- Convenor:
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Marnie Anderson
(Smith College)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
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Linda Flores
(University of Oxford)
- Discussant:
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Linda Flores
(University of Oxford)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Interdisciplinary Section: Gender Studies
Short Abstract
This interdisciplinary panel considers women’s labor across the twentieth century and sheds new light on the variety of feminisms that emerged in these years. We consider how women envisioned equality, the relationship between the individual and the collective, and what liberation might look like.
Long Abstract
This interdisciplinary panel considers women’s labor across the twentieth century and sheds new light on the variety of feminisms that emerged in these years.
The first paper considers women’s leadership of wartime women’s groups, countering the assumption that women were passive. The paper argues that local branches of patriotic women’s groups varied considerably and suggests the possibilities and barriers to liberation.
Our second presenter explores early postwar debates over Simone de Beauvoir’s feminism, which emphasised sexual equality through financial independence. Even women who agreed with her ideal of “liberation through work” found it unrealistic in light of widespread sex discrimination, leading some to explore alternate visions of a more equitable world through fiction.
Our third paper takes up several cases in Enchi Fumiko’s postwar fiction where economically vulnerable wives confront their spouses’ infidelity. The paper illuminates how social class constrained women’s choices and probes how some women sought autonomy through work.
The fourth panelist examines 1980s discourses on neoliberalism and postfeminism through Hayashi Mariko's autobiographical fiction, which focuses on women’s freedom and happiness. Hayashi’s insistence on individual success in the realms of employment and sexuality marked her as a “selfish woman,” according to the logic of the time.
Collectively, this panel showcases shifts in working women’s roles over half a century. These include the limits placed on women by gender, class, and sexuality. We draw attention to the multiple meanings of labor, both paid and unpaid, high and low status—as well as the often-limited possibilities for women’s leadership and autonomy. We consider how women variously envisioned equality, the relationship between the individual and the collective, and what liberation might look like.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper considers cases of women’s leadership in the large patriotic women’s groups at the local level in 1930s Japan. I challenge scholarship that stresses how competing groups served as the government’s “intermediaries” and demonstrate the variety of ways women’s groups operated.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines three cases of large-scale patriotic women’s groups at the local level in mid-1930s Japan. These include the Greater Japan Federated Women’s Association (Dai Nihon rengō fujinkai), the Greater Japan National Defense Women’s Association (Dai Nihon kokubō fujinkai), and the Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku fujinkai). I challenge existing scholarship that adopts a top-down approach and stresses how women’s groups served as the government’s “intermediaries.” Instead, I argue that a look at the local level shows that groups offered women leadership opportunities. To be sure, women’s chances to serve as leaders were uneven and varied by village. Men lead in some places, women in others. Yet in still other cases, husbands and wives appear to have worked together.
Village women in prewar Japan did not have professions, but they did engage in labor, typically uncompensated except for piecework. For many, women’s groups were yet another place where authorities called on women to serve the village and the country. And yet, it would be incorrect to assume that women were passive. I analyze the multiple motivations women had for joining women’s groups and the variety of experiences they came away with. Some women acted with great enthusiasm while others dragged their feet. Feminist Ichikawa Fusae’s 1937 visit to her hometown even led her to suggest that participation in the National Defense Women’s Association gave farm women temporary “liberation.”
Overall, the paper sheds light on how official ideologies hit the ground and how women responded in ways that government sponsors did not anticipate. I also briefly consider the legacy of women’s groups in the postwar era. While the women’s groups had been formally dismantled in 1942, women took their speaking and organizing skills with them into the new era and built postwar organizations based on wartime structures.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores early postwar debates over Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of sexual equality through financial independence. Even women who agreed with this idea found it unrealistic given widespread sex discrimination, leading some to explore alternate visions of liberation through fiction.
Paper long abstract
In The Second Sex (1949), the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir famously prescribed work outside the home as a key component of modern women’s liberation. Freedom through a satisfying career and financial independence sounded good, and Beauvoir made it look easy. But Japanese women soon realized it wasn't. As Japan’s economic recovery increasingly depended on a gendered division of labor that kept wives as home so their husbands could labor to build “Japan, Inc.,” postwar Japanese feminists argued among themselves about how or whether women should seek professional roles outside the home.
