Abstract

Abstract Five years after the establishment of the World Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in 1894 under the influence of the Protestant evangelical movement the Chinese YWCA national committee was founded in 1899. Shortly after the overthrow of the Manchu Empire, the Canton YWCA was founded in 1912, the first year of the Republic of China. In this study I examine three oral history interviews with former YWCA staff, supplemented by the written recollections of a former general secretary and other scarce materials to reconstruct the fragmented work of the Canton YWCA in the 1940s. In the conclusion, I discuss how their memories have shifted according to their contingent “present” identities in different periods of time, and how they are dependent on individual concerns, institutional affiliations and socio-political contexts.

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