Title: Class and the Ideology of Womanhood: The Early Years of the Boston Young Women's Christian Association
Abstract: Shortly after the Civil War, numerous wealthy women of Boston felt they had a problem in their city. Young women were coming there to work, many of whom were without arrangement upon arrival. Some lacked jobs, and thus lacked affordable, adequate shelter; even those with jobs could not always pay for both room and board. Even worse, many of such laboring, lower-class women were likely to fall under the pernicious influences of the preying men and immoral working girls around them. In order to grapple with this problem, one with looming catastrophic results 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 such girls. This quickly became the Boston Young Women's Association (BYWCA).1 Unconnected to the Young Men's 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 development, restaurants to feed them at cost, and an employment bureau to help them find work.2 Though much of what these women did was consistent with the larger pattern of earlier nineteenth century ladies benevolent tending to the less fortunate, the BYWCA was characterized by 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 present two letters attesting to her character, a custom that effectively excluded the very poor or new immigrants. These working women, presumably educated and from respectable homes, were certainly not the only ones who were in need of the BYWCA's assistance. The membership of the BYWCA was also informed by their understanding of an ideal 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 suggests that their work, achieved by the manipulation of the Victorian rhetoric of as pious, domestic, pure, and submissive, as well as morally superior, effectively reinforced the gender ideology both for themselves and their working class clients.4 For them, the concept of appropriate gender behavior was also tied to respectability and its perceived trappings, as they encouraged their clients to be domestic servants in wealthy rather than working in the rootless manufacturing sector. The BYWCA leaders essentially attempted to supply 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 produced for BYWCA board members-testifies to the wide gap between helper and helped, the difference in their values, and their understanding of what a proper woman should be.5 Scholarship on the YWCA is extremely limited. New York City women formed the first YWCA in 1858, and by 1875 there were twentyeight YWCAs around the country with thousands of members.6 In most cities, however, the Young Women's Association (YWCA) blossomed only in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What little scholarship there is on the organization tends to focus on that era, essentially from the roots of the Progressive Era through the modern age, tracing the way in which the YWCA became an engine for racial equality. Men and Women Adrift, edited by Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, is one such volume. Most of the essays included focus on the twentieth century activities of the organization, with one that briefly mentions the nineteenth century activities of black women in urban areas forming their own groups.7 Similarly, Judith Weisenfeld's work, African American Women and Activism discusses New York's black YWCA from 1905 to 1945. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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