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Global Feminism and Postwar Reconstruction: The World YWCA Visitation to Occupied Japan, 1947
Karen Garner
Florida International University
| This is the story of the World Young Women's Christian Association (World YWCA) and its efforts to assert an important role for (women in post–World War II reconstruction projects devised by the victorious national governments who came together to form the United Nations. It is part of a larger history dating from World War I, when Western liberal feminist-led international women's organizations began to promote women's involvement in international policy making and governance. And, it is a particularly relevant story in light of contemporary efforts to integrate women and gender issues into post-war reconstruction, nation-building, and peace-building projects. Whether championed by international bodies, national governments, or nongovernmental organizations, recent attempts to involve women in key policy-making capacities in post-Soviet governments in eastern Europe, in postwar governments in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, or in the ongoing peace process in the Middle East, all have something to learn from this historic episode because the World YWCA visitation to occupied Japan in 1947 exposed a gendered and racialized power structure in Japan and, by extension, in the U.S.-dominated international arena, that echoes in the current discourse about "women and democracy."1 As many international relations scholars have asserted in the past two decades, international politics can no longer be understood as gender-neutral.2 This episode also illuminates some of the ways that Western feminists have conceptualized "internationalism" in the past and it provides further empirical evidence to support postcolonialist and multicultural feminist critiques of an unproblematized "global sisterhood."3 Thus, it contributes to recent historical interpretations of women's transnational organizing, involving both local and foreign feminists in collaborative projects to achieve transformative social and political goals, and incorporates that history into international relations history.4 |
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In order to fill a perceived void in spirituality and to instill Christian values among the working classes, the YWCA was founded by lay-women in evangelical Protestant church denominations in England in the mid-1850s. Promoting nineteenth-century "liberal Christian" and "liberal feminist" values, 5 women drawn from the leisured middle class formed the organization's boards of directors that led local "city" YWCAs. The volunteer boards employed other professional women as teachers and social workers, called "secretaries," to carry out a holistic ministry among working-class women that included Bible study, recreational programs, and social services. This organizational model soon spread to other countries in western Europe and North America, and "national" YWCAs were formed to oversee countrywide development and to communicate with one another. In 1894, a coalition of British, U.S., Canadian, and western European national YWCAs established the World YWCA and sent "foreign secretaries" to work with Western missions and native women to establish YWCAs in their nations' formal and informal colonies, first in Asia and the Pacific, then in Africa and Latin America. |
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Fifty-three years later, in fall 1947, the World YWCA convened two historic meetings. The first, a World Council meeting held in Hangzhou, China, was the first YWCA council held since 1938, and the first-ever World Council held outside the West. The second, an international "visitation" to defeated Japan, was the first civilian delegation of women allowed to enter the occupied nation; it was approved at the highest level of the Allied Occupation force, by the supreme commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur. These two meetings reunited YWCA leaders from world member nations to promote peace and reconciliation in the aftermath of World War II, introduced new organizational officers who would lead the Western feminist YWCA from its colonial roots into the post-colonial era, and confirmed the World YWCA's newly awarded "category B consultative status" within the United Nations international governance system and its continued involvement in international politics.6 |
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