66 - A new era of women writers

Summary

In the final years of the Meiji era, women confronted a host of restrictions imposed by the newly constructed "family system", yet the profound social transformations in education, urbanization, and even the organization of work and home, created new terrains for women as both readers and authors. Tamura Toshiko published a succession of stories: Ikichi in the feminist journal Seito, followed by Seigon and Onna sakusha. Over the course of the interwar period, a new generation of women writers achieved considerable popularity and notoriety, with readership sufficient to support their literary careers that, for many, continued in the decades following the Pacific War. Despite increasingly strict scrutiny from censors from the early 1930s, women writers continued to probe the inherent inequalities of sexual politics. Sata Ineko's Crimson depicts an unhappy, unstable marriage that highlighted the limits of shared political convictions. Sata had achieved initial recognition through her autobiographical account of exploited child labor in Kyarameru kojo kara.