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How Did the
Portland YWCA's Outreach to Women and Girls Change over the Course of
the Twentieth Century?
Research
by Sinnamon Harris and Nancy Hungerford-Levine
The
YWCA's early mission focused on the young women and girls who occupied
new social spaces in the industrializing cities of the United States,
especially factory workers, retail clerks, and college students. Most
outreach focused on white, native-born, Protestant women, although African-American
women were consistent participants as leaders and members in their own
communities. The YWCA was a pro-woman, evangelical organization, self-described
as the "handmaiden of the church."[1]
Rather than adopt a political or feminist stance, the YWCA positioned
itself as a friend, mother, or big sister to women and girls in need.
The organization drew on both the new "social gospel" popular in Protestant
America before World War I, which accented an applied, practical Christianity,
as well as on older Protestant traditions of women teaching women and
of "home" missionary activity in the major denominations.[2]
Always
pressed for cash, the Portland YWCA made outreach pay. Classes, job
placement, and lodging were available on a fee-for-service basis. Clubs
also had membership fees and, in exchange, provided peer support and
access to YWCA resources. In all its programs, the YWCA sought to instill
Christian faith and social comportment in keeping with its "ideals of
womanliness and modesty."[3]
Protestant church membership was required for full voting rights in
the YWCA. Interaction with boys and men was highly regulated, with a
no-alcohol policy on the premises that is still in place today.
After
World War II, secularization, suburbanization, the expansion of higher
education, and a declining marriage-age for middle class white women
drew off the YWCA's historic constituency. The Civil Rights and women's
movements revitalized the YWCA nationally, but as this site explains,
Portland's established leadership struggled with the challenges these
movements posed. Instead, during the 1960s and 70s, Portland's YWCA
embraced not activism, but social service to new constituencies: senior
citizens, disabled persons, girls and teens in need, and families in
the crises of homelessness or abuse. However, new executive director
Jean DeMaster has recently affirmed the Portland YWCA's activist mission.
"We don't think of ourselves as a social service organization, but as
a social change organization."[4]
Many in Portland eagerly anticipate the YWCA's revitalization in its
second century.
1.
"YWCA Officials Here," newspaper clipping, 23 May 1915,
Morden Scrapbook, Vol. 1, Portland YWCA Archives, Portland, Oregon.
Back
to Text
2.
Credit for the Social Gospel in U.S. Protestantism is usually given
to Congregational minister Washington Gladden (1836-1918) and Baptist
pastor Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918). For the Social Gospel's application
in women's reform efforts, see Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel
in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and John Patrick McDowell,
The Social Gospel in the South: the Woman's Home Mission Movement
in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1886-1939 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
Back
to Text
3.
"Bathing Girls Opposed," newspaper clipping, c. March 1925,
Morden Scrapbook, Vol. 1, Portland YWCA Archives, Portland, Oregon.
Back
to Text
4.
Jean DeMaster quoted in Emily Busso, "Going Strong at Age 100:
Portland's YWCA Celebrates Past Successes, Future Dreams," The
Oregonian, 14 February 2001.
Back
to Text
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