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A Social Gospel for India1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2014

Karen Phoenix
Karen Phoenix*
Affiliation:
Washington State University
*
karenphoenix76@gmail.com; karen.phoenix@wsu.edu
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Abstract

This article discusses the ways that secretaries in the U.S. Young Women's Christian Association (USYWCA) used the Social Gospel to create a type of imagined community, which I call Y-space, in India. In the United States, USYWCA secretaries emphasized Social Gospel ideals such as the personal embodiment of Christ-like behavior, inclusivity, and working for the progress of society. In India, USYWCA secretaries used these same ideas to try to make Y-space an alternative to both the exclusive, traditional, British imperial “clubland” and the growing Hindu and Muslim nationalist movement. Instead, they promoted an idealized Americanized Anglo Indian/Christian woman who would engage in civic matters and embody Christian values, and serve as an alternative to the British memsahib, and the Hindu nationalist woman. Despite the USYWCA's efforts to distinguish itself from British imperialists, the secretaries' attempts to create these Americanized Indian women reveals that that the USYWCA supported transforming Indian society according to imposed Western models, in much the same way as the British.

Type
Theme: Women's and Gender History in Global Context
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 200 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2014 

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Kristin Hoganson, who generously gave feedback on this article, as well as Antoinette Burton, Elizabeth Pleck, and Augusto Espiritu, who helped shape the original dissertation chapter from which this is drawn. Grants from the History Department and the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign helped fund the necessary archival research.

References

2 Wilson, Elizabeth, Fifty Years of Association Work among Young Women, 1866–1916: A History of Young Women's Christian Associations in the United States of America (New York, 1916)Google Scholar, 184.

3 Wilson, Fifty Years of Association Work among Young Women, 1866–1916, 185; Boyd, Nancy, Emissaries: The Overseas Work of the American YWCA, 1895–1970 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar, 34.

4 Journal of Agnes Hill, quoted in Wilson, Elizabeth, The Story of Fifty Years: Of the Young Women's Christian Association of India, Burma and Ceylon (Calcutta, 1925)Google Scholar, 23.

5 Wilson, The Story of Fifty Years, 30,103.

6 During the period of my study, the YWCA in India was officially named the Young Women's Christian Association of India, Burma, and Ceylon, which I have shortened to “India YWCA.” As in the United States, the India YWCA was a large organization that covered a broad geographic area. I have focused on the national India YWCA and the Calcutta YWCA, where the India YWCA was headquartered.

7 From the journal of Agnes Hill, quoted in Wilson, The Story of Fifty Years, 23.

8 Sengupta, Padmini, A Hundred Years of Service: Centenary Volume of the Y.W.C.A. of Calcutta, 1878–1978 (Calcutta, 1987)Google Scholar, 57.

9 Elizabeth Wilson, Fifty Years of Association Work among Young Women, 1866–1916, 185; Boyd, Emissaries, 34.

10 Kramer, Paul A., “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88 (Mar. 2002): 1315–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Mayo, Katherine, Mother India, ed. Sinha, Mrinalini (1927; Ann Arbor, MI, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Anagol, Padma, “Indian Christian Women and Indigenous Feminism, c. 1850–c. 1920” in Gender and Imperialism, ed. Midgley, Clare (Manchester, 1998)Google Scholar, 91.

13 Clymer, Kenton J., “Samuel Evans Stokes, Mahatma Gandhi, and Indian Nationalism,” Pacific Historical Review 59 (Feb. 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 52.

14 Here I am using the concepts of space as articulated in Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar. While Y-space was an imagined community as defined by Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991)Google Scholar, USYWCA secretaries thought of it as transcending nationalism.

15 For the list of general secretaries from 1896–1924, Appendix C: Indian National Committee in Wilson, The Story of Fifty Years, 116. For the subsequent dates, see listings in individual annual reports, reel 56—National Annual Reports, YWCA of the USA Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA [hereafter YWCA-USA].

16 Ballantyne, Tony, “Religion, Difference, and the Limits of British Imperial History,” Victorian Studies 47 (Spring 2005): 427–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cox, Jeffrey, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA, 2002)Google Scholar; Etherington, Norman, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Singh, Maina Chawla, Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia, (1860s–1940s) (New York, 2000).Google Scholar

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18 William Hutchinson counted 1,667 American missionaries, compared to 493 continental Europeans in India in 1910. See the appendix to Hutchison, William R., “A Moral Equivalent for Imperialism: Americans and the Promotion of “Christian Civilization”, 1880–1910” in Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era, 1880–1920, ed. Christensen, Torben and Hutchison, William R. (Aarhus, Denmark, 1982), 167–78.Google Scholar

19 Wilson, Fifty Years of Association Work among Young Women, 1866–1916, 23.

20 Both of these groups were trying to increase membership in the 1910s—particularly Catholic and Orthodox women in Estonia, Romania, and South America. As explained in Saunders, Una M., The Æcumenical Policy of the World's YWCA, Revised (Geneva, Switzerland, 1939), 3–4Google Scholar, at the time, Orthodox women in Russia and Bulgaria were also calling for the YWCA to allow Orthodox women members.

