Photo of a YWCA Employment Collection Box, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton MA

This toolkit was created to serve as a resource for organizations advocating for the rights of domestic workers. In order to move forward in advocacy and activism it is vital to have a strong understanding of the past so we can learn from those who engaged in this work before us.

This toolkit focuses on the history of the YWCA between the 1930s and 1950s and their work around organizing domestic workers and their employers. The primary goal of this website is to serve as a guide to accessing the YWCA employment records on domestic workers in Smith College’s Sophia Smith Collection. In order to make this collection more accessible, this site briefly documents the trajectory of the YWCA before the records were produced, and fills in the gaps and historical context of when the records were produced, so anyone interested in these records can have a better idea of what documents they are looking at when they consult these records. This toolkit is divided in several different sections, set up so the reader can select whichever section they would like to look through, without having to skim through the whole kit.

The aim is to digitize the documents in this collection that pertain to domestic workers and make them available through this website by 2018. For now, this offers a sampling.

This website was written and compiled by Camille Williams Ginsberg ’17. For more information on these papers contact the Sophia Smith Collection Archivist Maureen Callahan at mcallahan@smith.edu