Internalization of Christianity

USYWCA secretaries in India sought to move away from the binary of Christian/non-Christian and instead emphasize the internalization of Christian values. This made them different from other Christian organizations in India, the largest of which were the missions, a significant portion of whose staff were from the United States.Footnote ¹⁶ For example, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent roughly half of their total missionaries to India.Footnote ¹⁷ Researchers estimate that in 1910, India was only slightly behind China in terms of total missionaries from North America.Footnote ¹⁸

The USYWCA was allied in some ways with these missionary movements. Prior to World War I, it had been part of the Student Volunteer Movement's drive to “Evangelize the World in This Generation.” Initially, the USYWCA was explicitly Protestant, and many YWCAs required women to be members of a Protestant church in order to become YWCA officers and, in some cases, members.Footnote ¹⁹ In the mid-1910s, however, the USYWCA's affiliation with other global organizations—such as the World Student Christian Federation and the World YWCA—pulled the group into being more ecumenical.Footnote ²⁰ Overseas, these efforts were aimed at increasing Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox participation, but some within the USYWCA saw an opportunity to open the organization to more secular members. For example, during the discussion about changing the membership basis at the USYWCA national conference in 1915, Winnifred Wygal stated that some of the Nevada girls she represented were “from mining camps and ranches” and did not have the opportunity to attend church, much less become a member of a congregation. Removing the church membership requirement was therefore a “new plan growing out of our needs,” so that “as never before we might lead the girls who have just come there with an innate scorn of the Church and of religion.”Footnote ²¹ Changing the basis would therefore not only increase the numbers of non-Protestant women who could join—a concern abroad—but also allow women who were secular to join the YWCA in the United States.

In India, the YWCA did attempt to accommodate some non-Christian women, although YWCA secretaries tended to be critical of these women, whom they viewed as anachronistic. For example, Benedicte Wilhjelm, a Danish YWCA secretary recruited for India by the USYWCA, recounted the accommodation of Muslim religious practices such as purdah at a YWCA's “Seasons Fair” in 1935. Wilhjelm stated that the YWCA “set aside” time “for the visit of women in purdah. All men servants were carefully kept behind in their quarters and Girl Guides watched the gate strictly keeping all male persons out! Quite a number of women of the Mohamedan community had accepted our invitation and seemed to appreciate very much the opportunity of seeing what other women may do.”Footnote ²² While the YWCA accepted some religious practices of these Muslim women, the implication of Wilhjelm's comments was that the YWCA's event was a rare chance for some disadvantaged women of a religious minority—after all, the exhibit did not conform to purdah rules all the time—to experience the type of activities and spaces that other women had access to at any time and to see what they were missing.

USYWCA secretaries' attempt to foster ecumenicalism and at least some interfaith inclusivity set Y-space apart from other organizations in the British colonial framework, in which people tended to draw strict divisions between Christians and non-Christians. At times, non-Christians seem to have been more comfortable in the YWCA than some non-Protestant Christians. At their 1939 summer camp at Anandagiri (when USYWCA secretary Margaret Wilson was the “warden”), organizers geared some activities toward fostering interfaith ties.Footnote ²³ Morning worship began with an “Ecumenical Practice” ceremony, conducted by staff members from different religions, and including Hindus and Parsees. The strongest divisions were not between Christians and non-Christians, but between Catholics and Protestants. The participant who described the event stated that “we found it was more difficult for the Roman Catholics to worship with us than for the non-Christians. They did not attend the morning service but sometimes remained for evening prayers.”Footnote ²⁴ Other accounts of these types of ceremonies are not part of the USYWCA's historical record. However, from this description one wonders if the non-Christians may have found it easier to participate because they viewed these activities as a type of spectacle rather than sacred event. If so, this would have turned the usual Euro-American practice of reducing of Hindu religious events into spectacles on its head, particularly if the non-Christian women were lower caste, which is likely.

