Archives for March 2015

Kusunose’s Tax Protest in Meiji Japan

March 25, 2015 By Pam

Kusunose Kita (1836-1920), a 45-year-old widow, resented her situation. After her husband’s death, she assumed his property tax responsibilities, but was denied his political rights. In September, 1878, to make a point, she attempted to vote in a local election. After she was turned away, she wrote a bold letter to government authorities. It read in part:

I do not have the right to vote. I do not have the right to act as guarantor. My rights, compared with those of male heads of households, are totally ignored. Most reprehensible of all, the only equality I share with men who are heads of their households is the onerous duty of paying taxes.

Kusunose Kita, “Grandmother Popular Rights”

Kusunose’s letter, the first known public petition written by a woman in Japan, was reprinted in newspapers across the country. Overnight, Kusunose earned the honorary appellation Minken Baasan, “Grandmother Popular Rights.” Because she dared question the status quo, she became a symbol of women’s new struggle for empowerment during the Meiji period (1868-1912).

Ueki Emori, leader of Japan’s popular-rights movement

The Home Ministry was not impressed by Kusunose’s insistence that “rights and duties must go together” and demanded that her back taxes be paid immediately.

One man who was impressed, however, was Ueki Emori (1857-1892), the leader of Japan’s popular-rights movement and champion of women’s rights. After reading the letter, he met with Kusunose and several other women to hear their ideas. In 1879, he published a series of essays promoting women’s equality.

The new ideas of justice made sense to other progressive thinkers as well, especially in Kōchi Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku, the birthplace of Japan’s human rights movement in the Meiji period. There, both men and women worked outside of the home to make ends meet. A mother’s movement helped establish numerous daycare centers. Kōchi is sometimes called the “Kingdom of Nursery Schools.”

And it was in Kōchi that the local government found a legal loophole and allowed women to vote in assembly elections in 1880. The national government closed the loophole in 1884, but it was a start. The seeds of a new day had been planted, thanks, in part, to Kusunose’s brave protest.

TO GO DEEPER

Anderson, Marnie S. A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan. Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.

Hane, Mikiso, ed. “Introduction” from Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Voices of Japanese Rebel Women. NY: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Sievers, Sharon L., Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983.

“Aspects of Women (1888), the woodblock art of Taiso Yoshitoshi” (2:16 mins.)

“Women’s Suffrage Around the World” by Encyclopaedia Britannica (4:30 mins.)

The “Red Virgin,” France’s Revolutionary Teacher

March 18, 2015 By Pam

“Victimes des Révolutions” by Paul Moreau-Vauthier. A goddess defends ghostly Commune martyrs at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Women in France have a long tradition of radical activism. Theirs is the country of Joan of Arc, who led an army in 1429; Marie de Gournay, who wrote about gender equality in 1622; and the 800 women who marched to the National Assembly at Versailles in 1789 to demand bread. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges wrote a “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen” and was beheaded two years later for “having forgotten the virtues which belong to her sex.” And then, there was Louise Michel (1830-1905).

BEWARE OF THE WOMEN!

Mosaic street art at Montmartre.

Prussian troops invaded France in 1870 and captured Emperor Napoleon III. Paris did not accept defeat easily. One of those who resisted the invasion was Louise Michel, nicknamed the “Red Virgin,” a poet, teacher, anarchist, and revolutionary.

That winter, Michel was both a participant in and witness to the Parisian uprising. In her Memoirs, she wrote about the women revolutionaries in Paris at that time.

Heroic women were found in all social positions … They would have preferred to die rather than surrender, and dispensed their efforts the best way they could, while demanding ceaselessly that Paris continue to resist the Prussian siege … Beware of the women when they are sickened by all that is around them and rise up against the old world. On that day the new world will begin.

Montmartre graffiti art. Rough translation, “The people manage to obtain only that which they take.”

Despite their efforts, the city was forced to surrender in January, 1871. Young soldiers of the National Guard (the Parisian popular militia) sank into mud up to their ankles and were slaughtered by Prussian forces. Even after they were allowed to elect a national government house in Versailles, the invaded population remained bitter.

