Making Efficient (and Clean) Domestics: Coming Street YWCA’s Training School for Domestic Workers Racial Uplift through Racial Acquiescence

Black women’s spiritual lives have always been integral to their social lives, activism, and productive labor. However, because “the Black Church” has been historically marked as a space of exclusively male leadership, Black women’s religious and political labors are too often viewed as supplementary to the life of Black religious institutions. Additionally, scholarship on Black women’s religious and morally informed labor activism is frequently restricted to the contributions of Black women within Black Protestant denominations. Therefore, examinations of Black women’s clubs and organizations as extraecclesial institutions—not directly connected to a church or denomination, but informed and structured by religious and moral sensibilities— allow scholars of religion and labor to illustrate intersections of Black women’s labor advocacy and spiritual and moral praxes outside of church institutions. Interrogations of clubwomen’s economic uplift efforts also allow scholarship to delineate class markers among Black women in a way that the ecclesial dichotomy of minister and laity does not.

Black feminist historians have expanded the lexicons of religion and labor through their studies of clubwomen as integral actors in religious/moral formation and industrial training of the Black working class from the Progressive Era (1890-1920) to World War II. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Darlene Clark Hine, Bettye Collier-Thomas, and Judith Weisenfeld illustrate how domestic institutes for Black women by Black merit inclusion as sites of labor activism and racial and gendered agency while also promoting competitive domestic positions as a realistic and trainable ideal for poor Black women, particularly in the urban South. 

Black clubwomen’s domestic training schools and institutes also employed techniques of intra-racial policing such as rigorous health and hygiene screenings to prove that their students were capable cooks, maids, laundresses, and nurses, and physically healthy. Because Black women who ran domestic science schools saw vocational training as a racial, economic, and religious/moral imperative, the students’ health, industriousness, and morality were intertwined. In other words, these schools cast the industrious, well-trained Black domestic as a healthy and moral Black woman. This project presents the Coming Street YWCA’s Training School for Domestic Workers (Charleston, SC) as a case study of Black clubwomen’s efforts to have their students achieve higher paying domestic employment through merit while also acquiescing to the white gaze by subjecting their students to health examinations upon their completion. This case inserts the precarious role of class as clubwomen—mainly among the city’s Black middle and upper class monitored the health of their working-class counterparts in the name of economic uplift.

Since 2022, I have conducted archival research as part of my broader dissertation project on Black women’s labor movements in Charleston, South Carolina. My work has uncovered records from the 1930s and 40s detailing the Coming Street YWCA’s work not only as a center for recreation but also as an employment clearinghouse and job training site for the city’s Black women and girls. Records include planning documents for the Training School for Domestic Workers, daily schedules and menus to be prepared by students, itemized program budgets, enrollment statistics, and bi-monthly blood test reports documenting the students’ names with an “X” indicating the number of times they were tested. However, individual test results are not disclosed in these records.

As an extraecclesial organization, the Coming Street Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Charleston, SC was one of the few African American operated YWCA branches in the early 20th century. When founded in 1907, the “Colored Branch” sought to align with the YWCA’s international mission of “bringing about the kingdom of God among young women,” and “look out for the future mothers of the race.” White Charlestonians even lauded the Coming Street branch as a worthy Christian organization that assumed the burden of supporting the Black poor. On the heels of the New Deal, the YWCA branch received 400 calls from white employers seeking workers. However, only half of the Black women who came to the YWCA looking for employment referrals qualified for job placement. Instead of citing wage discrepancies between factory jobs and domestic service, higher risks of physical and sexual assault while working in white households, and (albeit racially biased) labor codes via the New Deal that omitted household workers, the Coming Street leadership determined that lagging domestic placement rates was squarely due to Black women’s “inefficiency.”  

One year later, their indictment of poor Black women seeking work became more apparent in a 1938 report. “Not having much of a standard of living themselves,” the Coming Street branch claimed, “it is almost impossible to expect much knowledge of what to do in a well-arranged home.” In response to this conclusion, Coming Street opened the Training School for Domestic Workers on November 7, 1938. Beginning with sixty-two registrants, the institute featured a core curriculum of cooking, serving, table setting, cleaning, and personal appearance and hygiene. However, meeting the school’s curriculum and basic hygiene standards did not automatically result in students being referred to white employers. The YWCA informed the Charleston’s press that students must also pass a health inspection, including blood testing. The training school’s blood testing of its students coincides with increasing venereal disease rates within the city, and Charleston County. As venereal disease rates increased, Dr. Raymond A. Vonderleher, who would later become the first director of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, advised white Charleston to adopt anti-syphilis programs to ensure that white homes hired healthy Black servants. I contend that this promotion of the race-based monitoring of venereal diseases along with Coming Street’s YWCA efforts to produce well trained and healthy Black women points to how the economic subsistence of poor Black women, and extraecclesial programs supporting them, remain tethered and (sometimes acquiescent) to racial imaginaries of Black health and morality.