“Abundant Life for All”: American YWCA Workers in Turkey, 1920–35
Historians of Turkish women have debated just how feminist the state of the early Republic really was. While Ayse Durakbasa and Aynur Ilyasoglu argue that “women played crucial roles as agents of modernization,” but as Jenny B. White points out, this was a role best played out as wives and mothers. Simten Cosar pushes this line of argument further, writing that “While Kemalist policies provided an opening for women in terms of legal and political equality, they nevertheless restricted women’s liberation within the contours of the republican regime.”[1] The work undertaken by American women under the aegis of the Young Women’s Christian Association during the early years of the Republic, I argue, highlights the inherent contradictions of so-called state feminism in a newly created secular state.
This paper also explores the challenges the YWCA faced in Turkey in the interwar years as these American women sought to establish “a world fellowship of women with a Christian ideal” in an emerging nation that while now secular was undeniably still vastly Muslim. Relying extensively on the Records of the YWCA and the papers of several “Y” women including Florence Billings, Elizabeth Dodge Huntington Clarke, and Ruth Woodsmall, I will explore the goals and achievements of this complex organization as it sought to establish “abundance for all” by establishing a fellowship of women and girls around the world.
[1]Ayse Durakbasa and Aynur Ilyasoglu, “Formation of Gender Identities in Republican Turkey and Women’s Narratives as Transmitters of ‘Herstory’ of Modernization,” Journal of Social History Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn 2001): 195-203, quote, p. 200; Jenny B. White, “State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman,” NWSA Journal Vol. 15, No. 3 (Fall, 2003): 145-159; Simten Cosar, “Women in Turkish Political Thought: Between Tradition and Modernity,” Feminist Review No. 86 (2007): 113-131, quote, p. 127.