Dorothea Browder

The YWCA’s Industrial Program was an innovative experiment in citizenship education that illuminates connections among interwar women’s labor and racial justice organizers, the Christian Left, and US government agencies. From the 1910s through the 1940s, the Industrial Program organized tens of thousands of women across the United States each year. It encouraged personal growth, developed leadership skills, and fostered a sense of class-based female solidarity that staff called “group consciousness,” with innovative pedagogy centering working women’s experiences. Organizing workers whom labor unions neglected, the program also pioneered social work methods, fostered collaboration among social scientists and racial and immigrant rights advocates, and shaped the labor education movement.