The Best of Intentions: Upbuilding Through Health at the Portland YWCA, 1908-1959

In the early twentieth century, the American Committee of the YWCA stated that the Health and Physical Department's mission was the "upbuilding of perfect womanhood." ¹ But what was perfect womanhood? Who was allowed to be a "perfect woman"? How could upbuilding be best achieved? Over the course of sixty years, the answers offered to these questions at the Portland YWCA changed while the organization remained committed to promoting healthy bodies for women. In the early twentieth century, health focused on the establishment of exercise programs, an innovation in social space for women to gather and use their bodies in new ways. By the 1920s, wellness was synonymous with cleanliness of the body and culture, and in the post-World War II era, healthy meant attractive. The YWCA brought new thinking and resources to meet women's health needs in a changing city, from the wave of young women that came to live and work in Portland in the early days to the postwar era of expanding race relations.

With the opening of the Taylor Street building in 1908, the Portland YWCA offered classes in "Swedish gymnastics, exercises with wands, Indian Clubs, etc., folk dances, artistic gymnastics, fancy steps, apparatus work, gymnastics games and basketball." ² Calisthenics exercises were central to most of these early fitness programs which were designed to express the values of "true womanhood": piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. ³ These Victorian ideals placed particular constraints on appropriate activities for a woman's body. Anything rigorous, such as running or jumping, was considered dangerous. This attitude is exemplified in Sex in Education, written by Dr. Edward H. Clarke in 1875 and reprinted for decades: "Girls lose health, strength, blood, and nerve, by a regimen that ignores the periodical tides and reproductive apparatus of their organization." ⁴ The popular belief that women were too fragile for vigorous exercise still circulated in the early twentieth century, making the regular Thursday night basketball class for women a surprisingly non-traditional offering for the Portland YWCA. In 1922, a YWCA Girl Reserves team based at Franklin High School was known as "one of the fastest girls' basketball fives in the city." ⁵ The YWCA also held indoor baseball, field hockey, and archery (all with some modified rules and constrictive dress) by the 1920s. ⁶ Lillian Hansen, YWCA Athletic Director in 1920, linked sporting classes to the political advancement of women: "Girls need to cultivate a spirit of fair play—they are going to need it if they intend to compete in business and politics with men." ⁷

The early Portland YWCA programs created space for women to move, exercise, participate in sports, and socialize in a time where there were few places to do so. But because the YWCA's Health and Fitness Department was created by and for middle-class white women, the institution centered their programs to suit their own agendas and concerns. This gave rise to a chasm between cross-class outreach (the goal of other YWCA programs) and leisure for what I call "the fitness elite." Helen Lenskyj, a historian of women's sport, notes that "[m]ore leisure hours and a greater range of organized sport and physical activities were available to privileged women, while time, energy, and financial resources were scarce for most working class women at the end of their long workdays." ⁸ A 1911 Oregonian newspaper article mentions the popularity of the YWCA swimming pool with such women: "Society women flock there in the early morning between shopping tours and the luncheon hour." ⁹ Many of the YWCA classes before World War I were filled with women and girls who could afford membership, had time to exercise, and wanted to focus their fitness goals as outlined by "true womanhood." Immigrant women, African American women, and women of the laboring classes, among others, were not the clienteles serviced in...