in nursing and communication. Special Collections holds both original wartime posters and printed glass  lantern slides .

The lantern slide has its origins in seventeenth-century optical viewing devices which came to be known as "magic lanterns." Our Reading Room is equipped with a light table to assist with the viewing of these items.

Campfire Girls at Work

During times of conscription, American women found both responsibility and opportunity in the decline of available men for the workforce. Juvenile stories, including this volume from the  Campfire Girls  illustrates the shift in expectations for young girls and their role in the workforce.

The World War II Workforce

Various collections in Special Collection contain references to women in the workforce during World War II. The two images pictured in the center of the collage below, both from the  Leland Hawes Collection  highlight the women who worked at the Tampa Bay Times during the war.

The reproductions of World War II posters seen on the sides are from the journal  Tampa Bay History .

National Council of Jewish Women

As refugees resettled in American during and after World War II, organizations such as The National Council for Jewish Women sought to provide targeted resources.  Social Adjustment of the Foreign Born: A Guide to Chairmen  provides recommendations for employment, healthcare, education, and social services for Jewish women. In addition, there are expectations laid out for the associated “cultural Americanization program” and participation in the civil sector. 

Armwood Family Collection

One of the most widely recognized members of the Armwood family, Blanche, is regarded as one of Hillsborough County’s most prominent women of the early 20th century. An educator and speaker who rose to national heights, Blanche Armwood began her professional career as a teacher for Tampa’s African American schools.

In 1914, the same year that her family opened the Gem Drugstore, Blanche was contacted by the Tampa Gas Company to serve as a demonstrator. Later that year, Blanche Armwood established the Tampa School of Household Arts, where African American women and girls learned domestic science skills. She served as principal, instructor, and course developer for the school and eventually established a sister school, the New Orleans School of Domestic Science, in Louisiana. Based on Armwood’s success, other domestic science schools were established in Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina.

In addition to founding many domestic science schools, Blanche Armwood co-founded and served as the first executive secretary for the Tampa Urban League, and was appointed as the Supervisor of Negro Schools for Hillsborough County (1926-1934). In 1985, Armwood Senior High School was dedicated in her honor.

League of Women Voters Collection

The Hillsborough County League of Women’s Voters Collection contains materials relating to women’s rights advocacy in Hillsborough County and Florida as a whole. The papers housed in the collection include minutes from meetings, correspondence, and general publications, as well as multiple State Board Reports published by the League of Women Voters of Florida. The collection also reflects the League’s areas of advocacy, and contains literature relating to the Florida constitutional revision in 1968, labor, education, and the consolidation of the governments of Hillsborough County and the City of Tampa.

The collection also contains materials from the Women’s Equity Action League, a more conservative feminist group that focused its lobbying on fostering equality of opportunity for women in their education and careers. 

Robert W. and Helen S. Saunders Papers

Robert W. and Helen S. Saunders were a powerhouse in the local Tampa NAACP chapter, active from from the 1950s until the 1980s. Robert served as a decorated member of the Army Air Corp at Tuskegee Army Air Field, earned his degree from the Detroit Institute of Technology. He returned to his home of Tampa, Florida in 1951 when he was appointed as the Field Director for the NAACP, State of Florida. Helen served as secretary of the NAACP Tampa branch from 1964 – 1976 and as branch president from 1976 – 1981. She was one of many women who were very active in local chapters of Civil Rights groups, groups whose papers we hold in the collection. Serving through the height of the Civil Rights Movement, these women and the groups they participated in had a lasting impact on African American life across the United States.

Published Reports & Studies

Special Collections is home to several unique, rare, or scarce items to help you with your research. The three covers below illustrate some of the diversity of the holdings, and you can view their catalog records from our  citations  page.

Helen Gordon Davis Collection

Helen Gordon Davis (1926- ) received her B.A. from Brooklyn College in New York and moved to Tampa in 1948. n1952, she became the first white woman in Florida to join the NAACP and founded the first women’s center in Florida in 1971. Davis became the first woman elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1974 and served various districts until 1988, when she was elected to the Florida Senate where she served until 1992. During Davis’ tenure in the Florida Legislature, she pushed tirelessly for women’s rights and various family-based social programs. Davis has been awarded many community honors and remains an active supporter of the University of South Florida in Tampa, the Children’s Home of Tampa, and the Salvation Army. She was also a founding member of the Tampa Centre for Women.

Shown here is a mailer from Davis' collection detailing the work being done by the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women.

Zines

Authored by the Patriarchy Resistance Committee of Portland’s Industrial Workers of the World, this zine offers an introduction to the intersections of patriarchy and capitalism. This contemporary guide to grassroots organizing offers reading lists, is inclusive of trans and gender nonconforming people, and examines intersections between gender identity, labor, and oppression. Come in to view the  full item today !

We have much more that cannot be shared here due to copyright. Come visit us! USF Libraries - Tampa Special Collections is open Monday-Friday from 9-4pm for appointments. You can make an appointment online  on our website .

Research consultations are available. Please email  spcinfo@usf.edu .

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