Impact of Marxist feminism on Japanese women’s movement: Focusing on the domestic labor debates

The term Marxist feminism was introduced from the West and appeared in Japan after the 1980s. The representative theorist was Ueno Chizuko, who greatly contributed to the development of feminist theories in Japan, including Marxist feminism. It should be noted that this argument was not new in Japan, and in the 1970s, when the domestic labour theories began to be discussed in Western countries, there existed in Japan the original discussions by Takenaka Emiko, Iijima Aiko and others, which go back to the issue of socialist women, such as Yamakawa Kikue, before the Second World War. Of particular note was the 1960 housewife debate by Isono Fujiko and Mizuta Tamae, which had already pioneered Marxist feminism and most of the theorists in the 1970s succeeded the argument of the 1960s. Since the 1990s, the perspective of considering housework and childcare as labour has been reflected in social support for child and elderly care enacting the related laws. The change was accompanied by the women’s labour movement and women’s human rights issues such as the elimination of violence against women. It can be said that the recognition that ‘housework is labour’, formed by the domestic labour debate, as a whole, contributed to shake the patriarchal concept of labour and empowered the emergence of various movements concerning women that had been overlooked before.