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

Black women's clubs and organizations can be situated as extraecclesial sites that illustrate intersections of Black women’s labor advocacy and spiritual and moral praxes outside of church institutions. This project presents the Coming Street YWCA’s Training School for Domestic Workers (Charleston, SC) as a an extraecclesial site and 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.