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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Between World War I and World War II, the World Day of Prayer (WDP) expressed Protestant women's Christian cosmopolitanism that combined rituals of prayer with a liberal program of social activism and humanitarianism. The WDP began as a way to unite Protestant women together across organizational denominational lines as women's missionary societies entered a period of decline in the 1920s. The WDP raised awareness of home and foreign missionary work and took up a collection to support designated home and foreign mission projects, but it quickly emerged as a site for ritual creativity. The planning committees and prayer service facilitated Protestant women's efforts to replace a traditional understanding of missionary work with a cosmopolitan Christianity that coupled American women's spirituality with a liberal program supportive of racial diversity and internationalism. The prayer services became sacred spaces to enact “unity in diversity,” even though this was always more an ideal than a reality. Churchwomen used the evident dissonance between a universalist vision of a united Christian world and the realities of racial, religious, and national difference to generate discomfort in the prayer services and to deepen participants' spiritual experiences. While the interwar era is understood as a period of theological schisms and Protestant declension, a gendered analysis of Protestantism through the World Day of Prayer shows that it was also a period of religious transformation as churchwomen formulated a modern social gospel that paired spirituality and action in ways that would shape Protestant churches for the next several decades.
* I would like to thank the members of the Columbia University Seminar onNorth American Religions for their helpful thoughts and suggestions on an early draft of this article. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Castelli, Jack Hawley, Wayne Proudfood, Najam Haider, Judith Weisenfeld, Dana Robert, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.
1. Mrs.Lichliter, M. H., “Breaking Down Barriers,” WDP service, February 24, 1928, 1225 Google Scholar-6-2:03; “Suggestions,” WDP service, March 7, 1930, 1225-6-2:04, Church Women United Papers, General Commission on Archives and History, Drew University (hereafter cited as CWU, GCAH). The now-classic book on gender and missions is Dana Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997). Other scholars have examined the decline in women's missionary organizations, yet far fewer have looked to see what missionary women became after 1920. Hill, Patricia R., The World Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985).Google Scholar
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