The Versailles government was nervous about the continued resistance in Paris. In March, when the National Guard reclaimed its’ lost cannons in a show of bravado, the Versailles troops crept back into the sleeping city to seize the cannons.

MARCH 18, 1871: HOUSEWIVES STEP INTO HISTORY

Early in the morning of March 18, 1871, the housewives of Paris set out on their usual errands to buy bread and milk and stepped into the pages of history. They opened their doors to find that soldiers from Versailles had occupied Paris during the night. Word spread quickly, as more and more women came out of their houses. Soon, a crowd of over 1,000 stood gaping at the young soldiers.

Paris was at war again. The streets filled with French soldiers — those from Versailles fighting on behalf of the invading Prussians and those of the Parisian National Guard fighting for their beloved hilltop, Montmartre, their city, their nation.

No one knows how it happened that the women found themselves speaking with one voice that day. They approached the soldiers from Versailles asking, “Will you fire on us? Will you fire on your brother Parisians? On our husbands? Our children?”

Women surrounded the soldiers of the eighty-eighth Battalion and formed a barrier between them and the local men of the National Guard. When General Lecomte ordered his soldiers to fire, the soldiers turned around and arrested their own general. Several streets away, General Susbielle encountered similar resistance. He too ordered his cavalry to charge but, to his chagrin, the men retreated. The women cheered.

Louise Michel later wrote of March 18:

The Butte of Montmartre was bathed in the first light of day through which things were glimpsed as if they were hidden behind a thin veil of water. Gradually the crowd increased … The women of Paris covered the cannons with their bodies. When their officers ordered the soldiers to fire, the men refused … When we had won our victory, I looked around and noticed my poor mother who had followed me to the Butte of Montmartre, believing that I was going to die… On this day, the eighteenth of March, the people wakened.

All over the city, women stopped horses, cut their harnesses, and urged the soldiers from Versailles to join their brothers in the National Guard. That evening, the troops were ordered to withdraw.

FROM THE PARIS COMMUNE TO EXILE

For the next two months, the people’s revolutionary socialist government ruled the city. It was called the “Paris Commune.” But difficult days of death and defeat lay ahead for the people. Thousands were killed in the streets, executed, or sentenced to exile.

Statue by Émile Derré of Louise Michel, the revolutionary teacher.

Michel was captured, tried, and found guilty. She demanded the death penalty, crying, “Since it seems that any heart which beats for liberty has the right only to a small lump of lead, I demand my share… If you are not cowards, kill me!”

The court, however, did not want to make a martyr of her, so it sentenced Michel to exile in a prison colony in New Caledonia in the South Pacific for almost ten years. There, she learned from and taught the Kanaka children.

Granted amnesty in 1880, she returned to Paris, hailed as a heroine. Although she defended the use of violence as a tool of revolution, her own primary weapons were the words she gave the people in her poems, essays, school lessons, and speeches. For her, learning and teaching were the greatest tools in creating the new world of peace and justice. She wrote:

Do men sense the rising tide of us women, famished for learning? We ask only this of the old world: the little knowledge that it has …

Your titles. Bah! We do not want rubbish. Do what you want to with them. They are too flawed and limited for women … What we do want is knowledge and education and liberty… And then men and women together will gain the rights of all humanity.

She continued to teach, speak, and fight against injustice for the rest of her life, was arrested and jailed several more times. When she died in 1905, thousands mourned throughout France and the world.

Today, schools, a Paris Metro stop, streets, and squares are named for her. There are statues and plaques bearing her legend and stamps issued with her image. Louise Michel remains a heroine of working people.

TO GO DEEPER

Books:

The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, edited by Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter, (University Alabama Press, 2003)

Articles:

“Walking the Streets of Paris in the Footsteps of Louise Michel” on John Meed’s blog

Videos:

“Great Lives: Paul Mason and historian Carolyn Eichner discuss Louise Michel” (28 mins.)

International Women’s Day — Born in the U.S.A.

March 6, 2015 By Pam

According to one legend, International Women’s Day commemorates a March 8 demonstration in 1857, when women garment workers on New York City’s Lower East Side took to the streets to protest their deplorable working conditions. Problem is, there is no record of such a protest on that date.

