YWCA of Summit County
& The International Institute
Almost from its beginning, the Akron YWCA committed itself to helping the immigrant women in the city.
Two reasons accounted for this activism -- conditions within the city of Akron and the programming preferences of the national organization.
In the early 20th century, Akron was a city of immigrants.
Almost 50 percent of those living in the city were immigrants or children of the foreign born. Many of these immigrants were from Eastern Europe and could not speak English fluently.
To reach them, the YWCA began offering English language classes in the factories of the city in 1904. Soon after, English language classes were offered at the central YWCA offices downtown.
In offering classes like this, the Akron organization was in step with the goals of the YWCA nationally. Many associations located in cities with large immigrant populations -- Boston, New York, Cleveland -- were offering English language classes or were working in other ways to help the female immigrant population.
The immigrant woman received further attention and greater emphasis from the national organization after 1910. That year, the U.S. Immigration Commission issued a report that highlighted the new immigrant -- the non-Anglo-Saxon who faced language difficulties and problems adjusting to American life. In response, the national YWCA committed itself to easing the transition and set up the administrative ground work for the creation of International Institutes affiliated with individual associations and responding to the conditions peculiar to the immigrant population of each individual city.
It was up to the individual organization to determine if conditions existed within the city to merit the start of a local International Institute. Akron had a large immigrant base to its population: more than 7,000 were foreign born and another 13,000 were children of immigrants. Akron needed an International Institute, the local YWCA decided.
In 1918, the Akron YWCA created the city's International Institute committed to helping people of foreign birth. But first the Akron YWCA had some work to do. It started by hiring an immigration secretary, Shirley Leonard, who would oversee the YWCA's contact with the immigrants in the city.
Leonard did not wait for the immigrant to get to the city. She arranged for the government to send regular reports to the Akron YWCA with the names of foreign-born women landing in Ellis Island and planning to settle in the city.
Leonard reported to an Immigration Committee which had a broad mandate of easing the plight of the immigrant woman. By 1918, it was clear that the best way to do this was through an International Institute.
The Institute was run by Leonard assisted by volunteers who acted as interpreters for new arrivals. The Institute itself was administered by a Committee of Management, a semi-autonomous group of 21 women, many of whom were foreign born or daughters of immigrants. Thus, from its start, the International Institute had the administrative status of a branch, a status which would be problematic for the Akron YWCA in the future.
Akron's International Institute started almost as a war necessity. Many of the foreign-speaking men in the city were being drafted and could not read or complete the induction papers.
One of the first responsibilities of the International Institute in Akron was processing these inductees into the military and then helping their families get their benefits.
Leonard, her staff and volunteers soon discovered that the demands on the Institute would be varied and seemingly endless.
During the influenza epidemic of 1918 that hit the immigrant population of Akron particularly hard, the Institute staff and volunteers translated for physicians and explained medical orders in ways that the non-English speaking residents could understand.
When the immigrant ran into difficulties with government, the Institute sorted out immigration forms.
The International Institute also offered English language classes and a range of citizenship classes. It was a complicated task.
Immigrants settling in Akron came from many parts of Eastern Europe -- Italy, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Austria, the Ukraine, Serbia and Lithuania. The International Institute at times seemed a Midwest version of the League of Nations with the variety of languages spoken and the different cultural ways.
At various times during the YWCA sponsorship, the Institute served up to 41 nationalities -- many with their own languages. Leonard and the secretaries who followed her needed to speak the language -- or have access to people who did -- of every nationality represented by the Institute.
Citizenship was not the sole goal of the International Institute in Akron.
The city's organization was also committed to preserving the culture of the immigrants. Most nationalities created their own clubs that met regularly at the YWCA rooms earmarked for the International Institute and socialized. Akron's International Institute seemed to strike a balance between Americanization and keeping the native culture alive.
Striking a balance between Americanization and the native culture was often difficult for individual families and Institute staff stepped in there as well. Institute staff members tried to ease the tension by counseling families facing intercultural and intergenerational problems.
The International Institute, then, played an educational, cultural and social role in the lives of the immigrants of the city.
During the Depression, it assumed an economic role during the Depression. The International Institute started its own employment bureau to help the immigrant and the children of the foreign born find jobs. In 1932, more than 2,000 found jobs through the agency and another 1,000 received aid or relief.
The International Institute in Akron became known as the "only agency in the city with trained workers to deal with the foreign born and their children, which constitute nearly one-third of our population," honorary chairperson Wright wrote in the Institute's history.
Serving 20,299 Akronites through its clubs, classes and socials, the International Institute had become a large, powerful body within Akron's YWCA in the 1930s.
