BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Donations To contribute, make checks payable to the YWCA, 898 Walnut St., Cincinnati, Ohio 45202, or call 241-7090.

In 1929, the women of Cincinnati gave a new meaning to the term homemakers.

They made a home all right, but this one was for themselves.

In a day when a dollar was a respectable half-day's wage, the women raised $1 million to build the 12-story YWCA that still stands at the corner of Ninth and Walnut streets.

Back then, it featured fudge kitchens and sewing and singing parlours - the definition of ''home'' to hundreds of hopeful young women who left the countryside to seek employment in the city.

Today, it is a different kind of home for Cincinnati women and girls. A home for the spirit as much as the body. A place to find skills, support and hope.

Just as it sounds, the YWCA is a place caught between two realities. The reality of what Cincinnati women sought to build in 1929, and what Cincinnati women need in 1997. Today a new building campaign is under way, and a new set of ''homemakers'' seeks to raise $1 million.

The YWCA board of directors is completing a $4.6 million campaign that will establish a new shelter for battered women and their children, renovate a day care center, and expand treatment programs for men who batter.

It will more than double the occupancy rate of the Y's shelter, the only one for women in Hamilton County. It will mean longer and better child care so that mothers can train for jobs. It will mean space and resources to deal with the roots of domestic violence.

A place of safety, opportunity and education - that is what ''home'' looks like for women in 1997.

And, of course, it is what the city's foremothers wanted for females in 1929.

Today's Y leaders look back at those women often, to marvel at their persistence and ingenuity.

Raised more than money

Their $1 million was raised by women, for women and, most remarkably, from women. At a time when relatively few women were employed outside the home, and fewer still controlled the family finances, the Y leaders challenged women to think of themselves as philanthropists.

The women sold aprons for $1. They scheduled small social events as fund-raisers. They got up the nerve to talk to their husbands about finances, to claim part of their own money as, indeed, their own.

And so they raised more than money. They raised pride, awareness and not least of all their voices. And they built more than a building. They built self-sufficiency. They built sisterhood.

It still stands. It all still stands.

The YWCA of Cincinnati is calling on women today. There is still $1 million to raise for the capital campaign. The Y wants it to come from females.

They want it to come from paychecks from women who now have the chance for education and advancement. From family finances that women now see as rightfully partly their own.

And they want it to come from whence it has always come. From the hearts of compassionate women who have always known they were their sister's keeper.

In some ways, it is more of a challenge than in 1929.

Claim money as their own

As much as they have advanced in other ways, women have not made great strides in philanthropy. Though females make up 42 percent of all chief financial officers and 60 percent of all program staff of charitable foundations, still only 5 percent of charitable dollars go to women's and girls' causes, according to the national organization Women and Philanthropy.

Women give freely, but they often don't give to women's causes. Perhaps they still have a hard time claiming money as their own. Perhaps they don't understand the sense of pride and unity it gives to build something by and for women.

Here's that chance for local women.

Send a message of support and hope to the women of Cincinnati, from the women of Cincinnati. From investment clubs and Brownie troops. From lawyers' groups and librarians' groups. From mothers, daughters and grandmothers.

And always from sisters, for we are all, every one of us, one of them.

Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

RAMSEY ARCHIVE