Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

The lives of real women celebrated

The book recounts many women who helped shape a city and county.

By VANESSA GEZARI
Published February 2, 2005

TAMPA - The young woman in the pink shirt and the ponytail followed Pam Iorio into the grand lobby at the University of Tampa, hoping for a chance to shake her hand.

"Are you the mayor?" 20-year-old Danielle Garrison asked.

She took a deep breath and introduced herself. She was a sophomore English major who had been hooked on politics for the longest time. She saw Iorio as an inspiration.

"Maybe you'll be mayor someday!" Iorio, the mayor of Tampa, told her.

"You never know," Garrison replied, glowing.

Garrison had put aside her reading for the night, grabbed a few plates of cheese and crackers from the buffet in the ornate, old-fashioned Grand Salon in Plant Hall and settled in to listen to Iorio announce historian Doris Weatherford, who would be signing copies of her new book, Real Women of Tampa & Hillsborough County from Prehistory to the Millennium.

Iorio is one of many women profiled in the book, which was commissioned by the Athena Society and released on Tuesday. She spoke of the people who had paved her way in public life, women such as Helen Gordon Davis, Hillsborough County's first female state representative, and erstwhile U.S. Senate candidate Betty Castor, the first woman elected to the Hillsborough County Commission in 1972.

These days, Iorio said, no one is surprised to see women in public life.

"What we have finally achieved as women is that it's not noteworthy anymore," Iorio said. "We got here because so many other people charted the course, and so many people were pioneers."

Real Women is the story of that chain of inspiration: from the American Indian women who lived here in the 1500s, wearing belts made of a kind of moss that was "so delicate in texture as to be mistaken for filaments of silk" to the city's first divorcee; from Dorcas Bryant, an ex-slave who became a landowner and founded Tampa's first black church, to Cuban and Italian women who rolled cigars in Tampa's steamy factories.

As the years pass, the number of influential local women swells to include a movie star, a doctor and a psychiatrist, businesswomen and activists, judges and politicians. By the end, there seem to be women everywhere, but Weatherford, who has also written about women's suffrage and the history of immigrant women, cautioned against complacency.

"It's not written anywhere in the stars that we will make progress," she told about 50 people, almost all of them women. "It's important to remember that we had these achievements and we can slip backward. It's important to be vigilant."

In the audience, a woman nodded her head while knitting. Helen Gordon Davis, who served 14 years in the state House and four in the state Senate, listened in agreement.

A delicate, dark-haired woman with bright hazel eyes who refuses to reveal her age, Davis first ran for the state house in 1974. Her opponent dubbed her "The rich b---- from Davis Islands." Her husband, a whiskey distributor, said she would never win and forbade her from collecting donations from his friends.

"He didn't think I was sophisticated enough to withstand pressure from the lobbyists, and he didn't want to be alone," Davis said.

When she won, women flooded her Tampa office. Many had left school to become mothers and wives, sacrificing opportunities for education and employment, and had fallen on hard times. Some were divorced and others were addicted to drugs.

"They felt thrown aside," Davis said. "They never had anyone to talk to."

She drafted legislation to help women go back to school or learn a trade and commissioned a study that forced the state to address historic inequalities in women's pay. She thinks Weatherford's book is a good start, but says it doesn't tell the whole story.

"I'd like to see a much more accurate account of the troubles women have had," she said.

Danielle Garrison, the student who approached Pam Iorio, knows little of those troubles. What she does know is that, compared with the students in her all-girls Catholic high school in Illinois, the young women at the University of Tampa sometimes seem a bit timid. Especially when they're in logic class, arguing about politics with the boys.

"The girls are a little more afraid of what people are going to think, but definitely the guys are not afraid of what others are going to think at all," Garrison said.

On Tuesday night, as she rushed to a dance rehearsal, Garrison's world seemed wide open. She wants to go to law school, maybe run for office someday. But she doesn't entirely agree with Iorio that a woman politician these days is "not noteworthy."

"She mentioned that it shouldn't be extraordinary, but it still is, I think," Garrison said. "I wanted to come to meet her because she is a woman. If it was a man, would I really want to come? I don't know. So I guess I want to bridge the gap, to make it less extraordinary."

[Last modified February 2, 2005, 00:31:09]