While this interfaith stance lent weight to YWCA secretaries' claims of inclusiveness, the embrace of non-Christians was similar to missionaries' attempts to promote Christianity by emphasizing the role of “indigenous” church leaders and the conversion of prominent people. For example, at a conference in 1939, participants read papers on “the lives of great people” such as Sadhu Sandra Singh, Hudson Taylor, Pandita Ramabai, and Kagawa—“people who had made Jesus the center of their lives.”Footnote ²⁵ Not only were Singh, Ramabai, and Kagawa prominent Indian and Japanese converts to Christianity, Singh and Kagawa had embarked on missions of Christ-like acts of service. As a high-caste convert, Ramabai was particularly important to the USYWCA secretaries' conception of Christianity as racially inclusive and able to cross class boundaries.

Like some Anglo-American missionaries, USYWCA secretaries also extolled what they saw as the virtues of “indigenous” Christian YWCA members, particularly in situations that might lead to more Christian conversions. For example, in a February 1926 report, USYWCA secretary Ruth Cowdrey wrote of an “International Fellowship” meeting in Poonamaliee, just outside of Madras. She stated, “This is a group that meets at the Y.W.C.A. regularly once a month, and the membership is both men and women, European and Indian, Christian, Hindu and Moslem.” Initially the group had been “a form of inter-racial friendship among Christians, but has developed into an inter-religious group organized to promote understanding and sympathy between people often too far separated by prejudice.” Here, Europeans were the minority and were “jokingly referred to as ‘out-casts,’ a reversal of the usual attitude toward the dominant race.” After a dinner in which there were “frank discussions of race relationships, and misunderstandings,” the group had “talks by representatives of the three religions on their conception of prayer.” In her assessment of this meeting, Cowdrey asserted that she was “more convinced than ever that India must be evangelized by Indians, who know the thought and background of the Indian mind. The non-Christians listened with close attention and respect when Miss Devasahayan, a teacher in the Women's Christian College, and one of our Vice-Presidents, spoke on Jesus' conception of Prayer.” Cowdrey characterized Devasahayan as “a fine example of the influence of Christianity in the development of the best kind of womanhood.”Footnote ²⁶ Cowdrey said nothing about the possibility that she might be swayed by the Hindu or Muslim speakers, who were likely as educated, erudite, and well connected as Miss Devasahayan. For Cowdrey, the meeting was therefore less an exercise in interfaith and interracial understanding than a potential opportunity for converting prominent non-Christians. This conversion was most likely, in her view, when non-Christians were approached by Christians who were not European. What made Devasahayan “the best kind of womanhood” was a combination of her race, her status as a teacher, her association with the YWCA, and, most of all, her Christianity.

While some USYWCA secretaries echoed Euro-American missionary desires to convert Indians to Christianity, they also generally emphasized the internalization of Christianity and the manifestation of Christian values. This distinguished them from denominational and missionary groups in the late nineteenth century, with their inherent inward focus—in a literal sense they brought more members into a Church. Instead, the USYWCA secretaries' work was part of the broader movement attempted to turn Christianity outward into society, politics, and everyday life. This was the Social Gospel, in which theologians such as Walter Rauchenbusch (who spoke at the 1915 USYWCA meeting where ecumenicalism was debated) and Shailer Mathews asserted (as Mathews stated) the need for “the application of teaching of Jesus and the total message of the Christian salvation to society, the economic life, and social institutions such as the state [and] the family, as well as to individuals.”Footnote ²⁷ Success, then, was not only individual salvation, but societal salvation through manifesting Christ-like ideals and qualities.

