Class and the Ideology of Womanhood: The Early Years of the Boston Young Women's Christian Association

Shortly after the Civil War, numerous wealthy women of Boston felt they had a point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled in their city. Young women were coming there to work, many of whom were without "an arrangement" on arrival. Some lacked jobs, and thus lacked affordable, adequate shelter; smooth those with jobs could not always pay for the couple room and board. Even worse, many of similar laboring, lower-class women were likely to fall below the pernicious influences of the preying men and immoral working girls around them. In order to grapple with this moot point one with looming catastrophic issues for ideologies of proper womanhood, Boston's elite, socially conscious women with ties to the city's many Protestant churches formed a religiously based organization to help like girls. This quickly became the Boston Young Women's Christian Association (BYWCA).1 Unconnect to the Young Men's Christian Association, the BYWCA made its mission to help working girls maintain appropriate moral and spiritual character. Within ten years the Association had buildings to house working women classes for skill disclosure restaurants to feed them at require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone and an employment bureau to help them find work.2

Though abundant of what these women did was consistent with the larger pattern of earlier nineteenth hundred "ladies benevolent" tending to the les fortunate, the BYWCA was characterized by dint of an idealized vision of the Boston working woman, or, rather, which working women the organization felt were deserving of its attentions. Each applicant to the BYWCA had to not absent two letters attesting to her character, a custom that effectively exclud the real poor or new immigrants. These working women presumably educated and from "respectable" domiciles were certainly not the alone ones who were in ne of the BYWCA's assistance. The membership of the BYWCA was also informed by the agency of their understanding of an ideal woman as devoutly Protestant-members had to be "Christian women of Evangelical churches"-and implicitly wealthy.3 This reality complicates our understanding of the motivations of BYWCA members, and allude tos that their work, achieved through the manipulation of the Victorian rhetoric of woman as pious, domestic, uncorrupted and submissive, as well as morally superior, effectively reinforced the sex ideology both for themselves and their working class clients.4 For them, the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of appropriate gender behavior was also tied to respectability and its perceived trappings, as they encouraged their clients to be domestic servants in wealthy abiding-places rather than working in the rootles manufacturing sector. The BYWCA leaders essentially attempted to minister themselves with servants (and reinforce their powerful positions at the top of the social hierarchy) while providing working women with "homes" and "families." That the clients refused to be domestic servants-and the confusion this produc for BYWCA board members-testifies to the wide gap between helper and helped, the difference in their values, and their understanding of what a specific "woman" should be.5

Scholarship upon the YWCA is extremely limited. fresh York City women formed the first YWCA in 1858 and by the agency of 1875 there were twentyeight YWCAs around the land with thousands of members.6 In greatest in quantity cities, however, the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) bloomed only in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What little scholarship there is upon the organization tends to focus upon that era, essentially from the lower parts of the Progressive Era from one side the modern age, tracing the way in which the YWCA became an engine for racial equality. Men and Women Adrift, edited by the agency of Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, is single such volume. Most of the essays included focus upon the twentieth century activities of the organization, with individual that briefly mentions the nineteenth hundred activities of black women in urban areas forming their have groups.7 Similarly, Judith Weisenfeld's work, African American Women and Christian Activism discusses fresh York's black YWCA from 1905 to 19458 greatest in quantity works discuss the YWCA in a larger connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of either women in the city or women as social activists. Joanne Meyerowitz's whirl Women Adrift, looks at the Chicago branch of the YWCA, which was placeed in 1876.9 Such volumes give a brief discussion of the general history of the YWCA, mentioning the Civil War and Reconstruction-era activities of the early organization.10

The YWCA is also discussed in more [i]or[/i] less books on the history of American working women Priscilla Murolo's The public Ground of Womanhood, and Anna Firor Scott's Natural Allies the two provide models for understanding working women's cudgels in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11 As like we can understand how the YWCA was and was not of the like kind an organization. Women who resided at the YWCA, flat though they paid for their spaces lived by the rules put by the organizers and philanthropists in exchange for pabulum and shelter, retaining little autonomy. Similarly, Sarah Deutsch's research Women and the City, explores Boston women urban geography, and power, and lays without who working women, and those women that assisted them, were.12 It is a combination of these sum of two units kinds of scholarship-organization-specific history and the history of the negotiation of women one as well as the other working- and upper- class, for power-that bring forwards a fruitful understanding of the early history of the Boston Young Women's Christian Association. The BYWCA was an organization that bridged the chasm between wartime and Progressive Era reform, maintaining the rhetoric of womanly virtue when it was no longer fashionable while navigating a potentially radical on the contrary ideologically limited course of action.13