A New Haven for Working Women
The newly organized Young Women's Christian Association opens its doors to provide meals, employment, and safety to Seattle's laboring class.
The story, cleaned up
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The Seattle Young Women's Christian Association is now fully organized and will formally open its rooms in the Shoddy building at Third and Columbia streets. The association provides an employment department, a reading room, and a noon-rest committee that offers affordable meals for working women. Recognizing the vulnerabilities faced by women arriving in a growing city, the association has also formed a lookout committee to meet overland trains and boats, ensuring that new arrivals are directed to safe, reputable boarding houses rather than being left to the dangers of the streets.
“The lookout committee will soon be sufficiently organized to have someone attend the arrival of overland trains and boats to greet any young women having no at hand.”
This 1894 effort to support transient, single women moving to the city for work mirrors modern-day civic efforts to provide housing stability and social services to vulnerable populations in a rapidly changing Seattle.
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