However, USYWCA secretaries did not just emphasize the salvation of society through Christianity. They also attempted to foster women's individual internalization of Christianity into a type of personalized Social Gospel—a “lived Christianity.” Lived Christianity was evident in studies of Jesus's life written and used by USYWCA secretaries and in their attempts to apply Christian teachings to daily life.Footnote ²⁸ For example, Student Standards of Action by Harrison Sackett Elliott and Ethel Cutler, Bible studies secretaries of the YMCA and YWCA, reveals how the USYWCA tended to condense Christianity into characteristics and actions that could (and should) be manifested by anyone. Elliot and Cutler cited Christ's life as guidance for personal conduct, in which faith was apparent through character traits such as adaptability, efficiency, honor, and chivalry. This tied personal conduct, in which people worked for the benefit of others, to broad goals such as improving society and spreading Christianity.Footnote ²⁹

USYWCA secretaries sought to apply this lived Christianity to the YWCA, interweaving Christian tenets into all aspects of its work. As the USYWCA's 1914 Handbook stated, “Through every department throbs the spirit of the Risen lord. This is the element which unifies all the work, which makes … the warm welcome of the Association building as essentially religious in purpose as the Bible circle or the vesper service. In the profoundest sense of the word all work of the Association is religious work.”Footnote ³⁰ In this system, religion was no longer located in denominational membership or in Bible study classes that were separated from the rest of the broad spectrum of YWCA programs, but rather present in individual membership and in aspects of all programs. Put simply, religion was in all the programs, and all of the programs were religious. With this, the USYWCA itself had internalized Christianity, in much the same way that secretaries hoped the individual women would.

In India, some USYWCA secretaries went a step beyond lived Christianity to assert that if a person manifested Christian values, then that person was Christian, whether he or she had made a formal declaration of Christian faith or not. Secretaries applied concepts of lived Christianity when describing what they saw as the Christian traits in prominent non-Christian figures, such as Gandhi.Footnote ³¹ When Gandhi visited the YWCA in Colombo in 1928, the U.S. secretary Faith Parmelee, was particularly struck by “his thought of forgiveness” when he was answering questions from the audience: “It seemed just the Christian idea. We sang at the beginning the hymn ‘In the Cross of Christ I glory’ which they told us was one of his favourites. There seemed to be an infinite patience and tolerance and love in his words and manner and a fine courtesy through which a delicious humour broke now and then.”Footnote ³² As this demonstrates, USYWCA leaders viewed political leaders like Gandhi primarily through the lens of Social Gospel Christianity, asserting that Gandhi was Christ-like through his teachings and his life, regardless of his own claims to Hinduism. This notion that the world's most famous Hindu was in reality a type of Christian culminated the trend toward emphasizing the ideal of lived Christianity that had started with the YWCA's changes in membership criteria in the 1910s. Now, not only was formal church membership unnecessary, personal conversion itself was not required. If one lived a Christ-like life, then one was Christian.

When USYWCA secretaries superimposed these Christian qualities upon nationalist leaders like Gandhi, they probably meant it to be flattering. After all, they themselves were attempting to absorb Christ-like qualities and imitate Christ-like behavior. Yet this type of superimposition, in which one person has the ability to categorize another, was deeply imperialist. In other words, the fact that USYWCA secretaries could label Gandhi a Christian, despite his own claims to Hinduism, and the fact that the U.S. audience would likely support the USYWCA's claims over Gandhi's, is what makes this an imperial project. This is true despite leaders' claims that they differed from British imperialists, who were not likely to have compared Gandhi to Christ.

