“By Love, Serve One Another”: The YWCA of the USA and the Challenge of World Fellowship in Japan and Turkey, 1900s–1930s

By the 1910s, the international consortium of women involved in the interdenominational Protestant Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) faced a reckoning. Over the previous decade, a largely British and North American YWCA leadership had successfully expanded what they called the “association movement” into foreign mission countries, establishing dozens of multi-functional community centers in Africa, Asia, and South America. With their religious programming, educational offerings, recreational activities, and vocational assistance, YWCAs proved adaptable to a wide variety of settings. This success, however, brought the challenge of indigenization, a challenge that sharpened as an egalitarian Gospel rhetoric of foreign mission came up against anti-colonialist agitation. This paper details the experience of the Foreign Department of the YWCA of the U.S.A. in its attempts to turn over the associations it had launched in Japan and Turkey to local control. Using appeals to unified Christian womanhood, educator Michi Kawai secured local control of the Japanese YWCA through pragmatic strategies that resisted against the domineering practices of foreign administrators. Faced with the closure of their Istanbul association upon the establishment of the secular Republic of Turkey, American YWCA personnel dramatically revised programming, eliminating religious content, to meet community needs. Building from research conducted in the archives of both the U.S. and World YWCAs, these two case studies trace ways in which missionary attempts to bridge the divisions of nation, race, and creed played out in the human relationships necessary for sustaining institutions. Such interpersonal negotiations, I argue, compelled U.S. YWCA women to bring their institutional operating practices into closer alignment with their professed ideals of Christian sisterhood and global cooperation.