Margaret Allen, Ana Stevenson and Michelle Staff share their experiences of attending the 2024 International Federation for Research in Women’s History Conference.
It was great to attend the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH) 2024 Conference, ‘Reflections on Major Issues on Women’s History’, at Tsuda University (津田塾大学, Tsudajuku daigaku) in Tokyo.
As the first time the conference has been held in Japan, it was most fitting that the venue was the women’s university founded by the pioneering Japanese educator Umeko Tsuda (1864-1929), the first Japanese woman to appear on a banknote.
An Australian Women’s History Network (AWHN) contingent was in attendance. In this blog, we share some hightlights and ‘major issues’ explored at the conference.
Keynote ‘major issues’
The keynote panel, delivered in Japanese and English, addressed ‘major issues’ in women’s history from the perspective of Japanese historiography. Professor Yuriko Yokoyama (National Museum of Japanese History) opened the conference with a talk on ‘Gendered Japanese History’.
Held in 2020, this exhibition at the National Museum of Japanese History explored how gendered categories emerged to inform law and taxation in the eight century, then in connection to the early modern sex trade. The strong community response this exhibition generated demonstrates the importance of making feminist, gender, and women’s history tangible and accessible to the public.
Professor Emerita Linda Grove’s (Sophia University) presentation reflected on the long historical and cultural ties that inform Japanese research on Chinese women’s history, from the Chinese women who studied in Japan during the early twentieth century to the dynamic growth of East Asian women’s history networks decades later.
Professor Kumie Inose (Konan University) argued that Japanese research on European gender history challenges male, Eurocentric narratives. This is particularly prevalent alongside new interdisciplinary trends in agnotology, memory studies, and the social sciences. Inose also emphasized the importance of translation, especially major works on intersectionality, human rights, and settler colonialism.
‘Major issues’ for the Australian Women’s History Network
Of note amongst the AWHN contingent was ‘Reimagining Feminist Relationships in Australian History’, a roundtable that situated feminist relationships as a ‘major issue’ in women’s history.
In this session, Zoe Smith (ANU) began by arguing that feminists and suffragists around the turn of the twentieth century did not centre their campaigns around domestic violence citing Rose Scott’s outrage when Louisa Lawson published very explicit material on the matter in her feminist newspaper, The Dawn. In contrast, writers such as Ada Cambridge, Rosa Praed, and Barbara Baynton engaged in much more explicit and sustained descriptions and denunciations of domestic violence and marital rape.
Professor Angela Woollacott (ANU) argued that international collaboration and feminist friendships were important to Jessie Street’s work to end white supremacy in Australia, following her contributions to enshrine gender equality in the UN Charter. As Street linked feminism and decolonisation, her close collaboration with Pearl Gibbs and Faith Bandler sustained her campaign towards the 1967 referendum.
Winding up this session, Dr Michelle Staff (ANU) advanced the notion of the family as a concept in feminist history. She explored the long relationship between Bessie Rischbieth and her sister, Olive Evans, who both lived as children with their childless relatives Louisa, and William Rounsevell (a women’s suffrage and higher education supporter). Although Rischbieth was well known, nationally and internationally, Olive devoted herself to her family and to local activism. This relationship sustained Rischbieth’s very public work; through correspondence, her sister became her sounding board and muse.
‘Major issues’ for International Federation for Research in Women’s History delegates
Dr Mieko Kojima (Tsuda University) spoke about trans-pacific philanthropist Anna Cope Hartshorne, who met Tsuda at Bryn Mawr College around 1890. Hartshorne found her vocation assisting Tsuda and advancing women’s education in Japan in the late nineteenth century.
Associate Professor Michiyo Kitawaki (Nihon University) reflected upon the Trans-Pacific mobility and agency of Japanese women, specifically dressmaking teachers such as Obata Shigeko who travelled to Hawaii and the United States to establish dressmaking shops and teach sewing. Obata’s students used dressmaking as a tool for upward fiscal and social mobility that empowered them to earn their own living.
Professor Tomoko Ozawa (Musashino Art University) examined the mobility of the ‘picture’ brides: the approximately 7,000 young women who travelled from Yokohama to Seattle or San Francisco to marry Japanese men between 1912 and 1920. The Japanese YWCA prevailed upon the shipping companies to employ matrons for moral protection, thus opening a new occupation for middle-aged women.