A Fellowship of Equals

Along with this internalization of Christianity, USYWCA secretaries emphasized the distinctiveness of Y-space in that it encompassed a fellowship of equals. Grace Dodge, the first president of the USYWCA, explained this idea in a 1906 keynote address. She stated that a true fellowship meant “no spirit of patronage, but the loving working with, and not for, the members and girls who are in touch with Association work.”Footnote ³³ A “true fellowship” was one of equals, in which all women were welcome. USYWCA secretaries intended that this fellowship would be different from the sisterhood commonly pursued by maternalist organizations during the Progressive Era. Though local YWCAs within the United States did at times use the term “sisterhood,” it was not commonly used abroad.Footnote ³⁴ By using the term “fellowship,” Dodge drew from the YWCA's roots among prayer groups in England and the United States in the mid- to late 1800s. Her use of the term—and its use by other USYWCA leaders in the United States and abroad—was also likely pragmatic; in addition to female prayer groups, YWCAs were closely allied with student Christian and missionary organizations in colleges and universities, such as the Young Men's Christian Association, World Student Christian Federation, and Student Volunteer Movement. YWCA women could be in “fellowship” with members of these male or coed groups but not “sisterhood.” Beyond this ideal of fellowship instead of sisterhood, USYWCA secretaries attempted to construct Y-space as fundamentally different from the “women's work for women” common among female missionaries in India. Female missionaries typically focused on converting women to Christianity by appealing to traditional gender roles, such as care for the home and child rearing (even though the missionary women themselves were often operating in the public sphere).Footnote ³⁵

Rather than emphasizing Western domesticity, one of the central tenets of Y-space was to move local women into the public sphere physically, politically, and socially. USYWCA secretaries tried to use the notion of a fellowship of equals and women's involvement in the public sphere in order to position Y-space as an alternative to the exclusive British colonial “clubland” spaces that that Mrinalini Sinha describes. This clubland was an attempt by colonial officials to “reproduce the comfort and familiarity of ‘home’ for Europeans living in an alien land.”Footnote ³⁶ Yet many YWCA women, even those who were British, would have been among the “rebels” who were outside of clubland because as single women or missionaries, they rejected the “norms of Anglo-Indian social life.”Footnote ³⁷ USYWCA secretaries therefore conceived Y-space, with its basis in Social Gospel principles of fellowship, as a kind of parallel clubland.

While clubland reflected the cultural and social notions of the British upper class, Y-space had roots in USYWCA notions of community that the group's leaders imagined to be egalitarian and merit based. Although the USYWCA secretaries did not critique the British class system publicly and adhered to the British practice of designating a patroness for YWCA branches in India, the secretaries' version of the Social Gospel could be socially leveling. In their view, Y-space in India would be an inclusive, rather than an exclusive, space. The 1932 annual report for the Calcutta YWCA made the radical potential of Y-space clear by stressing that the YWCA was “a fellowship of women and girls. The value of their fellowship lies in whatever it may contribute to self-expression, discipline, and growth of the whole life of each of its members and in the effectiveness of that group as it functions in the life of the community.” Y-space enabled women to cross social, racial, and class lines because its basis was in Social Gospel Christianity, “expressed in the name ‘Christian’” with “the teachings of Jesus the informing and directing principles of any of the Association's programmes.” At least theoretically, the group's fellowship was open to everyone. According to the report, “Any girls may enter this fellowship”; there was “nothing selective” about it. The author asserted that “within the fellowship of our Calcutta Association is represented a varied cross section of our whole community, including business girls, school and teachers, the so-called women of leisure, and girls of many nationalities and racial groups and religions.”Footnote ³⁸ Although the YWCA was still selective because of its adherence to Christian ideals, USYWCA secretaries' promotion of a fellowship of equals and lived Christianity therefore directly challenged British clubland based in a “cult of exclusiveness, superiority and isolation.”Footnote ³⁹

India YWCA Women

One of the goals of Y-space was to facilitate the movement of all women into the public sphere, where they could advance Christian morals. In the context of colonialism in India and an emerging nationalist movement, however, the political project of fostering female engagement in the public sphere involved deeply unstable categories. Gender, religious, and national categories—male, female, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, British, Indian—were unstable and created in multiple directions simultaneously, as men and women struggled to define themselves and others.Footnote ⁴⁰ On one side of women's role in the nationalist movement were Hindu and Muslim men, who generally thought that women's involvement in the movement should adhere to traditional female roles. On another side were Christian British women reformers, who may or may not have been anti-imperial but who were likely to support British culture and influence in India. The issue of women's political engagement in India was even thornier because USYWCA secretaries often sympathized with Indian nationalist causes more than with British imperialism, even if this support remained private because of increasing pressure by British colonial officials upon U.S. nationals advocating for Indian independence.