21 Fifth National Convention of the Young Women's Christian Association of the United States of America, Los Angeles, California, May 5–11, 1915 (New York, 1915), 53.

22 Benedicte Wilhjelm to “Dear Friends,” Aug. 14, 1935, 1, reel 57—India—Personal Correspondence—Benedict Wilhjelm, YWCA-USA.

23 “Association Conference—Anandagiri, 4–24 April, 1939,” List of Delegates, reel 56—India Conferences—Misc, YWCA-USA.

24 Ibid.

25 “The Blue Triangle, Published by the Columbo Young Women's Christian Association,” May–June 1939, 1, reel 56—India—Conferences—Misc, YWCA-USA. Sadhu Sundar Singh was an Indian Christian missionary, while Toyohiko Kagawa was a prominent Japanese Christian missionary.

26 Ruth Cowdrey, Feb. 1926, 2, reel 57—India—Staff Reports—Cowdrey, YWCA-USA.

27 Quoted in Edwards, Wendy J. Deichmann and Gifford, Carolyn De Swarte, eds., Gender and the Social Gospel (Urbana, IL, 2003)Google Scholar, 3.

28 One example of this is the increasing quantity and range of biographies and histories of Jesus, along with Social Gospel tracts pointing to his life as a model. Examples include Edward Increase Bosworth, Studies in the Life of Jesus Christ (New York, 1907)Google Scholar; Bosworth, Christ in Everyday Life (New York, 1910)Google Scholar; Stokes, Anson Phelps, What Jesus Christ Thought of Himself: An Outline Study and Interpretation of His Self-Revelation in the Gospels (New York, 1916)Google Scholar; Slack, Elvira J., Jesus, the Man of Galilee: Studies in the Life of Jesus Arranged for Secondary School Students, Adapted Both to Class Use and Personal Study, 4th ed. (New York, 1916)Google Scholar; Rauschenbusch, Walter, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York, 1911)Google Scholar; Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York, 1914)Google Scholar; Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York, 1917)Google Scholar; Russell, Elbert, The Parables of Jesus: A Course of Ten Lessons Arranged for Daily Study (New York, 1912).Google Scholar

29 Elliott, Harrison Sacket and Cutler, Ethel, Student Standards of Action (New York, 1914)Google Scholar, 17.

30 Handbook of the Young Women's Christian Association Movement (New York, 1914)Google Scholar, 17.

31 USYWCA secretaries were not alone in viewing Gandhi as an adherent of Social Gospel ideals. See Danielson, Leilah C., “‘In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi’: American Pacifists, Christianity, and Gandhian Nonviolence, 1915–1941,” Church History 72 (June 2003): 361–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, Leonard A., “Mahatma Gandhi's Dialogues with Americans,” Economic and Political Weekly 37 (Feb. 26, 2002): 337–52Google Scholar. Some Christian leaders, such as the former missionary E. Stanley Jones, found similarities between Gandhi's promotion of selfless service and work for others and Christian teaching—a position with political consequences, as the British government began to deport American missionaries whom officials deemed politically radical in the 1920s. Clymer, “Samuel Evans Stokes, Mahatma Gandhi, and Indian Nationalism,” 54. For Jones, Gandhi had even been a type of Christian missionary because “by his life and outlook and methods he has been the medium through which a great deal of this interest in Christ has come.” Jones, E. Stanley, The Christ of the Indian Road (New York, 1925)Google Scholar, quoted in Gordon, “Mahatma Gandhi's Dialogues with Americans,” 339.

32 Faith Parmelee to “Dear Friends,” Dec. 5, 1928, 3, reel 57—India—Personal Correspondence—Faith Parmelee, YWCA-USA.

33 Quoted in Wilson, Fifty Years of Association Work among Young Women, 1866–1916, 235–36.

34 See Blair, Karen J., “The Limits of Sisterhood: The Woman's Building in Seattle, 1908–1921,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 8 (Spring 1985): 45–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bolt, Christine, Sisterhood Questioned?: Race, Class and Internationalism in the American and British Women's Movements, c. 1880s–1970s (London, 2004)Google Scholar; Reynolds, Katherine Chaddock and Schramm, Susan L., A Separate Sisterhood: Women who Shaped Southern Education in the Progressive Era (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; Robertson, Nancy Marie, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46 (Urbana, IL, 2007).Google Scholar

35 Hunter, Jane, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven, CT, 1984)Google Scholar; Robert, Dana Lee, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, GA, 1996)Google Scholar; Hill, Patricia Ruth, The World Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1985).Google Scholar

36 Sinha, Mrinalini, “Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India,” Journal of British Studies 40 (Oct. 2001): 489–521CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation 489.

37 Sinha, “Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere,” 501.

38 “Annual Report for 1931” in “Young Women's Christian Association Calcutta 1932 Year book,” 7, reel 56—India—Printed Matter—Calcutta, YWCA-USA.

