Members of the Taishutō s Proletarian Women s League planning to assist striking women textile workers at the Tōyō Muslin mills, September 1930.

Transcription

1 WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE The growth of unions in the heavy industrial sector features prominently in this history of the Japanese labor movement, but the majority of Japanese factory workers were employed in textile mills well into the early-20th century. This relatively slow transition from light to heavy industry is similar to what took place in the United States and Great Britain; and in Japan as in other industrializing countries the majority of textile workers were young women. In fact, women comprised more than half of all industrial workers in Japan until Despite protections ostensibly introduced in the 1911 Factory Law (implemented in 1916), these female workers were generally treated harshly. Managers imposed harsh work rules and long hours, ignored dangerous working conditions and rampant diseases like tuberculosis, and required their women workers to live in cramped factory dormitories. Managers got away with such repressive control in part because women were, by custom and by law, the wards of their fathers and husbands, and by extension, of their employers as well. Women did not, however, sit idly by as managers, government bureaucrats, and many union leaders as well overlooked their grievances. Women activists bargained for better wages and working conditions by organizing work slowdowns, strikes, and protests. 1

2 Members of the Taishutō s Proletarian Women s League planning to assist striking women textile workers at the Tōyō Muslin mills, September [S ] 2

3 This promoted a rally in support of striking textile workers at the Tōyō Muslin mills in February Party chairman Asō Hisashi headlined the event, but women activists Iwauchi Tomie and Orimoto Sadayo were also featured. The graphic at the center of the poster, a masculine worker, inadvertently illustrates how the male-centeredness of leftist organizations often overshadowed the interests of women even when their interests were ostensibly the focus [PA068] 3

4 Despite their legal exclusion from political events, women s nonunion disputes were at the center of political protest and strike events throughout the 20th century. Women dockworkers in 1918 refused to load ships with rice too expensive for them to feed their children, sparking nationwide riots that brought down the government. Women bus workers in the 1920s won toilet breaks and the right to unpaid menstruation leave, while women strikers at the Tōyō Muslin factory in 1930 fought for and won the right to come and go from their dormitories at will. They failed, however, to secure shorter work hours, the right to access to their saved wages, or even the right to receive visitors at their dormitories. Importantly, the strike at the Tōyō Muslin factory was only one of 329 labor disputes led by women for working women s issues. While women s suffrage was not achieved until 1945, the struggle dated to the campaign for universal manhood suffrage in the early 1920s. This photo depicts a 1924 meeting of Sōdōmei-affiliated women s suffrage activists. [S ] 4

5 It is easy to forget just how young many women textile workers were. Beginning their working lives as early as age 11, jokō (female textile workers) launched hundreds of small-scale strikes throughout the 1930s, often in the face of interference from their union brothers. This photograph captures a small group of five young jokō as they cross the street in front of the Sangenya Spinning Company in Osaka during a strike in the early 1930s. [S ] 5

6 Female textile workers stage a sit-down strike at the Kanabo Spinning Company s Hyōgo plant in [S ] 6

7 Number 2 in a series of five Proletarian Postcards (1930) commemorating the Tōyō Muslin strike depicts a unity rally of more than 3,000 women in the factory dining hall. [S ] On viewing images of a potentially disturbing nature: click here. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2013 Visualizing Cultures Creative Commons License 7