Yosano Akiko's Middle-Class Working Women

In her essay, Yosano Akiko and the Taishō Debate over the “New Woman,” historian Laurel Rasplica Rodd begins with the release of Henrik Ibsen’s provocative A Doll’s House in order to introduce the term “new women.” Coined by Ihara Seiseien, this phrase, just like the aforementioned play, represented how women were redefining their roles in all spheres of Japanese society (i.e. the home, workplace, education, and sexuality). Rodd continues by introducing the four prominent women in the debate over women’s future standing in society: Yosano Akiko, Hiratsuka Raicho, Yamakawa Kikue, and Yamada Waka. Though each shared the desire to ultimately better women’s position, they disagreed on what steps were necessary to get there.
According to accounts
This stems from the fact that an increase in women in the work force would ultimately result in changes to Japanese traditional values regarding family structure. In her essay, Middle-Class Working Women During the Interwar Years, historian Margit Nagy sheds light on the reasons middle-class women sought employment and the subsequent effect on the country.
Originally employment for women was often considered an indication of low class. These views were challenged with the increased amount of middle-class women entering the workforce. Though insufficient income and necessity certainly drove the majority of working women to search for jobs in the first place, these women were also drawn in for more personal reasons. A good portion of these new working women were “attracted by the opportunities that a job offered” (Nagy 207) in helping them express “independence and self-reliance” (Nagy 208). Furthermore, women were beginning to find a “greater availability of professional and white-collar jobs” that paid significantly more than the limited paying positions that had previously been available to them (Nagy 207). Despite these positive aspects of entering the workforce, working women were often subject to “demeaning remark and attitudes,” sexual harassment, and various other forms of maltreatment and criticism (Nagy
Nagy states that although Japan initially took pride in its special family structure that was supposed to help maintain stability, a sizeable amount of working women did not wish to get married. Though the most logical answer in regards to the “new women” is that these women avoided marriage to fulfill their “aspiration for independence,” Nagy argues that these women could also have turned economic “necessity into an ideal” in regards to the cost and availability of suitable marriage partners (Nagy 207). Married women on the other hand had a more difficult relationship with employment. Despite achieving a degree of self-fulfillment through working for their family’s income, they struggled to “fulfill work responsibilities without neglecting family life” (Nagy 213). The government’s main form of aid for these women came at the cost of their independence. The efforts focused on making “employment outside the home unnecessary” for women, instead providing jobs to “male household heads” (Nagy 214). Nagy infers from these programs that the government viewed women workers as more of a potential threat to society, than a benefit to the economy. As a result of this odd system that tried to both capitalize on and fix the “working woman problem”, there is an “uneasiness” that persists in the Japanese workforce in the present-day. One possible alternative that