Lady Bountiful

In 1866, 30 Boston matrons gathered in the home of Mrs. Henry Durant to discuss the plight of friendless working girls arriving in the city without a home.

Their solution was to create the Young Women's Christian Association, which was to provide young maidens with a safe, inexpensive and decent place to live and protect them against "the pestilence that walketh in darkness and the destruction that wasteth at noonday."

Maidens may not need much protection from pestilence these days, but the Y.W. is still the lady bountiful helping young girls in need. From its modest beginnings, the Y.W. has grown into an international organization of 2,200,000 members, operating 264 residences across the U.S. and carrying on activities in 74 countries abroad. No longer sexually segregated, the Y.W. has more than 240,000 men enrolled in its mammoth educational and recreational programs, which offer an assortment of courses ranging from cooking and shorthand to yoga and judo.

The Businessmen's Plunge. The Y.W. today, says Mrs. Alida Cory, executive director of the Cincinnati branch, is rapidly outstripping its old reputation as a "sanctimonious swimming pool." It now provides sophisticated instruction in sex education and natural childbirth; last year the Y.W.s in Oakland, San Francisco, Pasadena and Los Angeles started special clubs for unwed mothers that offer not only companionship but also baby sitting and employment services.

In its prim past, smoking cigarettes was generally not allowed, and locks were bolted at the toll of 10 p.m. Now all residences provide ashtrays because, as one Y.W. official explains, the girls smoked anyway and burned the furniture; any girl who signs out in the evening can get back in as late as 5 a.m. simply by ringing a buzzer. Although as a rule, men may still not advance above the lobby floor of residences, they have free run of the Y.W.'s recreational areas. The Boston center, which last week held its 100th annual meeting, has even opened its sauna bath and pool once a week for a "businessmen's plunge."

The main thrust of Y.W. activities these days is directed toward social action in the community. The St. Louis association, for instance, has started a letter-writing campaign to persuade the Missouri legislature to enact a fair-housing law. In Cincinnati, under a Y.W.-sponsored program social workers go to old-age nursing homes to entertain and teach lonely inmates recreational skills. Y.W. members now run a number of local Job Corps, Head Start and Neighborhood Youth Corps programs. In another tie-in with the federal antipoverty program, 27 Y.W. centers are opening their residences to 1,800 girls just out of the Job Corps.

Keeping the World. The Y.W. annual convention in 1946 formally banned racial discrimination. Association officials admit with some embarrassment that eleven Southern associations still operate segregated activities, but these have now been threatened with expulsion unless they change their ways. Last month the Y.W. elected its first Negro president, Mrs. Robert W. Claytor, the wife of a Grand Rapids physician. Mrs. Claytor sees her election as simply part of the general process of "barrier breaking" that has been going on in the Y.W. for decades.

As far back as the 1920s, the Y.W. dropped from its charter the requirement that members must be "ladies in good standing with an evangelical church." Although the Y.W. is no longer significantly Protestant--its membership includes Jews, Catholics and even atheists--its leaders intend to keep the word Christian in the organization's name. The Y.W., says Chicago Assistant Director Lucille Lamkin, is still basically religious, not in any narrow denominational sense but in the spirit of commitment and responsibility. "It is because we are Christian," says she, "that we welcome everybody."

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