Caught in the Crossfire: Women's Internationalism and the YWCA Child Labor Campaign in Shanghai, 1921-1925

Abstract

Caught in the Crossfire:Women's Internationalism and the YWCA Child Labor Campaign in Shanghai, 1921-1925 Elizabeth Littell-Lamb (bio) From 1923 to 1925 the Chinese Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) led a coalition of women's organizations in a campaign to ban child labor in the International Settlement, Shanghai's largest foreign enclave. The campaign linked women's local concerns in China with the activism of international feminists whose organizations were based in the West. In the aftermath of World War I those organizations claimed the moral and professional authority to shape a new global order. Among the organizations that joined this effort was the World YWCA.1 YWCA leadership believed women could "revolutionize" politics if they interjected their gendered values into political arenas. Moreover, they believed women had the obligation to promote those values on a world scale.2 The world needed "the motherliness of woman in the very best sense of the word; it needs the personal touch, the practical common sense and the clear, direct thinking characteristic of women."3 The reference to "the motherliness of woman" indicates how women continued to express their authority in the moralistic language of maternal feminism that had characterized nineteenth-century campaigns for suffrage and temperance, especially when addressing their remarks to other women. Increasingly during the interwar years women used professional expertise to define their authority and businesslike language to defend their involvement in public life. Moral and professional authority became a "fluid amalgam" of female authority that women used to achieve their goals.4 Even women whose primary occupations were marriage and motherhood used their standing in women's organizations to construct "professional" identities that enhanced their standing among women and their power vis-à-vis men. International feminists used both their moral and their professional authority to promote their organizations' causes overseas. They considered themselves to be "world women" whose work transcended national boundaries. 5 Some scholars categorized them as "feminist imperialists" because, intentionally [End Page 134] or not, they replicated the unequal power relationships between imperial rulers and imperial subjects when they introduced causes conceived in the West to non-Western lands.6 This study argues for a more nuanced view of the relationship between women's feminist internationalism and imperial power relationships. First, feminist internationalism was neither monolithic nor static. How women experienced and practiced it differed based on individual beliefs, cultural identity, and political views. Their feminist internationalism changed over time, and their activism served as catalyst for that change. Second, imperial power relationships became tangled webs because the relations between rulers and subjects were complicated by issues of gender, race, and class.7 Categories such as "feminist imperialist" mask those complexities. For example, in the International Settlement Western women were both colonizers and colonized—that is, privileged among Chinese men and women because they were Westerners but barred from the male arena of politics because they were women.8 The position of their Western-educated Chinese colleagues was ambiguous as they were often considered complicit in the West's imperial agenda because of their acceptance of Western values (such as Christianity or modernity), while at the same time they were doubly colonized as both Chinese and women. Finally, this study illustrates the central importance of local context and historical contingency. Support for and resistance to women's activism grew out of its local context as it was driven by local issues and influenced by contemporary events. These issues are examined through the work of three YWCA women. Briton Agatha Harrison led the child labor campaign from its inception to January 1924. American Mary Dingman, the World YWCA industrial secretary, led the campaign from Harrison's departure to its collapse in June 1925. Chinese YWCA secretary Cheng Wanzhen served as the campaign's local publicist. These women shared the Christian-inspired values of social justice and uplift for the poor and downtrodden promoted by the World YWCA. They considered their reform-minded internationalism a moderating influence on male greed, a modernizing influence on industrial society, and an assertive act of political engagement.9 Their experiences highlight how the Settlement's complicated and overlapping gender, race, and class identities made women's well-intentioned...