Women's rights, feminism, and suffragism in Japan, 1870-1925

The struggle for women's suffrage in Japan, often associated with the liberal politics of the 1920s, built on women's rights discussions dating from the late nineteenth century. Discourse about "rights" in nineteenth-century Japan derived from a conflation of indigenous anti-authoritarian ideas with imported notions of inclusion(following Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and respect for educated women's personhood (following John Stuart Mill). By the 1920s women's rights advocates called on the sate to recognize women both as a protected class requiring sheltering from the excesses of patriarchy and capitalism and as individuals with full rights of membership, including suffrage, in the state and civil society. Following limited participation in the activities of the wartime state, Japanese women obtained full political rights only after World War II. The evolving feminist movements of the previous seventy years laid the groundwork for womens lively use of the right of suffrage in the late 1940s.