the work experience, the neighborhood, and the social struggle. The leaders of
the Tobacco Workers’ Union understood that they would not reach their goals
by addressing only the workers’ issues of working conditions, wages, and the
participation of female workers; rather, they needed to appeal first and foremost
to the family as a whole and to rally its support for the organization, its goals, and
the struggle. The demand for better working conditions and higher wages was
part of a larger social demand for improved living conditions in working-class
neighborhoods in order to make their “slums of despair” into “slums of hope.”65
The family as a whole was considered to be within the framework of the long-
range plans of the union; the entire family participated in First of May celebrations
and in the excursions, dances, and picnics that were organized. Donations and
food packages were collected and distributed to the families of striking workers.66
Sports teams were organized and competitions were held between the teams
of different unions, public libraries were opened,67 and evening classes were
arranged where the young girls of the tobacco factories taught their tired mothers
how to read and write in Ladino (with Hebrew letters); Greek, history, and health
care were also taught.68 Dances were popular events, and those organized by the
Socialist Movement took place in a number of dancing schools that supported and
made donations to the workers’ struggle, such as the Karı Bazar dancing school
and Café Havuzlu.69 Even at the dances organized by the Jewish community, class
hierarchy was maintained and bourgeois women would not be seen dancing with
working class men.70
The cultural association De Grupo Dramatiko, which performed in Ladino,
was part of the socialist movement. Its theatre performances had a political and
an educational agenda. Right from its early beginnings, De Grupo Dramatiko
deliberately engaged in a politics of representation that attempted to develop an
alternative base of political power within the neighborhood. This organization
played a crucial role in the creation and shaping of the social and political spaces
and identities where city and Jewish community policies were negotiated and
contested.
The tobacco workers, experienced in conflict from the factories, were also
struggling with the tensions between fulfilling their expected roles as wife and
mother, on the one hand, and, on the other, their desire to emulate the female heroes
of the working class such as “Therese Rakin,” “Madlene,” “Ana Maslovena,”
and “Mishlin,” the sister of the worker “Gilbert” in Octave Mirbeau’s play The
Socialist Holiday,71 which gave encouragement to the workers of both sexes
in their hour of crisis. Every play that was performed relayed a clear socialist
message.
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139
The Female Tobacco Workers in the Eyes of the Bourgeoisie
In the aftermath of the great fire of 1917, the Greek government saw an opportunity
to transform the cityscape and revive its ancient Byzantine and Hellenic character.72
A new spatial geography was shaped, based upon the exchange value of space and
social divisions. The proletariat remained in the deteriorated districts, and were
pushed out of the center toward the outskirts.73
The homes of the tobacco workers and of the urban proletariat, the factories
themselves, and the public houses were all situated within an area called the
Bara. This area included the streets of Irinis [ Ειρήνης], Afroditis, [ Αφροδίτης], Prometheus [ Προμηθέως], Odysseus [ Oδυσσέως], Tantalo [ Ταντάλου],74 and Bacchus [ Βάκχου], and was designated by the city as both industrial and adult
entertainment zones.
This double process of industrialization and “purification” has been discussed
by Henri Lefebvre,75 and is described as follows by David Sibley in his The
Geographics of Exclusion:
Nineteenth-century schemes to reshape the city could thus be seen as a
process of purification, designed to exclude groups variously identified as
polluting—the poor in general, the residual working class, racial minorities,
prostitutes and so on.76
The proximity of the tobacco workers to the brothels led to the identification by
the middle class of the young girl tobacco workers with prostitutes (Figure 5.3). In
a 1920 article in the newspaper El Kulevro [The Snake], one writer complains:
We ask the Jewish representatives, “Why do you allow the ‘good girls’ to
remain in the old quarter rather than send them away? Don’t the authorities
know that decent people live in the Bara? Is it fair to leave these ‘fine ladies’
together with decent young women?”77
Another reason for the association of the female tobacco workers with
prostitutes was their attire. Older girls who worked in the tobacco factories would
dress up their younger sisters—sometimes only eight or nine years old—in high-
heeled shoes and brassieres padded with rags or cotton wool. They also used
make-up on them in an attempt to make them look older, so that they would get
employed and thus be kept off the streets.78
The young female tobacco workers posed a threat to the comfortable, orderly
life of the urban bourgeoisie for an even simpler reason: their employment in
the tobacco factories created a shortage of laundresses and servants. In the eyes
of middle-class women, the young girls did as they chose—they would come to
work in the homes of the middle class when they so desired, and when they did
not, they went to work in the tobacco factories. In a humorous newspaper column,
an “Aunt Clara” complains that one of her servants went to work as a maid in
some Greek or Muslim home because she had not received a raise that would
have allowed her to buy a hat “with a garden of flowers upon it,” gloves, and a
corset to accentuate the charms of her body, all for her Saturday stroll through
140
Women in the ottoman Balkans
the Beş Çınar Gardens. “Aunt Clara” went on to decry how times had changed,
and how the lady of the house now needed to treat her help kindly, because she
was under constant threat that her servants might pack their bags, declare that the
tobacco season has opened, and set off to the factories.79
The young girls preferred the work of sorting tobacco leaves. This seasonal
work was a return to a familiar environment. In the factory halls, no “lady of the
house” stood over them yelling orders, and they did not have to work until they
dropped from exhaustion; here they were equals, they were “countesses,” and
they could dream of a different life.80
Within their own neighborhoods, on the other hand, the female tobacco workers
were highly respected. They were supported and esteemed for their diligence,
their contribution to the family income, and especially for their courage in an
environment where docility was part of the cultural code. Articles in the socialist
press criticized the arrogant behavior of middle-class women toward their maids.
