Black and white women's struggles over race relations in the YWCA and beyond

As the major national biracial women's organization, the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) provided a unique venue for women to respond to American race relations during the first half of the twentieth century. In Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-46, Nancy Marie Robertson shows how women of both races employed different understandings of "Christian sisterhood" in their responses. Although the YWCA was segregated at the local level, African American women were able to effectively challenge white women over YWCA racial policies and practices. Robertson argues that from 1906 through 1946, many white women in the association went from seeing segregation as compatible with Christianity and democracy to regarding it as a contradiction of those values. They also began to understand the race question as a national priority rather than a southern problem, which helped lay the groundwork for the subsequent civil rights movement.

Robertson's analysis of black and white women's struggles over race relations in the YWCA relies on lively autobiographical accounts and personal papers from women associated with the YWCA and a large body of records documenting the organization's members at the national and local levels. Evidence drawn from the writings of Dorothy Height, Lugenia Burns Hope, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and others shows that conflict among YWCA members and competition with the Young Men's Christian Association helped shape not only the YWCA's institutional commitment to racial liberalism, but also the personal commitment of many YWCA women.

"This is not a history of inevitable progress, but a history of continuing tension and negotiation. . . . Thoroughly documented. Recommended."--Choice

"This book would be a great addition to classes that focus on feminist history, women's organization, and race relations."--Contemporary Sociology

"Robertson has written a thoroughly researched and comprehensive history that, while focused on the YWCA, tells the larger story of interracial work and is essential reading for those interested in the long civil rights movement."--American Historical Review

"A critical, well-written, and fascinating addition to the literature of 20th-century women's history."--Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

"This book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of American Protestant women's religious history and to interactions between black and white women in this important independent women's organization."--Church History

"This richly detailed book tells the largely untold story of the Young Women's Christian Association 'coming around' on race relations in the early twentieth century. Robertson offers a longer and more complex history of the civil rights movement, grounding the post-World War II movement in the work of progressive women decades earlier. In this rendering, women (both white and black) play a far more prominent role, and religion is a more consistently important factor, than in previous studies of the movement."--Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, author of Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present

"Nancy Robertson's Christian Sisterhood provides one of the most sensitive and nuanced accounts to date of black and white women's collaboration in the name of progress. Attentive to national, local, and regional dynamics, the differing assumptions of black and white women, working-class and middle-class, and the perils of those differences for black women in the field, Robertson provides a new understanding of the crucial role of one of the largest national women's organizations in guiding us from the women's movement of the early twentieth century into the civil rights movement of the late twentieth century."--Sarah Deutsch, author of Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940

Nancy Marie Robertson is an associate professor of history and philanthropic studies at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, where she also directs the women’s studies program.

Awards:

Received the Richard L. Wentworth Award, 2008.

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Series:
Women in American History

Subjects:
History, Am.: 20th C. / Women's Studies / Black Studies / Religion

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