Birth Strike vs Eugenic Feminism

Differing Conceptions of “Voluntary Motherhood”: Yamakawa Kikue’s Birth Strike and Ishimoto Shizue’s Eugenic Feminism

Sujin Lee U.S.–JAPAN WOMEN’S JOURNAL NO. 52, 2017

Yamakawa Kikue (1890-1980) and Ishimoto Shizue (1897-2001, later Katō Shizue after marrying labor activist Katō Kanju in 1944) were feminist pioneers of the birth control movement and established the first birth control organization in Japan, the Japan Birth Control Research Group (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Kenkyūkai), in May 1922, led by Ishimoto. Ishimoto observed Sanger’s birth control movement firsthand during her stay in  New York between 1919 and 1920. After returning to Japan in September 1920, Ishimoto worked to introduce birth control to Japanese society.

Although the organization disbanded less than a year later, the birth control movement continued throughout the interwar period as different actors— social reformists, proletarian activists, and feminists—agreed on the need to control population size and improve the “quality” of the Japanese population on eugenic grounds.

...my article analyzes the intersection of population discourses, feminist movements, and transnational birth control campaigns...

The crux of Sanger’s birth control movement was to promote women’s reproductive autonomy to transform the womb from the birthplace of poverty into the birthplace of a healthy race.

Yamakawa introduced Japanese audiences to Sanger’s concept of voluntary motherhood in her 1920 article “The Curse of Pronatalism” (Tasan shugi no noroi) in the magazine Taikan (General Views).

The concept of voluntary motherhood implied a causal link between a mother’s freedom and her potential to improve racial quality. It was therefore gendered and racialized freedom that Sanger pursued through the birth control movement.

both Neo-Malthusianism and socialism shared an economic determinism concerning the relationship between population and resources. Whereas Neo-Malthusianists believed that the balance between population and resources could be acquired by reducing population growth, socialists advocated an equal distribution of wealth or an increase in wealth. Yamakawa positioned herself as a critic of Neo-Malthusianism and socialism to remind both groups of the fact that birth control had to be a permanent goal even after overpopulation or poverty was resolved by the proletarian revolution (Yamakawa 1921a, 284-286). In her view, voluntary motherhood could not be reduced to economic determinism but instead retained its own merit as an expression of individual free will.

Sanger (1920, 9) asserted that the misery of the proletariat originated in their sexuality and, furthermore, that their sexuality served capitalism as its accomplice. Whereas Sanger problematized overpopulation as an immediate reality that working-class mothers themselves created, Yamakawa grasped the ideological tactics of the population problem, which inverted the causation of poverty. Yamakawa reframed birth control as a means of protest against the capitalist system. She advocated birth control as a weapon specically for the proletariat against exploitation and oppression and as a way of ghting the instrumentalization of women as breeding machines.

Yamakawa asserted that women’s rights to reproductive choice had to be protected even in a socialist state. Yamakawa (1921b, 247) asserts:

In short, [in an ideal society], people should be able to choose whether to give birth or not at their free will, just like they do when deciding marriage… I have no doubt that the difculties in getting married for economic reasons would be solved in the future. However, that cannot be directly linked to the conclusion that women will no longer need reproductive choice. In the same manner, the uselessness of contraception for economic reasons should be distinguished from the issue of birth control as women’s rights to decide on motherhood.

On the contrary, Ishikawa and many contemporary socialists left reproduction in the realm of nature, that is to say, the depoliticized sexuality of women.
In a pamphlet published by the Japan Birth Control Research Group in 1922, she advances the aim to breed better humans based on individuals’ “self- consciousness” and denes birth control as “a conscious control of population, far from race suicide or advocacy for sinful abortions”
This refashioned feminism, or “eugenic feminism,” was the crux of Ishimoto’s argument for birth control. Ishimoto also found new political potential for women’s reproductive roles by imaging birth control as a scientic solution for overpopulation and racial degeneration.

The motherhood protection debate generally divided Japanese feminists into two camps: 1) those who argued for the rights of the mother, as represented by Hiratsuka, and 2) those who advocated women’s rights in general, led in part by Yosano.

In a pamphlet published by the Japan Birth Control Research Group in 1922, she {Ishimoto} advances the aim to breed better humans based on individuals’ “self- consciousness” and denes birth control as “a conscious control of population, far from race suicide or advocacy for sinful abortions”

these feminists’ concerns about reproduction were simultaneously the symptoms of the politico-economic representation of reproduction and the respective critiques of it, that is, the formation of women’s political subjectivity by means of reproductive autonomy. Regardless of their different ideological visions, both Yamakawa and Ishimoto emphasized the link between the voluntary control of reproduction and women’s autonomy.