본문 바로가기
  • Home

Life-centrism and Eugenics in the Modern Japanese Women’s Movement: Focusing on the Politics of Sexuality in Seitō

  • 탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities
  • 2021, 14(1), pp.55-77
  • DOI : 10.22901/trans.2021.14.1.55
  • Publisher : Ewha Institute for the Humanities: EIH
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : March 15, 2021
  • Accepted : April 22, 2021
  • Published : April 30, 2021

Kim Byeongjin 1

1이화여자대학교 이화인문과학원

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Seitō (青鞜) represented women who questioned the ideology of the ‘good wife and wise mother’, which had been strengthened after the Meiji Restoration, as a “new woman” and led the women’s movement in Japan in the 1910s. After modernization, Japan strengthened the logic of patriarchy, divided women into wives and prostitutes, and made women with jobs such as female workers invisible. The female intellectuals of Seitō also showed limitations in internalizing this premise. However, in the abortion debate, women’s right to self-determination in sexual and reproductive sexuality within the institution was highlighted, and in the debate on the abortion, the human rights of women outside the institutional sex as the nucleus were highlighted. Also, as in the case of Hiratsuka Raichō”s eugenics and Itō Noe’s life-centrism, scientific thinking at the time influenced the feminist movement. It cannot be overlooked that this aspect, pointed out as their limitation, was intended to expand the extension of the women’s movement by securing scientific guarantee and ideological universality in the context of the time.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.