The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) is a transnational, interdenominational Christian women’s membership organisation and gender equality NGO, originating in Victorian England and spread globally through the British Empire. The worldwide YWCA movement is constituted by autonomous national YWCAs in more than 100 countries, coordinated by the World YWCA (established 1894). The World YWCA has represented the interests of the YWCA movement at the United Nations (UN) through participation at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and special consultative status at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) since 1947.
Throughout the twentieth century, the YWCA of the USA, the world’s largest by membership, has financially supported the World YWCA and YWCAs in the majority world. Its power and influence have been significant within the YWCA movement and in broader transnational women’s organising throughout the twentieth century. This influence has existed alongside, and perhaps influenced by, growing US imperialism.
Through archival research, this project will investigate the YWCA of the USA’s activities in the worldwide YWCA movement to identify examples of complicity in, and resistance to, Christian, feminist, and US imperialism in international development.
This project, titled In service for the girls of the world”: The transnational influence of the YWCA of the USA, 1947–2023, will explore the role of the YWCA of the US by critically reading previously unexamined or under-examined documents held in three archives. These will include personal correspondence, ephemera, internal communiques, publications, newsletters, and other YWCA documents at (i) the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, (ii) the World YWCA’s archive at its offices in Geneva, Switzerland, and (iii) the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College, Massachusetts.
Through reading about the historical development of transnational relationships within the YWCA movement, the project will track the YWCA movement’s discourse and practice from 1947 to the present. The YWCA of the USA's financial and other contributions will be understood against the backdrop of wider relationships between the World YWCA and other powerful YWCAs, such as the YWCA of Great Britain, and between the World YWCA, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
Exploring and analysing the YWCA of the USA's contributions to the worldwide YWCA movement will be focused on projects and programmes that address women's and girls' sexuality and reproduction - sometimes referred to as "family planning", or sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). These are highly gendered concerns in which the YWCA has been interested for a long time, and which are also major areas of work for feminist movements, churches, international organisations, and the international development industry. The results of this project will shed light on women’s history and the history of international (development) institutions and offer a critical case study of the well-documented tendency of northern feminist and development organisations to perpetuate colonial and racist power dynamics transnationally.
(Re)telling these histories of the World YWCA and YWCA of the US will illuminate deeply rooted contemporary political, ethical, and policy concerns around coloniality, racism, and imperialism in the international development industry and women’s movements. The World YWCA is one of the main beneficiaries of this research project and the results will be shared directly with the organisation. Other women’s movements and gender NGOs will benefit from the insights distilled from the long history of transnational YWCA organising.
Image from Walker, Anne (1969). International Training Institute 1969. New York: YWCA of the USA, p25. Record Group 11. Microfilmed headquarters files, YWCA of the USA records, Sophia Smith Collection MS324, Smith College Special Collections, Northampton, Massachusetts. . Accessed 12 October 2023.