They called upon the bourgeois mistresses to protect their female
servants from
sexual harassment by the masters of the house and their sons, treat them well, and
pay them on time.81
Love and Romance
As the young girls’ political awareness grew, so did their dreams of romance,
family, and children.
Girls usually married young men chosen by their parents (the preferred match
being someone within the extended family, such as a cousin). Sometimes—albeit
infrequently—a young girl would refuse to marry the appointed candidate,
instead choosing to follow the dictates of her own heart. Given the preferences
of the families in question, a tobacco worker would not necessarily meet with the
approval of the family as a prospective son-in-law, and attempts would be made
to separate the loving couple. So it was when Abraham Eskaloni and Estherina
Cohen, fellow tobacco workers, fell in love. Estherina’s father disapproved of
Abraham’s courting of his daughter and refused to give the marriage his blessing;
moreover, she had been promised to another. A frustrated Abraham accosted
Estherina’s father, stabbing him with a knife.82 After ten long years during which
Estherina stood her ground as to her right to choose her own husband, her father
finally consented to her marriage with Abraham.83 Marriages also took place,
though infrequently, across social and economic classes and religions, as when
Jewish women tobacco workers converted to Islam or Christianity and married
Muslim or Greek tobacco workers.84
Conclusion
In this article, I have focused on a facet previously overlooked in studies on the
private/public spheres, work relations, and the Jewish family and community of
Salonika in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods: the female tobacco workers.
It was first and foremost the female tobacco workers—girls and young women
who needed to work in order to help support their families and save a bit of
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141
Figure 5.3. Prostitutes in the Bara (Vardar district).
Detail of an anonymous postcard from the collection of Flor Safan Eskaloni.
money for their dowries—who spoke out publicly. They spoke their minds, cried
out their plight, and declared their existence. The female tobacco workers’ social,
class, and political consciousness came about as a result of the working class’s
understanding that without the recruitment and support of the young girls and
their families, the struggle was doomed to failure.
Despite the fact that work in the tobacco factories contributed to the formation
of the female workers’ self-identity, it did not produce a substantial and lasting
change in their way of life. In a society where self-fulfillment was generally
channeled through the family, women did not make a career of tobacco work.
Rather, they saw it as a necessity that enabled them to make a living and save
money for a dowry, so that when the time came, they would be able to marry and
start a family.
From interviews conducted some fifty years later with women who had
labored in the tobacco factories, it appears that for these working-class girls,
industrialization had not meant progress but low-paying and demeaning work.
This is clearly illustrated by the fact that when interviewed, these women did not
wish to speak about their work, working conditions, low wages, participation in
strikes and demonstrations, or the fact that they may have been part of the socialist
or communist movements. Instead, they preferred to speak of their married life,
family, and children.85
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
Tobacco work was but a stage in the maturation of the young girls from
working class neighborhoods of Salonika—a stage during which new values were
introduced into their world, and if only for a short time, they were the “countesses”
and the “princesses” who dared to take to the streets and demand social equality.
Work ties and social and ideological relationships did not replace family bonds,
but rather served as a means of incorporating the family as a whole into a larger
“ideological family.”
Notes
1. This article is adapted from a chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation (Hadar 2003),
written under the supervision of Prof. Minna Rozen.
