Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

ABUNDANT LIFE FOR ALL: THE YOUNG WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION

ABUNDANT LIFE FOR ALL l 1127 omon’s autobiography The Fabric of My Life: The Autobiography of Hannah Greenebaum Solomon (1946) offers its own insights . For Orthodox women’s groups, see Jenna Weissman Joselit’s New York’s Jewish Jews: The Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years (1990). Henrietta Szold has inspired several volumes that have explored facets of her life. Among the best are Baila Shargel’s Lost Love: The Letters of Henrietta Szold and Louis Ginzberg (1997) and Joan Dash’s Summoned to Jerusalem: The Life of Henrietta Szold (1979). Alexandra Levin’s Henrietta Szold and Youth Aliyah: Family Letters 1934–1944 (1986) and Marvin Levinthal’s Henrietta Szold: Life and Letters (1942) look at Szold’s Zionist work through her letters. Hadassah’s history can be found in Marlin Levin’s Balm in Gilead: The Story of Hadassah (1973). Miriam Freund-Rosenthal’s edited volume A Tapestry of Hadassah Memories (1994) offers Hadassah members ’ accounts of their experience with that organization. Hadassah’s pamphlet reports on its yearly accomplishments, including the 1917 report, can be found in the Hadassah Archives at the Center for Jewish History. Manfred Waserman’s analyses of Hadassah’s medical care in Palestine and Israel appears in a volume he edited with Samuel S. Kottek, Health and Disease in the Holy Land: Studies in the History and Sociology of Medicine from Ancient Times to the Present (1996). Sylvia Barak Fishman’s A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community (1995) explains the impact of Jewish women’s activities on contemporary Jewish life. Deborah Dash Moore and Paula E. Hyman edited the very valuable Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1997). “Social Workers in the Muskeljudentum”; Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews: The Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years (1990). Mary McCune, “Social Workers in the Muskeljudentum: ‘Hadassah Ladies,’ ‘Manly Men,’ and the Significance of Gender in the American Zionist Movement, 1912–1928,” American Jewish History 86.2 (1998): 135–165. ABUNDANT LIFE FOR ALL: THE YOUNG WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION Janine M. Denomme THE EMERGENCE OF the Young Women’s Christian Association in the United States and Canada took place within the context of increasing industrialization in the late nineteenth century. As industrial capitalism had begun to separate work from the home in the early nineteenth century, the household economy had started to shift to one based on family wages. Whereas once each person within a home, including servants and slaves, had been assigned specific responsibilities within the household in order for all to survive, with the rise of industrialization, some individuals began to go out for wage work. This pattern increased throughout the century . Each morning, more and more artisans left their homes, their original work sites, to ply their trades or new ones in factories. Many farmers and farmhands left the land to earn their living building ships, laying railroad lines, and digging canals as the transportation revolution moved across the continent. In the United States, millions of immigrants poured into the country to work side-by-side with the new industrial workers. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of industrial workers in the United States increased from 385,000 to 3.2 million. Industrialization also changed the nature of work for many women in both Canada and the United States during the nineteenth century. Especially during the latter half of the century, thousands of single young women began leaving their rural and small-town homes to find work in the cities among manufacturers. Whereas daughters had once played a vital role in the household economy, working alongside their mothers as they cleaned, cooked, tended gardens, sewed, and washed the laundry, they now began to play a different but equally as vital role as a wage earner. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed thousands of young women flood into the cities, each looking for work and a place to live. Between 1870 and 1900, the number of women working for wages in the United States nearly tripled. The needs of these young women, as well as the sudden opportunity they offered for evangelization , encouraged the emergence of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in both the United States and Canada. The lives of many middle- and upper-class women also shifted with industrialization, especially in the North where industry first took hold. Following the U.S. Civil War, during which women had gained experience organizing on behalf...