Scrapbooks and Social Awareness: A Self-Curated History of the Oberlin YWCA


Part 1: Domestic Arts     |     Part 2: Student-Faculty Discussions
Part 3: Career Symposia     |     Part 4: Interracial Relations
Bibliography


Scrapbooks and Social Awareness: A Self-Curated History of the Oberlin YWCA

Scrapbooks and Social Awareness: A Self-Curated History of the Oberlin YWCA

Allen House
In the 1940s, Allen House (Behind Baldwin Cottage) housed the headquarters of the YWCA. Photo: Pictorial Memories of Oberlin, 1976. Oberlin College Archives.

Project Group: Olivia Goffman, Yancey Hitt, and Gabi Shiner

Student Editor: Natalia Shevin

The first Young Women’s Christian Association chapter was founded in 1858 in New York City, and by 1894 Oberlin College established a chapter. At both the national and local level, YWCA worked to wed Christianity and service, especially in education, social work, and charity. In 1947, Mariam Kennedy, Chair of Y. W. C. A.’s Advisory Board, wrote “The Y in its program and its basic principles refuses to separate religion from the rest of life and thereby preserves the integrity of both.”[1]

Oberlin YWCA’s scrapbooks from 1940 to 1946 coincide with World War II. They record the public programming and statements of YWCA, while reflecting members’ personalities. Ellen Gruber Garvey writes, “Scrapbooks declare that they are something other than files of clippings; the framework and arrangement of materials they embody are works in themselves. Scrapbooks… materialize the collector’s vision, and each reflects the desire to promulgate a particular understanding of or

YWCA
YM/YWCA Photos, 1908-09, 1914, 1939-63, RG 29, Subgroup III, Series 4, Box 1

relationship to the material it presents.”[2] In many cases the YW member who compiled the scrapbook annotated newspaper clippings; in so doing, they were  responding to what they perceived as misidentifications in The Oberlin Review, or privately answering the comments of administrators quoted in an article . In this way, “Women activists understood the press not as a simple record but as a set of voices and conversations to be read critically and culled by the scrapbook maker who ensured that the correct view, as she saw it, survived.”[3] Beyond their scrapbooks, Oberlin YWCA produced extensive annual reports targeted at both the College and national YWCA to demonstrate their dedication to collective memory.

Dancing on Old Barrows Lawn
Dancing on Old Barrows Lawn
YM/YWCA Photos, 1908-09, 1914, 1939-63, RG 29, Subgroup III, Series 4, Box 1

The World War II years presented an opportunity for YW members to engage in new areas of service: in addition to their annual programming of student-faculty discussion series and career symposia, YW addressed interracial relations nationally and on campus through the rhetoric of democracy. This mini-edition details the consistencies and changes of YW activity during World War II, at a time when both the nation and Oberlin College were on the precipice of social change.


[1] YWCA Annual Reports, 1945/46-1950/51, Series II, RG 29, Box 6, O. C. A.

[2] Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing With Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 208.

[3] Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing With Scissors, 173.