USYWCA secretaries attempted to resolve this contradiction between Christianity and Indian nationalism through the creation of a group of women in between the stereotypical memsahibs and Hindu and Muslim nationalist women. These women would be more civic minded than the self-centered British memsahib found in clubland. They would be Indian or Anglo Indian rather than European, Christian in mindset rather than Hindu or Muslim, and politically and socially engaged in ways acceptable to the USYWCA secretaries. In short, and in a strong echo of Lord Macaulay's “little brown Englishmen,” these women would look a lot like the USYWCA secretaries themselves in all but skin color and dress.Footnote ⁴¹

As part of the creation of this in-between group, USYWCA secretaries attempted to alter the binary of nationalist roles for women. One way that nationalists had reacted against colonialism was to emphasize the spiritual rather than material. In this, a woman's presence in public was only acceptable as long as she visibly portrayed feminine and spiritual qualities and behavior, such as diet, dress, and religiosity.Footnote ⁴² For nationalists, each of these aspects was based on Hindu practices, and a nationalist woman was therefore a Hindu woman who visibly demonstrated her faith when in public.

Some USYWCA secretaries emphasized what they saw as the lived Christian qualities of some non-Christian women within the nationalist movement (as they had done with Gandhi). One example was Mrs. Ammu Swaminadhan, a high-caste Hindu woman who traveled to the United States with her daughter Mrinalini in 1939. Two USYWCA secretaries—Ruth Cowdrey and India YWCA General Secretary Faith Parmelee—wrote effusive letters of introduction for her. Although both women phrased their praise differently, it contained the same basic elements: her personality and education, evident in her active participation in public life and speaking; her skills as a hostess; and her connections to the women's movement.Footnote ⁴³ Parmelee and Cowdrey highlighted the same qualities that were part of lived Christianity and the Social Gospel—loyalty, friendliness, chivalry, and service. However, their particular way of praising Swaminadhan as an outstanding Indian also Orientalized subaltern women by comparison; Swaminadhan was outstanding because she embodied all of those qualities; and, by implication, many other Indian women were unremarkable because they did not.

Perhaps more notable was the fact that Cowdrey and Parmelee specifically cited Swaminadhan's connections to the nationalist movement in their letters. Cowdrey stated that “she has been very prominent in the Congress Party, and is at present a Principal Councilor in the corporation of Madras; and she is an ardent leader in all social reform activities. In addition to all of this she found time to organize a Swadeshi Emporium, where one may purchase the lovely handwoven materials which the Congress Party urges all of us to use.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Cowdrey's use of “us” was particularly revealing, because it linked her to anti-imperial nationalism. These kinds of explicit ties do not seem to have been present in the materials that the India YWCA generated for use within India—either because they would not be well received by the YWCA members or, more likely, because such ties could cause reprisals from British authorities. However, an anti-imperial stance was likely to be popular in the United States, where there were groups that supported Gandhi and funded nationalist causes.Footnote ⁴⁵ And this was not the first time that Swaminadhan had traveled to the United States as a spokeswoman for India. She had been to the United States a “representative” progressive Indian woman in the late 1920s, at the behest of her close friend Margaret Cousins, de facto leader of what would become the All Indian Women's Conference, in an attempt to counter the pro-imperial sentiment that Katharine Mayo's Mother India had generated.Footnote ⁴⁶

