ABSTRACT
Through the development of post-war employment and welfare structures, the idea of the ‘family as a unit’ has emerged. Accordingly, these systems created and reinforced women’s dependency upon their spouses and society. As elaborated in the previous chapter, it was inevitable that systems based on the male breadwinner family model had socially and often institutionally constructed gender roles - indeed, the role of women in society was clearly defined and embedded in many Japanese families. For example, despite the worldwide feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a gender-segregated curriculum was applied in Japanese schools until the late 1980s. In junior high and high schools (age 13 to 18-years-old), it was common for only girls to take ‘home economics’ classes to learn how to cook and sew, while boys took traditional Japanese martial arts (e.g. Judo and Kendo) or carpentry classes. Indeed, at the workplace, female workers are still expected to clean their offices every morning, and to serve tea to their male colleagues, except in the most progressive of companies.
