Courtyard Sisters: Settler Fantasy and Experiment at the International Institute of Los Angeles, 1914–1940

This article examines the history of the International Institute of Los Angeles, one of dozens of immigrant-serving agencies to open nationwide under the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) during the 1910s. Close reading of this branch reveals how related processes of domestication, democratization, and assimilation of immigrant groups buttressed the settler colonial making of the city. Through a study of the organization’s fieldwork, cultural programs, and architectural footprint, the author argues that the Institute preserved the racial fantasies of Anglo Angelenos with its efforts to Americanize women and girls in a Spanish Colonial Revival space. This article reframes the city’s institutional landscape during the interwar period, showing how social reformers helped maintain and police boundaries of belonging in western metropoles.

Assessing the Impact of an Intervention Project by the Young women's Christian Association of Malawi on Psychosocial Well-Being of Adolescent Mothers and Their Children in Malawi

Adolescent mothers in Malawi face psychosocial challenges such as low resilience level, low self-esteem, poor maternal-infant interaction, and exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV). Children of adolescent mothers often face numerous risks such as low birth-weight, stunted growth, infant death, low school enrolment, increased grade repetition, and dropouts that put them at greater risk of poor developmental outcomes and socio-emotional problems. This study assessed the impact of components of a community project conducted by the Young Women's Christian association of Malawi in providing psychosocial support to adolescent mothers and their children. The goals of the project were; (1) to improve early childhood development in babies born to adolescent mothers; and (2) to enhance the psychosocial well-being of adolescent mothers (self-esteem, resilience stress, and parenting skills). This descriptive mixed methods evaluation study comprised an intervention and control groups of adolescent mothers respectively. The project had 3 centers in southern region districts of Malawi. Target population was adolescent mothers 18 years of age and below. At baseline we enrolled 267 mothers and at the end of the project we had 211 mothers. The project involved monthly meetings with adolescent mothers imparting knowledge and skills and early childhood education activities. From July 2017 to June 2019, 58 sessions were conducted. In the first year the control group had no meetings, however they received the intervention in the second year. Overall results in the intervention group showed statistically significant increase in knowledge on parenting skills (p < 0.01), nutritional practice (p < 0.01), motor skills and cognitive functions in children (p < 0.01) as well as expressive language and socio-emotional capacities in children (p < 0.01), while the change in confidence and psychosocial well-being was not statistically significant (p = 0.8823). Community projects such as these enhance parenting skills and improve development of children born to adolescent mothers. Improving psychosocial support is complex and requires further research and a more holistic approach.

Using Evidence and Data to Design an Intervention in the Project Community Model for Fostering Health and Wellbeing Among Adolescent Mothers and Their Children

In this paper, quantitative and qualitative measurements of maternal psychosocial wellbeing were utilized in three districts in Malawi that guided decision-making to increase the wellbeing of adolescent mothers and promote the healthy upbringing of their children. The 1-year design stage of the study relied on several sources of information: literature search, prior project implementation of similar projects, discussions with officials at the Malawi Department of Social Welfare, and observation visits in the targeted districts. The approaches for collecting data mentioned were triangulated for the development of a baseline survey. The baseline survey generated systematically collected data of the experiences and recalls as well as the missing data from the preliminary evaluation of the existing data. The baseline data gave the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) insight on the type of intervention required in order to give a greater and more holistic effect on the beneficiaries. We also discuss the lessons we learned as to whether the assumptions we had made at the onset were correct. If they were not correct, we explained the measures we took to correct the design or implementation of the project. Finally, the data provided benchmarks for project monitoring and evaluation.

Becoming ‘Multi-Racial'

This chapter addresses issues of identity and racial exclusion by looking at Christianity and whiteness at the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in the context of late colonial Kenya. Between 1955 and 1965, Kenya YWCA rejected its identity as an organization for white/European women, and became inclusive of African women for the first time. The history of Kenya YWCA written by its last white leader, Vera Harley, is an important source of information about this period in Kenya YWCA's history. The narrative Harley constructs is an important part of the identity of the organization in the present day. Studying this narrative of ‘race' and inclusion yields two key insights; firstly, that in late colonial Kenya racial and religious identity were strongly connected, even mutually constitutive. Secondly, women in African contexts have historically been excluded from (some) Christian organisations.

