Legacy That Needs to Be Passed on - Women’s Rights

One of my college friends once told me that “you can’t just ignore feminism just because you don’t understand it because at least you must have benefited from their legacy.”

We were discussing feminism activities and I said that they did no good to women because most feminists were not “feminine,” i.e., shouting and ugly. I find this my own remark naïve now, but at the time, did not understand why so many women made a fuss about something which at that time seemed to me trivial, such as a name change due to marriage. I could not see how such a view would be relevant to my life.

Later on, a few years after I got married, my husband told me that he had no intention of having children. I understood the reason. I also loved and respected him, so I gave up on having kids and decided to stay with him. It was not an easy decision.

Several year later, my mother told me that I had no “motherly characteristics (bosei in Japanese).” That may be true if "motherly characteristics" mean the characteristics only mothers can have, if any. But by this, my mother meant that I had no characteristics which any mothers are naturally have from the moment they give birth to a child, such as patience, kindness, tolerance, caring, and I think it untrue. Many mothers abuse or even kill their own children and besides, if it were true, how can my mom, a mother with two children, who is supposed to be patient, kind, tolerant and caring, say to her daughter face-to-face that her daughter is not patient, kind, tolerant or caring, just because she has no kids? It is terribly discriminatory, isn't it?

But this kind of view, i.e., that mothers are better than women who have no children, is not unusual in Japan. One female lawmaker even proposed to award women who have more than three children, which of course caused a big controversy.

People live various lives for various reasons. In my case, no kids because of my and my husband’s decision. There are also many other factors for which people are different, e.g., religions, races, classes, appearance, countries. But don’t you think that we should be allowed to live our own lives even if we are different, even from our parents, children or siblings? Or are we going back to the time when the value of women was measured based on the number of children?

I was so stupid that I did not understand that how hard my predecessors had fought for women’s rights which I take for granted and forget that it is our turn to fight to protect these rights for the younger generation. There is bad legacy that needs to be get rid of, but I cannot help but think these days that many good legacies whose value we cannot see because we take them for granted are about to be thrown away.

Another such legacy is Article 24 of the Japanese Constitution and I will write about it on another post in the near future.