Women's Rights, Feminism, and Suffragism in Japan, 1870-1925

Abstract

author wishes to thank the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines at the London School of Economics and Political Science for permission to use material contained in her article, and Women in Modern Japan: Feminist Discourses in the Meiji and Taisho Eras, in Janet Hunter, ed., Japan: State and People in the Twentieth Century (London, 1999). 1. relationship of women to the Japanese state has been the object of much discussion in English-language Japanese studies. Some scholars look at women as the target of government policies; see, e.g., Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, The Meiji State's Policy toward Women, 1890-1910, in Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., RecreatingJapanese Women, 1600-1945 (Berkeley, 1991), 151-174; Janet Hunter, Legislation and Employer Resistance: Abolition of Night Work in the Cotton-Spinning Industry, in Tsunehiko Yui and Keiichiro Nakagawa, eds., Japanese Management in Historical Perspective (Tokyo, 1989), 243-272; Yoshiko Miyake, Doubling Expectations: Motherhood and Women's Factory Work under State Management in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, in Bernstein, ed., RecreatingJapanese Women, 267-295; Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford, Calif, 1983). Some works examine women as agents of some part of the state; see, e.g., Sumiko Otsubo, Engendering Eugenics: Feminists and Marriage Restriction Legislation in the 1920s, in Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming); Barbara Molony and Kathleen Molony, Ichikawa Fusae: A Political Biography (Stanford, Calif., forthcoming); Kathleen Uno, Passages to Modernity: Motherhood, Childhood, and Social Reform in Early Twentieth-Century Japan