The Japanese YWCA, specifically the Tokyo YWCA was also discussed by Hikarau Ishiyama (Sophia University), who found that the Tokyo YWCA developed a Professional Women’s Department in the 1920s. This drew together a new category of worker, young single women working as clerks and teachers. This department responded both to the situations of this new class of working women in Tokyo, but also to the emerging agendas of the World YWCA.
One of the most interesting sessions identified another ‘major theme’ of emotions in the archives. Professor Emerita Rumi Yasatuke’s (Konan University) commentary on this session focused upon the ‘major theme’ of women’s agency.
Dr Fang He (South West University, USA) explored Chinese women’s entry into California during the Chinese Exclusion Acts (1882-1943). US Immigration Inspectors working out of Angel Island, San Francisco, had to examine all Chinese emigrants for suitability due to concerns that these women might be of lower classes and of ill-repute.
Professor Febe Pamonag (Western Illinois University, USA) then looked at the importance of food and recipes amongst some 40,000 women prisoners of war (POWs) in the Philippines. Despite the focus on the men who became POWs during World War II, archival research reveals that these women used their respective food cultures as a point to facilitate community and comradeship amongst the prisoners that was frowned upon by Japanese prison authorities.
Eri Kitada (Rutgers University) studied the postwar situation of Tokyo YWCA whose husbands were deported. Their wives and children were left to make their way in a society that ostracized them and confiscated their property. Following individual families, she drew upon what she termed the ‘Afterlife Archive’ that the children and descendants have produced since the 1980s to situate her project within a grassroots, transpacific call for justice after World War II.
Two papers that strongly spoke to each other identified another ‘major theme’ of women as war brides. Associate Professor Karen Hughes (Swinburne University) and Dr Fumie Yokishawa (Hitotsubashi University) both discussed women settling in the United States after World War II. Hughes spoke about Aboriginal women’s experiences of marrying American servicemen and how the United States afforded them new occupational opportunities not available to Aboriginal women in Australia.
Yokishawa explored the experiences of the 30,000-40,000 Japanese women who married Allied Occupational servicemen following WWII in American Red Cross run Bride Schools. These school were initially established to teach Japanese women how to be American housewives but evolved more into a course in US citizenship.
‘Major issues’ from the 50th Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
Finally, this conference hosted an important discussion about the continuing racism and inequality in women’s history organisations. Led by several US scholars, this came on the heels of the 50th Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, held in 2023 at Santa Clara University in California. At that conference, the fiftieth anniversary plenary session caused much hurt and anger due to the racist, homophobic and Islamophobic comments made by one of the organization’s co-founders, Lois Banner.
Though US-focused, this discussion was relevant to everyone in the IFRWH’s very international audience. What struck me as I listened was the generosity of spirit and goodwill that characterized the panel. Anger and frustration, sentiments that many felt in the moment in 2023, would have been completely understandable twelve months later.
Instead, the panelists spoke about finding productive ways forward, recognizing, as the Berks current president, Associate Professor Ji-Yeon Yuh (Northwestern University), put it: ‘we are all bundles of different kinds of privileges and different kinds of oppressions.’ She emphasized mutual love, respect, equity, solidarity, and collective care as practices that we need to foster if we are to fight a system based on historic injustice.
While none of the speakers implied this would be easy, the conversation was an incredibly thought-provoking and generous one that was important to have at this moment in time.
Margaret Allen is Professor Emerita of Gender Studies and member of the Fay Gale Centre at the University of Adelaide. Margaret began teaching feminist history in 1979. She was convener of the Australian Women’s History Network between 2000 and 2004, and then IFRWH member and newsletter editor from 2005 to 2010. Margaret researches transnational, postcolonial and gendered histories, focusing upon links between India and Australia from c. 1880 to 1940. Her recent publications include Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire: Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks, 1860-1950 (Palgrave Pivot, 2017, with Jane Haggis, Clare Midgley and Fiona Paisley) and ‘”I am a British subject”: Indians in Australia claim their rights, 1880-1940,’ History Australia 15 no. 3 (2018): 1-21.
Dr Ana Stevenson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and a Research Associate of the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her first book, The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), explores the racial politics of women’s rights. Her research about transnational social movements appears in journals such as the Women’s History Review, Pacific Historical Review, and Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.
Follow Ana on Twitter/X @DrAnaStevenson.
Dr Michelle Staff is a feminist historian interested in transnational histories of activism and reform. She is the online and outreach manager at the Australian Dictionary of Biography/National Centre of Biography at The Australian National University. Her current project is a joint biography of Bessie Rischbieth and her sister Olive Evans.
Follow Michelle on Twitter/X @michellecstaff.
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