Since 1908, the YWCA McLean County has played a vital role in supporting the Bloomington-Normal community through advocacy programs and outreach. But 35 years earlier, in 1873, students from the Normal School (now Illinois State University) organized the first student chapter of the YWCA. Senior history major, Erin Wilcox, has explored the connections between the student chapter and McLean County’s organization.
Wilcox went into the internship looking to prepare for her professional career as a researcher. She was mentored by Dr. Kyle Ciani, a professor of history and a core faculty member for women’s gender and sexuality studies.
“My first step was to get context on the period, the progressive era. I was doing research in the archives from around the 1860s to 1940s,” said Wilcox. “Once I did that, I focused primarily on the lives of college women in that era.”
Beginning in a boarding house on School Street, the six founders of the Illinois State Normal University (ISNU) YWCA created their constitution in 1873. While enrolled at the University, they worked hard to support students on campus.
“They had a Thanksgiving party for students who were unable to go home,” said Ciani. “They provided a Christmas party and gifts for children whose families couldn’t provide that for them.”
Wilcox conducted most of her research on the group in the Dr. Jo Ann Rayfield Archives, reading through past ISNU yearbooks and editions of The Vidette.
“A majority of it was going through people’s letters and diaries. There’s a couple of meeting minute books I read through. Documents would detail what happened at meetings, or the mail from their mailing list,” said Wilcox. “There were also a couple of retrospectives from founding members.”
Wilcox’s time researching the archives equipped her with a core set of tools she intends to take with her to graduate school and beyond.
“I learned a lot of fundamental skills for archival research, how to handle these documents and how to handle such an interpersonal mystery,” said Wilcox. “I’m using the skills I gained from this to work on the writing sample I’m going use for graduate school applications. I wouldn’t have known how to do it without this internship, so this leads into my career, grad school, and beyond.”
“I taught her how to start from scratch. If you see clues, where are those clues going to lead you?” said Ciani. “I was able to see, over the course of the semester, a huge learning curve. What Erin learned is that the job of a historian is to not just look at information that’s in a file, but to find the file. She was learning about keywords, about where this information may appear in our archive.”
This is the sort of experience Ciani hopes all her students can have.
“I think it’s important, for my profession, that we continue to train our students on how to do primary research, how to go into an archive, because that’s where the meat is. All this stuff that’s been digitized, that’s kind of the broth, but the meat is really in those archives,” said Ciani. “This research—and all research—is a collaboration.”
Wilcox said her research showed her a familiar view of campus life and a community of women not so distant from her own college experiences.
“It was interesting to me to see the development of this and how it became such a major thing on campus,” said Wilcox. “Girls were befriending each other; It was a community thing, but it also was, in my interpretation, a way to make friends and have events to go to, similar to today.”
For the women of the YWCA’s first student chapter, Wilcox’s research provides a testament to a powerful legacy of service and care within the community.
“It didn’t surprise me the women from Illinois State Normal University were the ones who started the very first student association connected with the YWCA, because I continue to see so many wonderful RSOs (registered student organizations) being created at ISU. There’s this legacy of community activism,” said Ciani. “Illinois State students are committed to helping other people.”
