ABSTRACT
The decades from the 1950s through the mid-1980s were a time of revolutionary change throughout the world. Science and technology created new opportunities and challenges, which were often entangled with Cold War politics. The five countries—People's Republic of China (PRC), Republic of China (ROC), South Korea, North Korea, and Japan—continued to have vastly different political systems, global positions, and transnational relations from the 1950s through the 1980s. Gender issues were, as a result, treated differently in each of them. Women and men found their roles increasingly defined by state actors and/or economic interests in the 1960s, and many, especially in South Korea and Japan, resisted these forms of gendering through women's movements in the 1970s and 1980s. In Japan, a notion of the "traditional family" was promoted by big business through the New Life Movement and by the government through social programs in the countryside, through education, until the early 1980s, of laws that gendered the definition of nationality.