Legends aside, the official holiday had modest beginnings in 1908 when the Socialist Party of America appointed a Women’s National Committee to Campaign for the Suffrage. This committee recommended that a day be set aside every year to work for women’s right to vote.

“CURSED WITH THE REIGN OF GOLD LONG ENOUGH”

Socialists in the U.S. were not as rare in the early 1900s as they are today. Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party, received 900,000 votes when he ran for president in 1912. “I am for Socialism because I am for humanity,” he said. “We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough.”

By 1914, Oklahoma (!!) had elected six socialists to the state legislature. In Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, there were 55 weekly socialist newspapers.

Helen Keller, Jack London, and other famous people were not afraid to be identified as socialists.

“HOME SHOULD MEAN THE WHOLE COUNTRY”

Bust of Clara Zetkin in a Dresden park.

In 1909, American socialists agreed to designate the last Sunday in February as “National Woman’s Day.” Women throughout the U.S. held mass meetings and listened to union organizers and others call for equal rights for women. In one address, writer/ lecturer Charlotte Perkins Gilman said, “It is true that a woman’s duty is centered in her home…” but she clarified, “home should mean the whole country and not be confined to three or four rooms or a city or a state.”

In 1910, in Copenhagen, at the Second International Conference of Women, Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin, the German women’s rights leader, proposed internationalizing the American Woman’s Day. It passed unanimously among the women, as it did a few days later at the general International Socialist Congress.

FEBRUARY OR MARCH?

The first celebration of International Woman’s Day was in 1911. There were rallies worldwide. According to an account by Russian delegate Alexandra Kollontai, the slogan of the new celebration was, “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism.”

The day was named, the slogan chosen, but a date was never specified. Consequently, from 1911 to 1918, International Woman’s Day was celebrated on different days throughout the world.

In the U.S., it continued to be celebrated in February; in other countries, March. Whatever the date, it became a day for women’s celebrations, demonstrations for women’s liberation and workers’ rights, speeches, and, increasingly, a day for peace activism. It was widely held that women would use the ballot to end war.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1915, Clara Zetkin called on socialist women from neutral as well as warring nations to use the day to protest the war. Two years later, in Italy, women protested food shortages and posted this notice:

Hasn’t there been enough torment from this war? Now the food necessary for our children has begun to disappear. It is time for us to act in the name of suffering humanity. Our cry is “Down with arms!” We are part of the same family. We want peace. We must show that women can protect those who depend on them.”

THE WOMEN’S STRIKE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

The International Woman’s Day protest that changed the world occurred that year in Russia. Women had planned a day of speech-making and leafletting (March 8 by Western reckoning on the Gregorian calendar, February 23 on the Julian calendar used in Russia at the time). The spirit of the day carried them beyond these simple plans.

Coming on the rise of long struggle and many strikes, thousands of women left their homes and factories to protest food shortages in Russia, high prices, war, and the suffering they had so bitterly endured.

That day, the women went on strike. Trotsky wrote in The History of the Russian Revolution:

A mass of women, not all of them workers, flocked to the municipal duma demanding bread. It was like demanding milk from a he-goat. Red banners appeared in different parts of the city, and inscriptions of them showed that the workers wanted bread, but neither autocracy nor war. Thus, the fact is, that the February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organizations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat, the women textile workers, among them no doubt many soldiers’ wives.

Russian women inadvertently inspired the last push of a revolution. A general strike spread through Petrograd, and, within a week, Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.

FROM WOMAN TO WOMEN TO EXTRAORDINARY

After 1917, in honor of women’s role in the Russian Revolution, International Woman’s Day secured its place on March 8. The day became official in 1921, and the name changed to plural (Women’s) after 1945.

George W. Bush signs the Women’s History Month proclamation, March 10, 2008.

Today, IWD is celebrated around the world, from Afghanistan to Zambia. In the U.S., a consistent effort has been made to downplay its labor roots.

Here, International Women’s Day morphed into Women’s History Week and finally Women’s History Month — a time set aside to celebrate noteworthy women who have made extraordinary contribution’s to history and, um, not so much women garment workers. Sigh.

TO GO DEEPER

“International Women’s Day History” The University of Chicago summary