In 1920, the working-class members of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), numbering some thirty thousand, convinced the Association to endorse a workers' rights platform at the height of the red scare. The YWCA's original mission was to extend the protections of middle-class, Protestant virtue to young workingwomen. However, workingwomen reworked the association's "Christian Purpose" into a tool to radically increase its commitment to labor issues. This article suggests how both social feminism and the Social Gospel were shaped by working-class women. It shows how workingwomen intervened in intra-Protestant debates to insist on equal citizenship within a purportedly democratic, cross-class women's organization. Having begun by seeking to convert workingwomen to evangelical Protestantism, YWCA leaders had found themselves converted—by a mix of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish women—to political activism as an expression of faith.

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This article examines how a group of Black and White YWCA staff members seized the opportunities of World War I to advance a racial justice agenda through Young Women's Christian Association programs for working women. First, they created YWCA program work for thousands of Black working women that paralleled the YWCA's Industrial Program, which followed YWCA segregation policies. Second, they made claims for social justice based on Black women's labor contributions, in contrast to both earlier reformers' focus on elite Black women and other wartime activists' focus on soldiers' service. Finally, in a period best known for White people's violent resistance to Black advances, they fostered a program culture and structures that encouraged White working-class women to view African American coworkers as colleagues and to understand racial justice as part of a broader social justice agenda. Arguing that interracial cooperation among working people was crucial to social progress, they made African American laboring women and White working-class allies both symbolically and literally crucial to wartime and postwar civil rights efforts. Their efforts contribute to our understanding of the changing discourse of “respectability” and the impact of World War I on the Black Freedom Struggle.

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