Women’s Rights as Proletarian Rights: Yamakawa Kikue, Suffrage, and the “Dawn of Liberation”

Abstract

Yamakawa Kikue is famous for having worked relentlessly to critique Japan’s prewar socialist movement for its lack of attention to women’s issues. In addition to her continual presence as an oppositional figure operating simultaneously at the margins and the center of Japanese socialist political and organizational activities, she also offered similarly relentless critiques of what she considered “bourgeois” women’s groups and their pursuit of liberal political rights like suffrage that would benefit primarily elite women. She was highly ambivalent during the prewar period regarding the importance of advocating for women’s suffrage. But with the end of the war, and thus the end of the authoritarian and militarist state against which she had fought her entire adult life, Yamakawa could embrace the cause and the reality of suffrage without hesitation. This marked not a radical shift, but a continuation of her commitment to democratic and anti-authoritarian principles.