ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of women’s roles through the years of Occupation and democratic consolidation and looks at the politics of feminist mobilization through the 1970s. It considers their participation in formal-democratic institutions, along with the emergence of national security as a “woman’s issue” in the 1980s. The chapter shows that what moved women to take a Great Leap Forward with regard to direct engagement in politics during the 1980s was not their interest in traditional “gender issues” but rather their focus on nuclear energy and national defense, topics erroneously classified as "men’s issues". Extreme economic insecurity, added to the pervasiveness of traditional religious beliefs regarding proper female roles, rendered women susceptible to the National-Socialist cause. Any treatment of women as political actors needs to distinguish between the largely apolitical mainstream and those counting themselves among the well-informed, activist core.
