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The Young Women 's Christian Organization Traces Essay

Decent Essays

The social organization in my local area that I chose to write about is the YWCA. The Young Women’s Christian Organization traces its roots back to the Victorian Era England, where two separate organizations, Emma Robart’s prayer Union and Mary Jane Kinnard’s General Female Training Institute, were chartered in 1855. As the industrial revolution brought sweeping changes to establish ideology of women’s place in the home, these two initiatives shared a concern, for the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of women and girls everywhere. Within a few years they united under the name YWCA. The first Associations in the United States focused on providing clean, safe, affordable housing to these displaced women, as well as traveler’s aide, meals, professional training, employment bureaus and social outlets. From its infancy, the YWCA movement emphasized inclusion of women from all ages, races, nationalities, backgrounds and interests, a tenet that remains central to the YWCA’s work today. The YWCA of Great Falls was organized in 1911 by a panel of 25 women from local churches. The YWCA at Valeria Hall here offered safe, clean housing, a cafeteria, laundry facilities, and an employment bureau, a directory of rooming houses, traveler’s aid, an educational department, and club rooms for high school girls. In the 30’s and 40’s the YWCA of Great Falls evolved to meet the needs of the community as the United States experienced a period of depression, and then war. As World War

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