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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.