39 Leonard Woolf quoted in Sinha, “Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere,” 490.

40 Anagol, Padma, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920 (Burlington, VT, 2006)Google Scholar; Burton, Antoinette M., “From Child Bride to ‘Hindoo Lady’: Rukhmabai and the Debate on Sexual Respectability in Imperial Britain,” American Historical Review 103 (Oct. 1998): 1119–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994)Google Scholar; Sinha, Mrinalini, Guy, Donna J., and Woollacott, Angela, eds., Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Mani, Lata, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, CA, 1998)Google Scholar; Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995).Google Scholar

41 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, “Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education” in Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, ed. Young, G. M. (Cambridge, MA, 1957).Google Scholar

42 Chatterjee, Partha, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question” in Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology, ed. Castle, Gregory (Oxford, 2001), 151–66Google Scholar. For criticisms of Chatterjee's well-known argument, see the introduction to Mazumdar, Vina and Kasturi, Leela, eds., Women and Indian Nationalism (New Delhi, 1994)Google Scholar; and Bannerji, Himani, Mojab, Shahrzad, and Whitehead, Judith, eds., Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism (Toronto, 2001), 34–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Ruth Cowdrey to “Dear Friends,” July 26, 1939, reel 57—India—Personal Correspondence—Ruth Cowdrey; and Faith Parmelee to Mrs. Finley and Miss Lyon, May 2, 1939, reel 57—India—Personal Correspondence—Faith Parmelee, YWCA-USA.

44 Ibid.

45 Hess, Gary R., America Encounters India, 1941–1947 (Baltimore, 1971)Google Scholar; Raucher, Alan, “American Anti-Imperialists and the Pro-India Movement, 1900–1932,” Pacific Historical Review 43 (Feb. 1974): 83–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Danielson, “‘In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi.’”; Gordon, “Mahatma Gandhi's Dialogues with Americans.”

46 Candy, Catherine, “The Inscrutable Irish–Indian Feminist Management of Anglo-American Hegemony, 1917–1947,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2 (Spring 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 National Young Women's Christian Association of India, Burma and Ceylon, Annual Report 1936, 1, reel 56—India—National Annual Reports, YWCA-USA.

48 Alison Blunt defines the group as “English-speaking, Christian and culturally more European than Indian.” Blunt, Alison, Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home (Malden, MA, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 2. Some USYWCA secretaries likely understood “Anglo-Indian” as solely a racial category, and this cultivation of Anglo-Indian leadership was likely evidence of indigenization. However, the status of Anglo Indian was not just a racial category; it was also a locational one that could encompass Europeans domiciled in India. The India YWCA seems to have used the term to refer to both populations; here I use “Domiciled Europeans” to denote the latter group.

49 “The Present Situation in India and the Young Women's Christian Association,” 1915, 2, India 01 Folder 3, Records of the World's Young Women's Christian Association, Geneva, Switzerland.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 “Everymember: Monthly News Sheet of the Y.W.C.A. of India, Burma and Ceylon, 184 Corporation Street, Calcutta” May & June 1939, 5, reel 56—India—National Annual Reports, YWCA-USA.

53 Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora, 60; Priti Ramamurthy, “All-Consuming Nationalism: The Indian Modern Girl in the 1920s and 1930s” in The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, eds. Weinbaum et al. (Durham, NC, 2008), 147–73, esp. 161.

54 “Everymember: Monthly News Sheet of the Y.W.C.A. of India, Burma and Ceylon, 184 Corporation Street, Calcutta” May & June 1939, 5, reel 56—India—National Annual Reports, YWCA-USA.

55 Elizabeth Wilson, The Story of Fifty Years, 109.

56 Sengupta, Padmini, A Hundred Years of Service: Centenary Volume of the Y.W.C.A. of Calcutta, 1878–1978 (Calcutta, 1987)Google Scholar, viii.

57 Sengupta, Padmini Sathianadhan, Sarojini Naidu: A Biography (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

58 Van Doren, Alice Boucher, Lighted to Lighten the Hope of India (West Medford, MA, 1922), 138–43.Google Scholar

59 Van Doren, Lighted to Lighten the Hope of India, 141–42. Although Van Doren seems to have met Das in Calcutta, and Das may have relayed the story to her, Van Doren seems to have also been generally against noncooperation, so it is likely that she exaggerated the story.

60 Elizabeth Wilson to “Mrs. McCormick and My Other Friends in America,” Jan. (9?) 1923; and Wilson to Friends (at State Agricultural and Industrial College), Nov. 21, 1922, reel 57—India—Staff Reports—Elizabeth Wilson, YWCA-USA.

61 Most of Leela Kasturi and Vina Mazumdar's citations for Gandhi's calls for women's participation in Swadeshi come from the mid-1920s and the 1930s. Mazumdar and Kasturi, Women and Indian Nationalism, lii–liv.

62 Harriet Taylor to Elizabeth Wilson, June 6, 1922, 1–2, reel 57—India—Personal Correspondence—Elizabeth Wilson, YWCA-USA.

63 Jean Begg, “Facts about the YWCA in India, Burma & Ceylon,” n.d. [likely 1932 or 1933], reel 57—India—Staff Reports—Jean Begg, YWCA-USA.