‘Christianity’ and ‘Feminism’ in YWCA Discourse: Perspectives from Accra and Johannesburg
As a para-church women’s membership organisation, a lay ecumenical movement, and a global NGO working towards gender equality, the YWCA is a rare example of women’s collective interpretation of Christianity outside of churches and other, male-dominated Christian institutions. Initially established in England in 1855, its activities, funding, and purpose have been coordinated and administered through an umbrella organisation, the World YWCA, since 1894. Based in Geneva since 1930, the World YWCA is the body to which each of the independent, national YWCAs (known as member associations) must be formally ‘affiliated’. Affiliation grants member associations (MAs) the right to participate in the quasi-democratic processes through which the World YWCA movement constitutes itself—primarily quadrennial World Council meetings. Each MA is entitled to send a delegation to World Council to represent its members in votes on policy, statements, and amendments to the World YWCA Constitution, and also to elect the World YWCA President, Treasurer, and other positions. The YWCA began as a British, white-dominated movement aligned with missionary societies and colonial projects. Since the late twentieth century approximately one-fifth of all YWCA members worldwide are in Africa—in 2022, there were YWCAs in 29 African countries. Despite this, the YWCAs of the African continent are largely absent from academic analyses of the movement—an absence I address in my work, which focuses on YWCAs in English-speaking African contexts.

CC-BY 4.0 Signboard Y.W.C.A. of Ghana
From its inception to the present day, the YWCA movement has devoted considerable time and energy to articulating its specifically ‘Christian’ foundation and identity, and the implications of these for its activities. However, since the 1970s, the World YWCA has increasingly adopted approaches and vocabularies from the international development industry and feminist movements, for example in its statements of policy on human rights, social justice, and gender equality. The broad and contested fields of development and feminism can facilitate resistance to oppression, but they are also key sites for the (re)production and perpetuation of racisms and (neo)colonial power dynamics. I have suggested elsewhere that this context is particularly significant for the YWCA, as a movement with roots in the British Empire. The YWCA movement in Africa offers a kaleidoscopic view of the intersections between coloniality, feminism, Christianity, and development. Therefore, looking at the power dynamics within the YWCA movement on a transnational scale could reveal important details of how this unique movement acts on its interpretation of ‘Christianity’—and whose interpretation prevails.
A changing Christian identity
In the nineteenth century, the ‘Christian’ in the nascent YWCA movement’s name signalled many things: it meant pious, middle-class, benevolent (see Izzo 2018; Phoenix 2014; Seymour-Jones 1994). It is clear that for the YWCA in the British Empire, a central and highly consequential connotation of ‘Christian’ was ‘European’, and thus white. Finally, being ‘Christian’ was explicitly about a religious commitment and faith. At its founding meeting in 1894, the World YWCA adopted a strongly evangelical Constitution, and defined itself as Protestant; but changed it in 1914 to the wording currently still used: ‘The World YWCA is founded on and inspired by the Christian faith’. From that date it opened the possibility of membership to women from Catholic and Orthodox churches in eastern Europe, paralleling the more gradual shifts that included women of colour. Despite its explicitly Christian basis and name, the World YWCA habitually brought up its Christian identity for debate and revision throughout the twentieth century. During the first and second world wars, the YWCA movement was committed to ecumenical ‘Christian internationalism, civilization, and women’s liberation’, but in the 1950s the World YWCA developed a more overtly political position that Karen Garner (2004) describes as an ‘antiracist, anti-imperialist [Christian] morality’. This change, codified in statements of policy and changes to the Constitution, was achieved through a mixture of committee work and participatory decision-making processes at World Council meetings. It came about alongside other changes intended to redress the Eurocentrism and whiteness of the YWCA movement’s practices and its office holders, which began to bear fruit in the 1970s. From its white British Protestant beginnings, the World YWCA included first non-Protestant women, and then women of colour. Thus, the twentieth century history of the YWCA illustrates a dimension of the co-constitution of religion and race in its changing use of Christian identity as a referent for racialised identities. It is not coincidental that there is a similar co-constitution of gender and race in women’s and feminist movements in which ‘women’ means ‘white women’ (e.g. Mohanty 2003, pp. 49-50).
