Hist 199 Postwar Japan Prompt Paper #6

Due April 25, 4-6 pages

Draw upon Yoshitake in Changing Lives Ch. 3 and/or Kishino in Ch. 4, and triangulate with the documentary film Ripples of Change .

Since trying to do both women and both documentaries in the same paper would be too much, you should probably focus on just one of them in this paper and something from the films. If you choose to do your longert final paper on this same topic, you could then expand your analysis and go deeper.

If you want to look mainly at Yoshitake in this shorter paper, you could look at how the Lib Movement helped her develop a "feminine consciousness" (onna-ishiki) located inside each of us." (101) Use extensive quotations fro her text and work with her language so you can show the reader what she has to say. Why is this a feminine consciousness important? How did women explain their encounter with a feminine consciousness?

Another tack: Yoshitake also mentions her feelings of "discomfort, isolation, even alienation" and that and how women like herself still felt "bound up in a stereoypical image of women's happienss in terms of getting married, being a good wife, and being a good mother" (101) and, as a result, many felt "trapped with no way out given the oppressive nature of a society controlled by men" (103). How was she able to fight her way out and overcome these feelings?

Lib women like Tanaka Mitsu and others talked a lot about the feeling of being pulled in different directions, of being "bunretsu shita" or "torn apart," and Kishino even used the same word to describe her feelings when looking at the face of the young girl Mitsu in the film (The Woman I Abandoned): she said she could see in that face her own "disrupted self" (bunretsu shita watashi jishin). Why do you think she felt such a sense of rupture?

So, these kinds of passages may be important markers that suggest some of the key issues of this period. Is this something you can examine more closely?

 

Note: This shorter paper could be preliminary to the longer, medium length paper later where a student would bring together these two Changing Lives chapters on Yoshitake and Kishino, the Muto article on "The Birth of the Women's Movement in the 1970s,"  the Shigematsu.pdf on WISE on the role of Tanaka Mitsu, along with the two documentary films, Ripples of Change and The 30 Years of Sisterhood. This paper could focus on what the Women's Lib Movement accomplished in terms of engaging participants who previously lacked a voice and a sense of agency.  The Yoshitake and Kishino chapters offer wonderful primary materials--original voices imbedded in their historical context--which are important for good historical writing.  This paper offers an excellent opportunity to explore how the "Lib" Movement provided women with a place and a vocabulary with which to grapple with women's issues and define, for themselves, what a "feminine consciousness" might mean.   

 

 

Instructions