Relief from Relief: The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike of 1937 and the Right to Welfare

Abstract

In July 1937 Mabel Hagan and her co-workers in a Tampa, Florida, sewing room went on strike. The sit-down was short-lived and unsuccessful. In a week's time, the workers were back at their machines, the leaders had been fired, and the entire event quickly dis appeared from historical memory.1 In Tampa, a city with an impressive history of labor activism, strikes were common events, and this one seemed a minor skirmish. But the event was notable. The women involved were relief workers who made clothing and other items to be distributed to nonprofit organizations; their jobs had been created by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (wpa). Although relief workers had staged other strikes across the country, very few had taken place in the South, and in 1937 Florida had yet to see one. Even rarer was a relief strike conducted by women workers. So the Tampa sit-down was intriguingly unusual. Tampa was itself unusual, one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the South. Its im migrant residents did not easily fit into the region's racial binary system. Cuban, Spanish, Italian, and Bahamian immigrants, along with native-born whites and African Americans, provided the labor to make Tampa premier industrial city. Still largely an agri cultural state, early twentieth-century Florida was beginning to show signs of its future service-sector economy. Already tourism had become a significant industry, and within a very few years the Sunshine State would seem far removed from its Old South history, as it laid the foundations for the post-1940 economic revolution that the historian Gary R. Mormino has called Florida's Big Bang.2 So this was an unusual strike in an unusual city in an increasingly unusual southern state. How then can the strike have any relevance to the larger histories and historiog raphies of labor, race, gender, or region? As Christine Stansell once noted of antebellum