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The Homosocial Gospel: Winnifred Wygal and the Women Couples of the Young Women’s Christian Association of the USA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2025
Abstract
In the first decades of the twentieth century, several same-sex couples populated the professional workforce of the Young Women’s Christian Association of the USA (YWCA), one of the largest and most influential US women’s organizations. At the same time, discourses of medicine and law hardened around binary categories of sexual identity, giving rise to the regulation of homosexuality as a pathology and crime. Contesting assumptions that Christianity has historically served to suppress and punish same-sex romance and sexuality, this article investigates how middle-class white women employed by the national administration of the YWCA carved out an institutional space that was at once welcoming to female couples and deeply dedicated to Protestant faith traditions. While the ongoing influence of nineteenth-century ideals of homosocial romantic friendship had considerable influence on this space, an inquiry into the work of the YWCA theologian Winnifred Wygal reveals the ways in which liberal Christianity could be used to authorize, rather than prohibit, love between women in the face of modern frameworks of sexual identity.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
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25 Archivist Maida Goodwin alerted me to these photos. Elizabeth Herring, “Education vs. Training,” The Womans Press, February 1927, 97. See also Elizabeth Herring, “Education Unawares,” The Womans Press, November 1927, 789. For unknown reasons, the YWCA spelled Womans Press, the name of its publishing house and magazine, without an apostrophe.
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49 Smith-Rosenberg, “Female World of Love and Ritual,” 27.
50 Winnifred Wygal, Diary, May 1917, WW-SL.
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59 Wygal, Diary, January 25, 1931.
60 Wygal, Winnifred, The Superb Adventure: Acquiring a Theory of Living (New York: Womans Press, 1934)Google Scholar, foreword, 20. She quotes the George Matheson hymn “Make Me a Captive, Lord” (1890).
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63 Wygal, Diary, August 23, 1929.
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70 Wygal, Diary, February 28 and September 1930.
71 “Miss Frances Perry to Speak at CURW Tea,” Cornell Daily Sun, December 1936.
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73 Wygal, Diary, January 25, 1931.
74 Kathi Kern names the most “significant finding” in her account of these diaries not Wygal’s use of “religion as a protective buffer against encroachments of medical pathology and popular discourses that stigmatized same-sex desires” but, instead, Wygal’s creation of an “erotic life that lay outside the dominant paradigm of serial monogamy” (Kern, “Winnifred Wygal’s Flock,” 29).
75 Wygal, Diary, March 17, 1933.
76 Wygal, Diary, February 22 and March 23, 1928.
77 Wygal, Diary, January 11, 1931.
78 Wygal, Diary, September 13, 1931, and March 15, 1932.
79 Frances Perry to Winnifred Wygal, May 6, 1933, WW-SL.
80 Wygal, Diary, December 24, 1933.
81 Wygal, Diary, September 14, 1934.
82 Wygal, Diary, January 27, 1935.
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84 Wygal, Diary, January 8, 1944.
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86 Wygal, Diary, September 4–5, 1934.
87 Wygal, Diary, February 4–6, 1928.
88 The recommended reading included in her co-authored 1945 publication, Questions and Answers about YOU, 30–31, for example, includes Fritz Kunkel’s Let’s Be Normal, “an excellent, popularly written guide to the understanding of personality,” alongside such titles as Personal Problems of Everyday Life: Practical Aspects of Mental Hygiene, Have You Met Yourself?, and Life and Growth. The diaries housed at the Schlesinger Library and the collection of personal papers held at the Sophia Smith Collection contain relevant reading notes.
89 Kern, “Winnifred Wygal’s Flock,” 25.
90 Wygal, Diary, September 1934, 4–5.
91 Wygal, “On Having Been Born,” note, n.d.
92 See Freedman, “‘The Burning of Letters Continues,’” esp. 184–85, for insight into the self-fashioning of middle-class white women during this transitional period of sexual modernity.
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