Yet for USYWCA secretaries, Swaminadhan was an anomaly, and much of Hinduism ran counter to their ideas of progressive modernity for women. The secretaries, therefore, attempted to create a type of parallel anticolonial Christian nationalism in which women could be active in Christian ways in the public sphere. The National Annual Report for 1936 explained, “In India we need more than ever before a group of women not only called to social service and the ‘uplift’ of those less fortunate than themselves, but also conscious of a vocation, and anxious to make a definite contribution to the mental, physical and religious life of the nation.” The YWCA secretaries envisioned that “women will be a greater force than ever in the political world; the weak traditions that hamper us as a nation are being rapidly removed in the social world, and we have therefore to look all the more to the brighter shining of our witness in the religious world.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Instead of a Hindu woman, whose presence in the public sphere was acceptable only because she was a spiritually proper Hindu, the women of the YWCA would serve as a witness for Christianity, remove what secretaries saw as weak or anachronistic Hindu and Muslim traditions, and attempt to foster political change that would conform to Y-space ideals.

USYWCA secretaries targeted a particular group of women for this public work—Anglo Indian and Christian Indian women.Footnote ⁴⁸ Initially, secretaries saw this group as a racial category; by Anglo Indian they meant mixed race women. As an India YWCA secretary explained in 1915, there were “three main divisions—the resident European population, the Eurasian community, or, as they are now called, Anglo-Indians, and the vast mass of the women of the many Indian races.” The author continued that “to each of them falls a large share of the responsibility for the future of the Empire.”Footnote ⁴⁹ She asserted that the education of Anglo Indian had been “neglected” and that many “have no home except the YWCA hostel” once they had left school. However, “some of them … occupy important positions in business houses, and one of the most capable Association Secretaries to-day, in India, is an Anglo-Indian girl. These facts speak for themselves as to the value of any attempt made to bring these women to a worthy position in the community.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Anglo Indian women were especially important in the secretary's argument: “It is not too much to say that to a large extent the very fate of the Empire will depend upon the quality of the leadership” which would “control and direct” the “awakening” womanhood in India.Footnote ⁵¹ According to this secretary, the empire would rise or fall based upon Anglo Indian women, who had Anglo racial heredity to lead and who could more easily move into the public sphere.

In the 1920s and 1930s, these discourses shifted from salvation of empire by an in-between race of Anglo Indians, to the salvation of Indian society (endangered by rapid social and political changes) by a Christian community. A report from 1939 stated that “when we find young people in revolt against unthinking leaders within the Church, and secularism gaining ground, the only way to face these issues with courage is the Christian motive.” This “Christian motive” would provide stability in the face of cultural disruption, in which “the place of women is one of new freedom, and older barriers have gone, and young people are growing up without the guidance of tradition. Young professional women find themselves in new places of responsibility and often loneliness and temptation, and they also face the conflict between professional ideals and Christian behavior.”Footnote ⁵² As they had in the United States, USYWCA secretaries saw Christian values and womanhood as the answer to problems of industrialization and geographic mobility.

This group of educated, professional, Christian Indian women was the one closest to the USYWCA secretaries' concept of women leaders. Some held positions in medicine and law, while others ran businesses in Calcutta or Bombay (where commerce—especially the emerging entertainment business—was considered to be less respectable than the other professions).Footnote ⁵³ USYWCA leaders assumed that either because of their similarities to professional women elsewhere in the world or because of their status largely outside the caste system in India, these women were isolated and therefore in moral danger. A 1939 report stated that the YWCA was “endeavoring to provide the need of friendship, through the bringing together of the Christian women in a small community; the need of spiritual refreshment by providing daily Bible readings in a monthly newssheet and a prayer fellowship; and the need of good reading matter by influencing friends to send magazines and other suitable reading matter to lonely members.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In the 1920s and 1930s, the YWCA established hostels for students and Indian business and professional women, both of whom tended to be predominantly Christian, in order to consolidate and support the Christian community. For example, the All-India Student Conference, held in late December 1923, gathered together 123 representatives at Bishop's College in Calcutta. All but two of these were Christians—the others were Parsee and Brahmo-Somaj.Footnote ⁵⁵ By supporting this group of young professional women, the USYWCA secretaries bolstered the group of women who could network and support each other as they helped lead India into the future.