Shifting Memories

Five years after the establishment of the World Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in 1894 under the influence of the Protestant evangelical movement the Chinese YWCA national committee was founded in 1899. Shortly after the overthrow of the Manchu Empire, the Canton YWCA was founded in 1912, the first year of the Republic of China. In this study I examine three oral history interviews with former YWCA staff, supplemented by the written recollections of a former general secretary and other scarce materials to reconstruct the fragmented work of the Canton YWCA in the 1940s. In the conclusion, I discuss how their memories have shifted according to their contingent “present” identities in different periods of time, and how they are dependent on individual concerns, institutional affiliations and socio-political contexts.

The Start of War

Prior to the War, few social workers in the coastal states, including state and county welfare workers soon to be confronted with the massive task of facilitating the forced removal of an entire population, had any significant contact with the Nikkei. As West Coast social work began preparing for the fallout from Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of War on Japan, therefore, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and its offshoot organization, the International Institutes, were the only social work organizations with both knowledge of the community and contacts within it. This chapter, focused on the so-called voluntary period between mid-February 1942 and March 29, 1943, outlines the beginnings of social work’s equivocal role as both the protector of the Nikkei and the instrument of their delivery into incarceration.

The Women Will Be Factors in the Present Campaign

This chapter examines black women’s national politics in the 1920s. For years, African American women had been organizing in their churches, mutual benefit associations, the Phyllis Wheatley Young Women’s Christian Association, and clubs. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and pending presidential election in 1920 inspired women to connect their existing alliances with partisan causes. Black women seized on their location in the nation’s capital to advocate on behalf of African Americans living across the country. Black women across the city formed eight, distinctive political organizations, using them as instruments to lobby for economic justice, protest southern disfranchisement, express opinions about Supreme Court nominations, and weight in on which monuments and memorials would grace the national mall. While elite and middle-class women dominated the leadership of most political organizations, the National Association of Wage Earners attracted a working-class membership through its unique recruitment strategies and mission of economic justice.

Where Women Live

The years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were defined in part by a national obsession with domesticity and respectability and a redefinition of public/private spheres. Beginning with the efforts of the Christian Woman’s Exchange, and continuing with the work of the Traveler’s Aid Society, the Catholic Woman’s Club, the Catherine Club, and the Young Women’s Christian Association, reform-minded women in New Orleans organized to promote white women’s economic security and provide respectable and affordable residences as alternatives to prostitution. This essay considers women’s organizing and institution-building as creating an unchartered, interstitial spatial territory situated in-between the geographically-defined private household and the public boarding houses and brothels of Storyville.

Winnifred Wygal’s Flock

This chapter follows the life and personal relationships of Winnifred Wygal (1884–1972), a career Young Women’s Christian Association worker. Wygal forged an erotic life that challenged both the conventions of heterosexual “companionate marriage” and the concomitant emergence of homosexual “pathology” that characterized early twentieth-century domestic relations. Her perception of the boundless capacity of God’s love emboldened Wygal to engage romantically with a number of different women, including Frances Perry, her companion from 1910 to 1940, as well as multiple other women who became, as she sometimes put it, part of her “fold.” Wygal’s diary provides a rare window on a Christian’s negotiation of her sexuality and underscores a central contribution of this book: religious faith played a shaping role in validating same-sex desire in the first half of the twentieth century.

“‘By Love, Serve One Another’: Foreign Mission and the Challenge of World Fellowship in the ywcas of Japan and Turkey”

By the 1910s, the international consortium of women involved in the interdenominational Protestant Young Women’s Christian Association (ywca) faced a reckoning. Over the previous decade, a largely European and North Americanywcaleadership had expanded successfully what it called the “association movement” into countries it designated as foreign mission territories, establishing dozens of multifunctional community centers across the Asian continent. With their religious, educational, recreational, and vocational programming,ywcas proved adaptable to a wide variety of settings. This success, however, brought the challenge of indigenization, a challenge that sharpened as Western women came to terms with anti-colonial agitation and egalitarian Gospel rhetoric of foreign mission. Detailing theywcaof the United States’s administration of theywcas of Japan and Turkey in the early 20thCentury, this article contends that interpersonal and organizational negotiations of power ultimately gave rise to transnational partnerships that thrived as theu.s.women’s missionary movement ebbed.