Pre-war Movement Research Articles

The Purist Focus

This paper examines the apparent contradictions between the use of the fragmented close-up in Fernand Léger's film Ballet mécanique (1924) and his depiction of the cohesive face in his painting in the early 1920s. I argue that this paradox stems from Léger's seeing, in certain pre-war movements whose aesthetics were premised on fragmentation, an endorsement of the supreme value of technology and modernity to the human subject, and of the suborning of that subject to industrial modernity, with all the catastrophic human consequences that were then witnessed in the First World War. These “aesthetics of fragmentation” are then compared and contrasted with Purism's post-war reconciliation of “man” as a cohesive being, achieved through its conservative revision of modernist aesthetics. This critique is effected through the “portmanteau” of Ballet mécanique, which is effectively an assemblage of different pre-war modernist aesthetics contrasted with Purist depictions of cohesive form.

Ishimoto Shizue: The Margaret Sanger of Japan

Post-1945 Japan is known for its remarkably low birth rate and a heavy reliance on abortion for birth control purposes. What may be less well known is the extensive use of contraceptive methods as well to limit or regulate births and the role played by the prewar birth control movement in making the concept of birth control socially acceptable. The prewar movement owed its origins and much of its success in changing attitudes toward birth control to the efforts of an individual feminist – Ishimoto Shizue. Ishimoto, in turn, owed much support and guidance to the American birth control leader, Margaret Sanger. A study of Ishimoto and the prewar Japanese birth control movement highlights the importance of international cross-currents in feminist thought and practice, for Ishimoto's meeting of the dynamic and controversial American leader focused her energies on birth control as a means to bring about women's liberation in Japan. Ishimoto's relationship with Sanger continued and grew throughout the following decades, ending only with Sanger's death in 1966. The way in which Ishimoto promoted birth control in Japan shows a strong influence from Sanger, but at the same time it was not a simple replication of Sanger's approach. Ishimoto's strategies for gaining support appear to have been shaped by her own social background, and also by the constraints of the interwar Japanese social and political environment. Ishimoto and her arguments for birth control therefore provide an insight into social trends of the pre-1945 period and an example of ways in which Japanese have accommodated Western ideas in the twentieth century.

Ishimoto shizue: The margaret sanger of Japan

Abstract Post-1945 Japan is known for its remarkably low birth rate and a heavy reliance on abortion for birth control purposes. What may be less well known is the extensive use of contraceptive methods as well to limit or regulate births and the role played by the prewar birth control movement in making the concept of birth control socially acceptable. The prewar movement owed its origins and much of its success in changing attitudes toward birth control to the efforts of an individual feminist – Ishimoto Shizue. Ishimoto, in turn, owed much support and guidance to the American birth control leader, Margaret Sanger. A study of Ishimoto and the prewar Japanese birth control movement highlights the importance of international cross-currents in feminist thought and practice, for Ishimoto's meeting of the dynamic and controversial American leader focused her energies on birth control as a means to bring about women's liberation in Japan. Ishimoto's relationship with Sanger continued and grew throughout the following decades, ending only with Sanger's death in 1966. The way in which Ishimoto promoted birth control in Japan shows a strong influence from Sanger, but at the same time it was not a simple replication of Sanger's approach. Ishimoto's strategies for gaining support appear to have been shaped by her own social background, and also by the constraints of the interwar Japanese social and political environment. Ishimoto and her arguments for birth control therefore provide an insight into social trends of the pre-1945 period and an example of ways in which Japanese have accommodated Western ideas in the twentieth century.

The New Age and the Emergence of Reactionary Modernism Before the Great War

It is well known that New Age played a vital role in dissemination of literary modernism and post-Impressionist art in Britain before First World War. Of three main polemicists of early modernism— T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis—Hulme wrote almost exclusively for magazine, Pound wrote a large proportion of his criticism for its pages and Lewis, who described New Age in 1914 as one of only good papers in country (Letter 319), published some of his early stories in paper and used its correspondence columns to lash out at his opponents, real or imagined. But despite its lively interest in such pre-war movements as Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism, New Age was a paper primarily concerned not with contemporary developments in art and literature, but with politics. Although historians of Edwardian Britain are well acquainted with fact that New Age played an important role in pre-war British politics, very little has actually been written about paper. John Finlay, an historian of Social Credit movement, maintains that historians have neglected journal because its politics are so hard to categorize (83). Rather than attempting any categorization himself, Finlay concludes that the paper was sui generis, a judgment which would have appealed to its editor, Alfred Orage (83). Similarly, Wallace Martin, main literary historian of New Age, attributes paper's mercurial politics to its writers' independence from existing political parties and factions. Martin argues that readership of the first Socialist weekly in London (The New Age 5) was comprised mainly of an in-

‘A Victory for God’: The Scottish Presbyterian Churches and the General Strike of 1926

During the final months of the First World War, the General Assemblies of the two major Presbyterian Churches in Scotland - the established Church of Scotland and the voluntary United Free Church - committed themselves to work for the thorough re- construction of Scottish society. Church leaders promised to work for a new Christian commonwealth, ending the social divisions and class hatred that had plagued pre-war Scottish industrial society. Bound together through the shared sacrifice of the war, the Scottish people would be brought back to the social teachings of Christianity and strive together to realise the Kingdom of God. The Churches would end their deference to the laws of nineteenth-century political economy, with their emphasis on individualism, self-interest and competition, and embrace new impera- tives of collective responsibility and co-operation. Along with the healing of social divisions, church leaders also pledged to end the ecclesiastical divisions in Scottish Presbyterianism. The final months of the war brought a revival of the pre-war movement to unite the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church into a single National Church, and Scottish ecclesiastical leaders held forth to a weary nation the vision of a united National Church leading a covenanted Christian commonwealth in pursuit of social justice and harmony.

Comparison Between Pre- and Post-War Student Movements in Japan

The world-famous Zengakuren of Japan is analyzed in its social context. Three types of student movements are distinguished: in-campus, co-campus, and extra-campus. The first are concerned only with an individual institution and are run by its students. The issues are direotly relevant to their campus life. These movements occur spontaneously and attract a majority of the enrollment on the campus involved. When, however, issues directly relevant to student life cannot be solved within a particular institution, students of many colleges cooperate with each other, thus running a co-campus movement. Formal organizations like Zengakuren are founded in this way. When political disputes of a broader-than-educational significance become the central concern of students, cooperation with non-student organizations like political parties and labor unions is necessary. Movements of this kind are naMed extra-campus. In post-war Japan, these three types of student movements can be seen in the periods from 1945-47, 1948-50, and 1951 to date, respeotively. Gradual radicalization, federation, and bureaucratization are found in both preand post-war student movements. But the pre-war movements were run by underground, cohesive minorities, whereas the post-war movements have mobilized the majority of Japanese university students. The latter are open, legal, heterogeneous, and not-very-cohesive, ma88 movements.