The Birth of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s

In 1970, when the radical student movement known as the Zenkyoto movement ¹ was retreating, a new women’s movement sprang up amidst jeering by media and antipathy from all other quarters of the male-dominated Japanese society. It also startled and enraged most of the women’s movement establishment with an iconoclastic appeal to which they had never been exposed—liberation of women’s sexuality, suppression of which, it was contended, was the concealed, tabooed base of women’s oppression, and in fact, of human oppression in general. The appeal, however, proved to be a moving message from women to women, reaching not only those in the movement but also women of no definite political persuasion, addressing the kernel of their never openly told issues, and liberating their minds, mouths, and senses. That was the women’s liberation movement, dubbed “Woman Lib” or just “Lib,” pronounced so in Japanese. Launched by spontaneous groups of young, anonymous activists, Lib marked the emergence of a radical feminist movement, in fact a reemergence after the first in the 1910s, the Seito (blue-stocking) movement, which pioneered radical feminism in Japan.