Disagreements and alliances
The terms ‘Christianity’ and ‘feminism’ come up at different moments in World YWCA discourse. Throughout much of the twentieth century YWCA discourse cited the ‘extremes’ of feminism in order to define itself as the sensible and socially acceptable face of women’s liberation (Seymour-Jones 1994, pp. 315-326). Feminism was more subtly eschewed until the twenty-first century, at which point it became steadily more visible in World YWCA policy and practice. At the 29th World YWCA Council in 2019, which I attended as a participant-observer, the words ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ were highly visible—on t-shirts, in statements of YWCA identity and policy, and in the presentations of invited speakers. Christianity and feminism were both implicated in official discussions of the YWCA’s organisational identity. The question of whether and how to ‘include’ non-Christian women was foregrounded in a discussion of YWCA Netherlands’ proposed amendment to the Constitution, which would have changed the references to Christianity—removing a statement of faith in ‘God the Almighty, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit’ and replacing it with a commitment to ‘welcome’ women ‘of all beliefs and traditions’. YWCA Netherlands explained that its proposal would ensure the YWCA movement could more meaningfully include non-Christian women with appeals to liberal feminist ideals—diversity, inclusion, openness, emancipation, women’s rights. Despite the fact that the proposed amendment would have retained explicit commitments to Christianity, the discussion among delegates revealed a widely-shared concern that it amounted to a rejection of faith, that it would undermine the YWCA’s history, and tarnish its public image. The proposal was rejected with a clear majority.
While there is little to suggest the existence of a north/south divide or geopolitical rifts among MAs, there may be broad ethical/political alliances or voting blocs. My observations at World Council 2019 suggest that global northern MAs are equally likely as majority world MAs to value an explicitly Christian YWCA identity, but are more likely to embrace an explicit ‘feminist’ identity. Reflecting on events at World Council, my interlocutors at Ghana YWCA informed me that African MAs had unanimously opposed changes to the World YWCA’s Constitutional statement of Christian faith. Perhaps less obviously, the debate over Christianity and the inclusion of non-Christian women has implications for racism in the YWCA movement. In the Netherlands and throughout northern/western Europe, ‘welcoming’ non-Christian women has implications for claims or perceptions of ‘diversity’ because, as noted above, a religious category can stand in for a racialised category. ‘Immigrant’, ‘outsider’, ‘newcomer’, and ‘Muslim’ are often synonymous, for example, in islamophobic and anti-immigrant European politics.
Research directions
Emphasising the Christianity of the YWCA has different effects in different parts of the movement. For YWCA Netherlands, the attempt to ‘welcome’ non-Christian women into the YWCA can be understood also as an attempt to ‘welcome’ non-Christian women of colour. In 2022 however, while deeply ambivalent about the value of ‘feminism’, Ghana YWCA found Christianity essential for their association and the World movement. From this point of view, YWCA Netherlands’ proposal to alter the ‘Christian’ basis while ‘welcoming’ all women in the name of feminist solidarity was experienced as a challenge the core of YWCA identity. To clearly understand the meanings of ‘Christianity’ in World YWCA discourse in the twenty-first century, the effects of marginalising or emphasising Christianity must be analysed, particularly in terms of their effect on practices of inclusion—and exclusion. Further research is required to determine whether some parts of the World YWCA still have greater power to define ‘Christianity’ than do others. Whether or not that is the case, it seems likely that disagreements over the implications of the YWCA’s Christian identity are likely to be complicated and deepened by disagreements over the meaning and role of its newfound feminism.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
eleanorhiggs (October 24, 2024). ‘Christianity’ and ‘Feminism’ in YWCA Discourse: Perspectives from Accra and Johannesburg. Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa - Blog. Retrieved March 25, 2025 from https://miasa.hypotheses.org/3876