Uncovering "The Real Work" of the Portland YWCA, 1900-1923

In January 1921, Mrs. Norman Christie, General Secretary of the Portland YWCA, delivered a speech about the Association's work to female students at nearby Linfield College. After the presentation, an audience member confessed to Mrs. Christie that she had always understood the YWCA to be a place where women could find inexpensive rooms or hot meals, "but she had no idea that they did real work there." ¹ Misunderstandings about the "real work" of the YWCA persisted throughout the first two decades of the Association's existence and numerous references can be found in the YWCA's records explaining "the real work we do here" to everyone from employers and potential supporters, to Association clients and even to its own membership. In general, "real work" was activity other than benevolence or charity, older modes of Christian philanthropy that were falling out of fashion with the rise of the "Social Gospel," unionism, and socialism during this period. In Portland, however, the conservative women who organized the Portland chapter held tightly to their Christian tenets and benevolent approach to the working women of the city for many years; only reluctantly did they incorporate more inclusive and egalitarian reforms. Most of this new thinking originated from the national offices of the YWCA and from the Portland working women the Board sought to assist.

Like other YWCAs throughout the country, the Portland YWCA provided food and lodging for young women, which might be described as benevolence or a "helping hand," but it also contained programs that addressed more fundamental needs of women workers in Portland. The impulse to do "real work" rather than benevolence initially came from the paid professional staff. Unlike in New York or Chicago, socialism and trade unionism remained muted within the city of Portland, and the staff who sought out the YWCA did "real work" rooted in a progressive, assimilative framework rather than in a more protest-oriented, radical agenda. Furthermore, the historical records of the Portland YWCA illustrate the complex and often competing interests that existed among the women of the Board of Directors, the paid professional staff, and the working women who utilized the programs. ²

An Employment Bureau was one of the first programs to be put into place by the newly founded Portland YWCA. Newspaper accounts from 1901 suggest that the Employment Bureau was created as a place "where girls can earn pin-money" as temporary domestic workers "and at the same time be helpful to others." ³ Keeping women employed at home supported the ideal of "true womanhood" to which the upper- and middle-class membership of the YWCA ascribed and labor that they believed would be the salvation of working women's problems. But such work generally paid poorly and domestic workers themselves expressed the need for a Domestic Guild, something like a "proto-union," that could act as a "mediator in employer and employee relations" and teach potential employers to "regard [the servant] as a human at all times and treat her accordingly." ⁴ These disparate viewpoints reveal the growing incompatibility between the helping hand of benevolence and the practical needs of working women who turned to the YWCA for assistance in addressing the stark financial realities and bleak industrial conditions they confronted at their work places. While women struggled to adjust to the changing social and economic realities of the new century, they were by no means all on the same side of every issue. ⁵

Alma Hunt, General Secretary of the Portland YWCA in 1901, epitomized the idealism of the aspiring professional "new women" in this period. Hunt envisioned the Employment Bureau as one "which will furnish work in all lines, and which will not by any means be confined to the furnishing of domestic help. . . . we aim to meet practical needs." These practical needs were "exemplified in the outlining of our course of study," she continued. "We do not attempt to...