2. Also Salonica, Saloniki, Salonique, Selânik, Θεσσαλονίκη; On the multiplicity
of names for the city, see Portugali 1993: 156–57: “[T]wo or more collectivities
use different languages to refer to the very same phenomenon, so they might
construct different cognitive maps of the very same territory. … From their
discourse and actions it is clear that each group perceives the past, present and
future of this same territory in its own peculiar way, which is different from
that of the other group.”
3. For a discussion of the demographics of Salonika at the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth, see Moutsopooulos 1980: 19–23.
The population of the city was principally composed of Jews, Turks, and
Greeks, together with Albanians, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Vlachs, Gipsies,
and foreign residents. For a general survey of Salonika during this period, see
Veinstein 1992; Anastassiadou 1997; Rozen [forthcoming], 1: 137–73.
4. Language is one of the major elements in the creation of the identity of the
group, the nation, and the individual. The Jews of Salonika—and in particular
the Jewish women of all classes, though most pointedly those of the worker
and proletariat classes—spoke only Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish language written
in Hebrew characters.
5. On the Greek tobacco workers, see Dagkas 2004; Quataert 1995: 59–74;
Quataert 1996: 311–32.
6. The majority of the workforce in Salonika’s tobacco industry was made up
of girls between the ages of 10 and 14, with a minority of female workers
falling within the 14-to-20-year-old range. Therefore, when the terms “women
workers” or “female workers” are used in this paper, one must keep this
fact constantly in mind. At the same time one must remember that modern
associations with the term “girl” do not adequately express how these workers
saw themselves, nor how their community related to them.
7. On the “Public/Private” dichotomy, see Ardener 1981; Keohane 1992: ix–xii;
Rizk Khoury 1997: 105–28.
8. Despite this prohibition, tobacco worker strikes did take place in Kavala, and
were suppressed by force. On the strikes of the Kavala tobacco workers see
La Epoca, 23 February 1900, 31 March 1905.
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143
9. “In Salonika,” El Avenir, 31 July 1909: “Greek business owners painted their
stalls and the entrances to their stores in the colors of the Greek flag.”
10. Ibid., 28 July 1908.
11. Ben-Aroyah
1972: 311. For the emergence of Greek and Turkish socialism
in the years 1909–1914, see Kofos 1964; Liakos 1985; Harris 1967: 16–20;
Tunçay 1967; Haupt and Dumont 1977; Tekeli and İlkin 1980: 351–82.
12. Aktsoglou 1997: 288;
El Avenir, 12 August 1908.
13. Raporto annuel de la union de los la
voradores del tutun de Saloniqo 1909:
6.
14. Throughout
the world, young women were employed in sorting tobacco leaves
under similar conditions. For other examples, see Pollert 1983: 96–114; Stubbs
1985: 71–76; Tilly 1992: 172–73; Baron 1991: 1–46; White 1996.
15. Uziel 1978: 31; see also “Conversions,”
El Avenir, 2 April 1909.
16. The
dowry tradition is also common among Greeks. The dowry is not only
a transfer of property and bride, but also part of the system of “honor” and
“disgrace.” On the meaning of the dowry in Greek culture, see Lambiri-
Dimaki 1985: 165–78; Hirschon 1981: 70–86; Sant Cassia and Bada 1992:
53, 74–76.
17. El Avenir, January 1910.
18. Quataert 1996: 322–23.
19. “The
Tobacco Workers’ Strike,” El Avenir, 13 April 1914; on the low wages
paid to female workers in the international tobacco industry, see Stubbs 1985:
79; Tilly 1992: 175; Pollert 1983: 100.
20. “Letter
,” Journal del Lavorador, September 1909; “A Letter to my Sister
Workers,” Journal del Lavorador, October 1909: this was a call to the young
female workers who worked in the silk mills and sewing workshops to form
a union. Regarding a small group of women who attempted to organize a
union but failed, see “Why did they want to commit suicide?” El Popular, 19
August 1930: two Greek nurses who tried to organize the nurses at the city
hospital into a union were fired from their jobs; they were unable to find other
employment as they had acquired the reputation of being “instigators,” and in
the end committed suicide.
21. La Epoca, 8 July 1910; see also Dumont 1997: 67 ref. 32, a letter from Ben-
Aroyah to C. Huysmans, 11 August 1910, Arch BSI.
22. El Avenir, 24 August 1909.
23. “The Herzog Factory
,” El Avenir, 26 October 1909.
24. The
concept of honor has many connotations: the honor of the family and
relations, class honor, and more. The honor of the (male) individual is
expressed in a cluster of attributes such as generosity, honesty, seriousness,
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