From "Industrial Girls" to "Career Girls": Postwar Shifts in Programs for Wage-Earning Women in the Portland YWCA

For the first half of the twentieth century, the YWCA actively struggled for the protection and rights of working-class women. In fact, labor issues were a major emphasis of the political and social work of both the national and Portland, Oregon YWCAs from their foundings until the 1950s. In the postwar period, however, programs for young business and professional women gained prominence over those focused on the industrial working class. Several factors united to bring about this shift. Long-standing class anxieties and conflicts within the YWCA combined with McCarthyite political pressure and postwar demographic changes to redirect programming for wage earning women from working-class "industrial girls" to middle-class "career girls."

At the turn of the century, the national YWCA focused its attention on young, urban, wage-earning women and sought to provide them with the guidance of middle-class values and the protective embrace of a Christian environment. The organization's goals soon broadened to include a concern to improve poor working conditions, and beginning in 1911, the YWCA campaigned for protective legislation for women workers. ¹ By World War I, the YWCA began to advocate for working women in a more radical way, organizing Industrial Worker's Clubs and education programs, and in 1934, officially supporting collective bargaining rights.

In the Portland YWCA, outreach to working-class women reached its peak during and directly after World War II. Under the program goal, "To work towards a better understanding of Labor groups through [a] wider representation of industrial girls, [and] close cooperation with labor," ² the Young Adult committee of the Portland YWCA established Industrial Girls clubs in 1945, offered swing-shift classes for industrial workers, and opened the "Lunchtime Canteen" for working women in the downtown area. The observance of Union Day, beginning in 1945, was perhaps the Portland YWCA's most radical pro-labor gesture. The YWCA, in cooperation with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), sponsored the event—which included speakers and workshops—to "increase understanding of Unions and work for women's active participation in Unions." ³

By the early 1950s, the Portland YWCA's involvement in the labor movement had dramatically declined and "business and professional girls," mainly composed of clerical workers, became the new focus of the Young Adult committee's work. The increase in clerical work and decrease in industrial work for women in the postwar period helps to explain this change. With the postwar "reconversion" effort, women were pushed out of heavy industry. In Portland, this meant that women, who had made up 30 percent of wartime shipbuilding labor, were redirected back into traditionally female jobs. ⁴ Service and low paying factory work were options for some, ⁵ but the majority of American women moved into clerical work and associated occupations. ⁶

In addition, by focusing on the middle-class coded population of clerical workers, the YWCA may have been attempting to distance itself from its more radical past associations with the labor movement, which the Cold War political climate made increasingly dangerous. In response to accusations of communism, ⁷ the Portland YWCA created the "Building and Policy Committee" in 1950 to prevent radical groups from using the building. In addition, the Portland chapter endorsed National's anticommunist avowals, including the 1953 official "Policy with Respect to Communism," which stated the YWCA's "unalterable opposition" to communism. ⁸

Anticommunist sentiment and shifts in postwar employment patterns were not the only factors at play; they operated in conjunction with long-term class tensions within the YWCA to reshape programs for wage-earning women. Even in the 1940s, when the Portland YWCA directed much attention to the labor movement and industrial working-class women, the organization had difficulty reconciling its middle-class status with its working-class constituency. ⁹ Beginning...