These Anglo Indian and Christian Indian women who were active in the public sphere raised a question similar to one that surrounded YWCA secretaries from the United States: would they support the British Empire or Indian nationalism? While the India YWCA was still largely a British organization well into the 1930s (and beyond, depending upon who was doing the counting), a small group of indigenous members with deep connections to the British colonial establishment also rose to prominence in the organization. In her preface to a history of the Calcutta YWCA, Padmini Sengupta stated that her first contacts with the YWCA came when she “was a schoolgirl in London, in 1919.” Her family was friends with the Kinnairds, and Emily Kinnaird “saw to it” that Sengupta's mother became a World YWCA Committee member. Sengupta traveled with her mother and World YWCA president Lady Parnoor to the World YWCA conference in Champery, Switzerland.Footnote ⁵⁶ These connections marked Sengupta as very elite and likely familiar with the colonial corridors of power. However, this did not make her necessarily pro-imperialist. Though Sengupta had these strong ties to British missionary leaders, she also wrote biographies of Indian Nationalist leaders, such as Sarojini Naidu.Footnote ⁵⁷

If Anglo Indian and Christian Indian women did not already have these types of ties to power, USYWCA secretaries worked to facilitate them—albeit with the U.S. metropole, rather than the British, as the example of Maya Das (also known as “Dora Maya Das”) demonstrates. One of thirteen children, Das was the child of first- and second-generation Christians, who were in close contact with several missionaries. These connections helped Das, and she and two others were the first women to enroll in classes at Forman Christian College at Lahore. In 1906, she enrolled at Mt. Holyoke College as the first Indian student. After her time at Mt. Holyoke, she spent a year at the YWCA Training School in New York. Upon her return to India, she held positions as acting principal of Kinnaird College and then as the associate national secretary of the Indian YWCA.Footnote ⁵⁸

Das also illustrates that while some Indian Christian women were politically active and engaged, USYWCA secretaries tended to portray their efforts as more geared toward a type of Social Gospel reform than anticolonial nationalism. One example of this was a YWCA weaving program organized by Maya Das and the USYWCA's Elizabeth Wilson. In the early 1920s, Das spearheaded the program (with funding from American magnate Cyrus McCormick) to train women to teach weaving. USYWCA secretaries generally portrayed Das's weaving program as a type of rural uplift work. However, in the context of the home rule (Swaraj) movement, in which Gandhi and other nationalist leaders advocated the boycott of British-made goods and their substitution with Indian-made goods (Swadeshi), teaching women to weave was a deeply political act. Although the evidence is very much from the U.S. and British perspective (and Das may have seen her work in a different light), Das was aware of the nationalist potential of the weaving project. In a 1922 book on Christian women in India, Alice Boucher Van Doren (who was not part of the YWCA) reported that Das had been a little tart about the program in an interview with Gandhi. Van Doren wrote that “Miss Maya Das told him that she had even anticipated him in this [spinning wheel] movement, for she and other Christian women of advanced education are following a regular course in spinning and weaving, with the purpose of passing on this skill through the Rural Department of the Y.W.C.A.”Footnote ⁵⁹ As much as Van Doren painted Das as aligned with “Christian women of advanced education” rather than with Gandhi, the dichotomy that Van Doren implied may not have existed for Das, who displayed sympathies with both Christian and nationalist groups. Her comment to Gandhi may have been a matter of timing. USYWCA secretaries were quick to emphasize that this was the first effort to train women to teach weaving—indeed, much of the correspondence between Elizabeth Wilson and the USYWCA and Nettie Fowler McCormick consisted of the logistical difficulties of setting up the facilities specifically for women rather than men.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although Gandhi had already begun the Swadeshi movement, Das's conversation with him came early in his calls for women's inclusion, and the feminism apparent in Das's comment does not mean that she was antinationalist.Footnote ⁶¹