But the Institute was an organization isolated from the rest of the Akron YWCA. Few Institute members took advantage of the YWCA's programs or became a part of the other branches. The board of the YWCA suspected that the Institute was not encouraging immigrant women and girls to do so. Not so, the Institute replied, their members just did not feel comfortable at YW-sponsored events or clubs.
Beginning in the 1930s, the board of the YWCA began to wonder if the semi-autonomous organization of the International Institute was best for the Akron YW. If the Institute became a department, board members speculated, more immigrant women and their daughters might participate in the total YWCA program.During the Depression, when the Akron YWCA was facing staff cutbacks even as unemployment and training services expanded, the move seemed logical.
But the Institute would have none of it. "Because of our set-up as a branch," Institute representatives emphasized, "we gave opportunities for foreign women to develop. The things we did for them would be impossible under a department."
The arguments worked. But a decade later, in an ugly, public battle, the Akron YWCA and the International Institute would revisit the question. The YWCA board would vote to make the Institute a department and that action would trigger a bitter divorce.
During World War II, the International Institute and the Akron YWCA continued their separate programming. There still was little interaction between the groups but there was no official discussion on how to handle the issue.
Throughout the U.S., the International Institutes were becoming a problem for the YWCA. By the late 1930s, the Institutes were either converted to departments under the direct supervision of the individual association's general secretary (executive director) or split from the YWCA and organized independently. By the end of World War II, only five International Institutes existed as semi-autonomous organizations under city associations of the YWCA.By the end of 1947, there would be one less. The Akron International Institute would become a separate organization, much to the surprise of the Akron YWCA and its board of directors.
There were many reasons for the split. Some might explain it as a series of personality conflicts. The Institute Director Laura Haines did have problems with a number of influential women leaders in the organization. But that would be an oversimplification of deeper problems between the Akron YWCA and its International Institute.
Haines was part of a new generation of YWCA leaders who were pro-labor and pro-integration and who defined international more broadly than European.
When Haines arrived at the Institute in 1944, she embraced the national YWCA's recommendations for "more inter-racial and inter-faith programs." The programs she started veered from the traditional European focus of Akron's International Institute.
The Institute under Haines hosted a Fiesta of the Americas that included Mexican railroad workers of Akron and concerts that reflected the diversity of nationalities, faiths and races present within the city.
She looked into starting clubs to serve West Indian immigrants and began integrating the Institute into the Akron YWCA by inviting African-American members of a Business and Industrial club to a Russian Women's dinner.
Many leaders of the International Institute, tied to the European focus that had always served the group so well in the past, objected.
They complained of Haines' "arrogant, dictatorial ways." They objected to the new programming that seemed out of touch with the interests of the members and the new inter-racial group that was being "forced" on the Institute.They didn't care for the new reading room literature -- "too pro-labor." One Institute member called it "pink." They didn't like Haines' hiring practices either. She had hired a "Russian Jew" as a caseworker.
Haines replied that under her direction the Institute had been revitalized. The Institute was more active and more inclusive, "indeed cosmopolitan in its cultural and racial make-up." The real problem, she asserted, was the "total social scene and my leadership has provided an easily identified focal point for the problems that must be collectively faced."
Meanwhile, the YWCA Board of Directors was looking into ways to best serve the immigrant population in Akron. Within the Institute, there seemed to be two alternatives -- the traditional European focus or Haines' more inclusive, albeit more controversial, approach.
The Board had its Committee on Community study the issue and come up with some recommendations. The committee seemed more in sympathy with Haines' administration and recommended that all YWCA programs be open to women and girls of foreign birth, that the organization assume responsibility for immigration and naturalization services and that the Institute lose its semi-autonomous status and become a department.
A number of the Institute members objected, calling the Institute a "haven to the foreign born," that immigrant women had learned to "express freedom" there and that the foreign born needed to "grow our own leaders."
But when the vote was taken, the YWCA approved the report and made the Institute a department.
If the Board thought that the vote settled the issue, it would soon see its mistake. The leadership of the International Institute secretly organized its own group, the International Center.
On January 15, 1948, the group went public. The leadership of the new International Center was the leadership of the old International Institute. Virtually every club once associated with the YWCA's International Institute aligned with the new group. The Community Chest supported the new organization and the Beacon Journal welcomed it as "THE central organization of foreign-born groups in Akron."
Two months later, when it finally became clear to the YWCA's leadership that the loyalties of the nationality groups rested with the Center, the YW released the International Institute name.
The story of the International Institute as a part of the Akron YWCA was over.Photos courtesy of The University of Akron Archives.
