One Woman Who Dared: Ichikawa Fusae And The Japanese Women's Suffrage Movement.

Abstract

This thesis examines the prewar activities of Ichikawa Fusae, the central figure in the decades-long struggle for women's rights in Japan. Born into a late nineteenth century farming family in central Japan, Ichikawa was scarcely aware as a child that being female would someday limit her aspirations. A highly motivated child and young adult, she expected to earn her slice of the expanding pie of opportunities in Japan's modernizing society and economy. By the time she reached adulthood in the 1910s, however, brakes had been applied to Japan's societal momentum, stopping progress short of the radical change implicit in women's equality. Ichikawa began to perceive that the emphasis on women's traditional role as wives and mothers would inhibit her own proclivity for an active career. Although Ichikawa was not the only one to articulate the distinct limitations of women's prescribed role, her name alone runs as a thread throughout the prewar women's rights movement. She is, perhaps, the best example of a pure feminist in her generation. She consistently refused to internalize her frustrations by blaming herself for personal setbacks. Rather, she sought to relate her own experiences in Japan's changing society to the more abstract problem of women's social circumscription. Though various political ideologies may have attracted her at different stages in her life, none vied with feminism for her attention. I have developed an analytic explanation for Ichikawa Fusae's evolution from discontented young woman to conscious feminist and committed suffragist. In Part One, I explore the influence of her upbringing, education, and early work experiences on the development of her activist personality. The crucial factor in the development of her non-feminine (as traditionally defined) personality--that is, a bold, aggressive, inquisitive, activist personality--was, I believe, her provincial background and her father's uncommon emphasis on self-improvement. Part Two discusses her exposure to feminist ideas in Tokyo and the ways in which she began to see beyond her own experiences in developing an abstract ideology of feminism. She devoted unflagging energy to the cause of women's rights, but she was never stubbornly wedded to one organizational approach to activism. During her twenties, she developed her ideas in several contexts, learning through Tokyo's New Woman's Association, through sitting at the feet of America's Alice Paul, and through agitation in the Diet. Pragmatism demanded shifts in methods--her feminism demanded consistency in ideology--as she worked out an organizational approach appropriate to her tastes and talents. Part Three discusses that approach by exploring Ichikawa's role and activities in the Women's Suffrage League, the organization she helped to establish in 1924. It was through her activities in this organization that Ichikawa became the recognized leader of the women's rights movement in her country. In Part Four, I discuss the difficulties she faced as a feminist in wartime Japan. Her story as a suffrage activists ends with the granting of women's suffrage after World War Two. Although not directly responsible for the granting of women's suffrage in December 1945 (the role of MacArthur's Occupation is undisputed), Ichikawa's earlier activities helped to make the idea of political rights for women acceptable to millions of Japanese. Above all, she succeeded in creating a new role for Japanese women, one in which they were more politically sophisticated than before, more likely to express their discontent through organization, and, consequently, less dependent on men.