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Women's Rights and Society's Needs: Japan's 1931 Suffrage Bill

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Sharon H. Nolte
Sharon H. Nolte
Affiliation:
DePauw University
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Extract

The history of women is different from that of men. Women's history is the highlighting of the cultural construction of gender, the ways in which “men” and “women” are defined in considerable autonomy from biological males and females. The culturally constructed gender system interacts with a society's political system in ways that are just beginning to be explored.1 At the same time, scholars also find their definitions of national states to be in flux. Criticizing both Weberian and Marxist traditions of analysis of the state, Charles Bright and Susan Harding have stressed the open-ended, continuous, and contingent interplay between state structures and initiatives on the one hand, and social movements on the other.2 It is an auspicious time to reconsider the relationships between women and the state in cross-cultural perspective. Here I will examine the women's suffrage movement in Japan (1919–31 ) in its political context in order to encourage comparison with other women's suffrage movements, and to re-examine the interwar Japanese state from the viewpoint of one of its least-studied challengers.

Type
Perspectives on the Position of Women
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , October 1986 , pp. 690 - 714
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1986

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79 Saji, 120–43.

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