From working girl to adolescent: The Detroit YWCA and the transformation of sociability among working -class young women, 1900--1930.

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the Detroit YWCA's clubs for working-class young women between the ages of 14 and 30. In it I propose that the influence of new social patterns introduced in such clubs helped reconfigure the youthful social life and status of urban working-class young women in the years between 1900 and 1930. In the supervised social clubs of the Detroit YWCA, young working-class women experimented with changing patterns of peer friendships, relations with adult authorities, interactions with young men, racial and ethnic consciousness, the types of urban leisure in which they engaged, and with increasingly assertive public stances and activities. They also experienced the beginning of a shift in their status from members of an older, more nebulous category of working-class youth to a newer, more age-specific, and cross-class category of adolescent. The Detroit YWCA federation of industrial clubs was the first of its kind and a model for other city branches within the national organizational history of the YWCA. The story of the Detroit YWCA industrial clubs and their offshoots is also part of the theoretical projects of reconceptualizing gender's significance to working-class history and women's relation with urban space. By looking at Detroit working-class women's leisure and associational patterns outside of the workplace---and indeed outside of working-class women's traditional neighborhood parameters---this dissertation contributes to these debates, as well as addressing the lacunae in Detroit's particular historiography regarding women, gender, and youth. Unlike thematically similar works on urban American working-class women's experience and self-definition, this study chooses for its site a city not characterized by heavy female employment or (in the study's time period) by heavy union organizing. Finally, the results of my research suggest a close, subtle, and complicated relationship between the middle- and working-class girls and women who created the social clubs of the Detroit YWCA. The world of the clubs was one of cross-class cultural fluidity, with familial, institutional, stylistic, and affective connections among industrial workers, school-girls, and club advisers---rather than one of distinct class cultures, isolated from and unknown to each other.