• DOI:10.1086/493837
• Corpus ID: 143844577

Feminist Criticism in Japanese Politics in the 1880s: The Experience of Kishida Toshiko

@article{Sievers1981FeministCI,
  title={Feminist Criticism in Japanese Politics in the 1880s: The Experience of Kishida Toshiko},
  author={Sharon L. Sievers},
  journal={Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society},
  year={1981},
  volume={6},
  pages={602 - 616}
}

• Sharon L. Sievers
• Published 1 July 1981
• History
• Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

It is symptomatic of the treatment of women in Japanese history that we know so little of their direct contribution to the wide-ranging debate over "women's rights" that began in the early years of the Meiji period (1868-1912) and continued, in one form or another, throughout Japan's modern history. Part of a larger discussion over the pace and style of Japan's modernization, the debate was carried on against a background of growing political opposition to a new government, which had imposed unpopular economic burdens on the population and had initiated broad social change that left fellow samurai without the status they had held for centuries. The ability of Japanese women to use this opposition movement to raise women's issues and build networks is one of many remarkable achievements of the second decade of Meiji, a decade in which women demanded the right to vote, called for an end to customary discrimination of all kinds related to women, staged the country's first industrial strike, demanded better education, and generally made it clear that they intended to play important roles in Japan's nation-