This paper explores the way Japanese women in the 1950s and 1960s engaged with Beauvoir’s feminism, focusing on the shifting significance of her ideal of “liberation through work.” While the postwar constitution theoretically guaranteed women equality of opportunity in education and employment, they struggled against a host of societal barriers to capitalize on these new rights and freedoms. Mainstream media fanned the flames of resentment toward young women who gained entrance to prominent universities, on the argument that they were taking places away from young men who deserved those opportunities more. Once they graduated and started looking for work, young women found that companies blatantly posted "no women" clauses in their want ads, in flagrant violation of labor laws and constitutional guarantees of equality. Those who somehow managed to find employment in keeping with their qualifications faced virulent harassment and discrimination on the job. Married women, and particularly those with children, faced additional hurdles. It was hard to feel "liberated" when having a career meant facing a second shift of housework and child care upon returning home. Even childless wives found themselves taking care of husbands and prioritizing their partners' careers when "necessary," which was pretty much all the time. And though women writers envisioned a myriad of fictional worlds where societal and technological change would help to even the playing field—from affordable child care to male pregnancy and artificial wombs—somehow the idea of men sharing the burden of housework seemed the most fantastical of all possible solutions.
Paper short abstract
Hayashi Mariko (1965–) became an iconic woman writer in the 1980s, the so-called women’s decade (onna no jidai). This presentation analyses her early work as a proto-postfeminist novel, where women’s individual choices and freedom for employment and sexuality are in contest with collective change.
Paper long abstract
Winning the Naoki literary prize in 1985, Hayashi Mariko became an iconic writer of the 1980s, to the extent of being called “a prodigy of the decade” (Suzuki 2010). This presentation will analyse her autobiographical novel Hoshi ni negai o (1984, Wish upon a Star) in the contexts of the 1980s, in light of contemporary debates and issues in women’s employment, freedom and happiness. Considering Hayashi and her ambivalent positionality regarding feminism, reading her early work will help us to understand this proto-postfeminist novel as an account of women’s fraught choices, success and happiness. I will analyse the individualist stance the novel takes in relation to a critical reading of Downing’s contested concept of the ‘selfish woman’ (2019). Where Sanga (2019) engages with Hayashi’s later novels from a postfeminist lens, I trace these concepts back and elaborate further on them in her earlier work, which I consider here as proto-postfeminist.
The 1980s is the so-called women’s decade (onna no jidai), when the possibility of equal employment is legalised in principle (Equal Employment Opportunity Law), while, in contradiction, law and policy retained women at home as housewives, with the revision of pension protections (No.3 insured). I read Hayashi’s novel in such a context of the 1980s, with these legal contradictions and the polarisation in women’s lifestyles and their possibilities for ‘freedom’, ultimately highlighting the controversial nature of her Hoshi ni negai o. Writing in the bildungsroman form, the protagonist’s social mobility from working class to becoming a successful copy writer resonates with Hayashi’s life. Written at the peak of the Japanese economic bubble, Hayashi herself and her works controversially represent the desire to conduct her individual success, in employment and sexuality. In dialogue with Downing’s contentious valorisation of the ‘selfish woman’, I argue that Hayashi created a rather controversial icon of women’s freedom and happiness in this novel.
Paper short abstract
This paper focuses on Enchi’s works where economically vulnerable wives confront marital infidelity. It highlights how social class influenced marital, reproductive and sexual choices. The study aims to deepen the concept of women’s autonomy through employment as it was negotiated by Japanese women.
Paper long abstract
Enchi Fumiko’s works generally focus on a refined, well-educated female protagonist who holds an intellectual profession or works as an artist or writer, and whose occupation constitutes a defining aspect of her identity rather than merely a means of economic subsistence. This study focuses primarily on two short novels by Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986) written in the 1950s, both of which instead center on women engaged in less privileged forms of employment. Specifically, I examine Korosu 「殺す」 (1955) and Tsuma no kakioki 「妻の書きおき」 (1957), both first published in Fujin kōron, which depict the dilemma of wives who become aware of their husbands’ infidelity. In both narratives, the wives’ inability to confront their husbands is closely tied to their economic vulnerability.
A specular contrast emerges between the two protagonists: in one case, the wife’s lower social status leads her to envy her husband’s lover, a doctor whose professional position highlights the class disparity between them; in the other, the protagonist instead empathizes with her rival, a poor war widow. In both works, social and political contexts play a crucial role, extending the reflection on the presumed freedom of working women beyond economic independence alone, and linking it to marriage, reproduction, and sexuality.
On this basis, I compare these stories with a later work, Hanayakana Kūge 「はなやかな空華」 (first published in Shōsetsu gendai in 1966), whose protagonist occupies a markedly different position as a wealthy, lesbian doctor. Through the depiction of her intimate relationships with women of a different class, the narrative reveals that women in postwar Japan who lacked independent careers were often obliged to marry, embracing compulsory heterosexuality not solely as a result of social prejudice, but more fundamentally for economic reasons.
By analyzing works by one of the most prominent female writers of the period that portray employed women from different perspectives, and by situating these texts within their social and political contexts, this study aims to deepen the concept of women’s autonomy through employment as it was negotiated by Japanese women in the 1950s and 1960s.