Das's experience also shows that as much as the USYWA secretaries espoused an unlimited egalitarian fellowship within Y-space, it did not often manifest itself in reality. In 1920, Das hit the India YWCA's glass ceiling when she was appointed assistant general secretary to Faith Parmelee, rather than general secretary in her own right. USYWCA secretary Harriet Taylor reported after seeing Das at a meeting in Peking in 1922 that Das was “most critical of the Association as a whole, and of India in particular.” She “was coming to the conclusion” that the YWCA “could never meet the needs of Indian women, and that in the near future it might be that the Association concentrated its efforts upon the Anglo-Indian women and a purely Indian Association would be started to meet the needs of the women of the country.” Taylor wondered if Das was “disappointed in not being made general secretary” although in the end she put Das's dissatisfaction down to tiredness.Footnote ⁶² For Taylor, the problem was personal—Das's disappointment or her fatigue—rather than a systemic and racial one within the India YWCA, in which Das may have been pointing out that the organization was insufficiently attuned to Indian women's perspectives.

Other Indian YWCA secretaries likely shared Das's experience, although direct evidence is sparse. The leaders of the Indian YWCA, both U.S. and non-U.S., claimed in reports to the USYWCA throughout the 1920s and 1930s that the India YWCA was gradually becoming more “indigenous.” The USYWCA leadership pointed to this trend as evidence of democracy and egalitarianism; here was the fellowship of equals. In the mid-1930s, India YWCA General Secretary Jean Begg claimed that the association was predominantly Indian. She listed “91 branches, with 6716 members of whom 4173 are Indian, Burmese or Singalese [sic], 1819 Burgher, Anglo Indian or Domiciled European … the remainder are women who do not come under these two general categories (the majority British).” Begg also portrayed the staff and national YWCA leadership as indigenous. Of fifty-four staff members, there were “18 Indian, Burmese, Burgher or Anglo Indian, 8 Domiciled European, 1 Danish, 2 New Zealand, 4 Australian, 3 Canadian, 12 British and 6 American.” The Indian National Committee had “thirty members of whom 13 are Indian, 2 Anglo Indian, 4 American, 2 Australian, and 9 British.”Footnote ⁶³ These numbers were misleading; in order to argue that the YWCA was indigenous, Begg broke apart the European, British Commonwealth, and Americans by nationality. While there were eighteen “Indian, Burmese, Burgher or Anglo Indians,” they were outnumbered almost two-to-one by the thirty-six secretaries from other countries. As these numbers and the experience of Maya Das show, very few Indian women rose to the top of the organizational hierarchy, and even by 1939, the YWCA in India was primarily an Anglo British-run organization.

Ultimately, the USYWCA secretaries' attempt to create women who were much like themselves shows the problematic nature of their attempts to create Y-space as U.S. agents operating within a British imperial context. They saw these efforts in a positive light, in which different people could exhibit Christ-like behaviors and Christian traits, whether they were Christian or not. Anglo Indian and Indian Christian women could lead an emerging nation, and Y-space could be above political divisions, serving as a neutral space where people of many different groups could gather together. Yet the USYWCA secretaries' efforts also demonstrate the difficulty of reconciling their position as Americans, who tended to be sympathetic to the anticolonial claims of Indian nationalists, even as they supported what they saw as feminist reform. In coping with these two agendas, USYWCA secretaries emphasized Anglo Indian and Christian Indian women, who embodied qualities that the USYWCA secretaries saw as positive. Yet this in and of itself was a type of imperialism, in that the USYWCA secretaries attempted to re-create themselves. The Indian YWCA women would be like USYWCA secretaries with “indigenous” Indian faces. And the USYWCA secretaries hoped that these women would take up an agenda that continued the British “civilizing mission”—albeit this time allied with the modernity of the U.S. metropole—and make it the basis for the emerging Indian nation.