Women's Suffrage in Asia

Gender, Nationalism and Democracy

Louise Edwards, Mina Roces, Louise Edwards, Mina Roces

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134320356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Including chapters on Indonesia, India, Thailand, China, the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Vietnam and international suffrage connections, Women's Suffrage in Asia engages in debates on suffrage in the region by raising issues unique to the country's case studies presented. It explains why the history of suffrage is neglected in the nationalist historiography and untangles the connections between culture, nationalism and colonialism in the context of women's struggles for suffrage.

1 Introduction

Orienting the global women's suffrage movement

Louise Edwards and Mina Roces

From its inception, women's struggle for the vote was explicitly global. Each national women's suffrage campaign directed its attention to a ‘national government’, but at the same time these suffragists also saw the power in drawing upon international comparisons and international energies. In this regard, women's suffrage campaigns were simultaneously national and global. Women activists exchanged information, tactics and advice with each other across the seas and in multiple languages. They applauded victories and mourned losses along with their sisters in distant nations. When the British suffrage activists smashed shop windows in Bond Street on 1 March 1912, Chinese women activists celebrated their audacity and within 20 days had performed the same act on parliament windows in Nanjing. In 1917, America's women's suffragists challenged their Senate to match China, where they erroneously thought women had won suffrage rights.¹ Asia's women's suffrage activists imagined their ‘national’ citizenship within an increasingly ‘international’ conversation of nationhood.

Suffrage activists from the 1890s and the 1920s saw their campaign as international. After all, gender discrimination knew no national boundaries. Women were women the world over and recognition of a common enemy — patriarchy — forged global alliances well before globalisation was a household word. Male power and privilege was firmly embedded in a wide variety of government and family structures and women suffrage activists saw that gaining access to this political power, in whatever system of governance, was crucial to effectively addressing women's concerns in every other public and private sphere. Political power was the key to furthering women's status at a national level and suffrage activists rightly saw that international forces could be mobilised to help win this political power. The international vision of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) saw the establishment of Asian missions promoting women's suffrage in Tokyo, Shanghai, Rangoon, Manila and Bombay.² Women's suffrage activists demanded the right to be national citizens in the fullest possible political sense and to achieve this goal they demonstrated their power as active global citizens. This outlook has ensured that the history of feminism had an international or transnational dimension. Leila Rupp argued that the period between the two world wars could be labelled ‘the first wave of an international women's movement.’³ Her approach, which viewed women's movements as inherently transnational, documented the making of a collective identity of women despite the tensions between nationalism and internationalism. This perspective (though largely Atlantic-centric) concluded that women's transnational movements had an impact on world politics. Feminism and women's movements transcend national boundaries — and therefore a history of feminism or women's movements should not be bound by the geography or imagined community of nation alone.⁴ A transnational movement deserves a more truly international perspective.

Despite the frequent wide-ranging conversations between women's suffrage activists around the world, we know very little today about the struggles for equal citizenship rights by women outside of the western world. Carole Pateman observed in 1994 that, ‘We know remarkably little about how women won the vote around the world. How important are local circumstances and local political configurations, or struggles for national self-determination? How important are cultural differences, or differences in political regimes?’⁵ In a bid to redress the omission noted by Pateman in 1994, Fletcher et al. drew together research on suffrage struggles in a more international perspective in their volume Women's Suffrage in the British Empire.⁶ However, this work privileges colonial agency and leadership on the issue within its Empire-centric theme and includes only India as an Asian case study. Thus, the dominant historical narrative has been one shaped by nations with long and proud democratic histories — usually nations with equally long and ignoble colonial histories. Indeed, the campaigns of the British, European and American suffragists have attracted the overwhelming majority of scholarly attention. One would be forgiven for thinking that women's suffrage organisations only emerged in wealthy and powerful nations. But this is a skewed vision of the past.

In a seminal book on the beginnings of feminism in the ‘Third World,’ Kumari Jayawardena called attention to the links between feminism and nationalism in the first wave feminist movements that emerged in the context of colonialism. Jayawardena argued that feminism was part of all nationalist movements and was not necessarily an ideology ‘imposed’ from the west.⁷ The book concluded that ‘struggles for women's emancipation were an essential and integral part of national resistance movements’⁸ and that the issue of suffrage was raised alongside concerns about women's education and the construction of the ‘new woman’ of the early twentieth century.⁹ Our volume builds on Jayawardena's work by problematising this link between feminism and nationalism as it explores the dilemmas raised by women's participation in nationalist movements that mobilised women without enfranchising them.

Women throughout the Asian region mobilised energetically and in concert with their British, European and American sisters, to win suffrage rights. But, the challenges faced by Asia's suffragists differed markedly from their western counterparts.

For the suffrage activist in Asia … the pressing questions included the following: ‘Which “government” do we lobby for suffrage?’ ‘What should be the relationship between nationalist and feminist struggles?’ ‘What are the borders of our nation and who are the “national women” we represent?’ These questions were crucial in the formation of the non-Western suffrage struggles.¹⁰

Moreover, the precepts that gave rise to the notion of women's suffrage were European and not Chinese, Japanese or Indian. Incorporating notions of women's equal political rights with men required a willingness to incorporate western philosophies of the ‘natural rights’ of all human beings forged in the European Enlightenment. Asia's women's suffrage activists were advocating a fusion of cultural values where American, British, French or New Zealand women argued for the full application of pre-existing cultural principles. Perhaps in the Asian context one must ask the question Tamara Loos proposes in her chapter on Thailand (this volume): ‘How can we write a history of women's suffrage and rights in non-Western countries without implicitly regarding it as a site of mimicry for Western forms of political authority?’

Independence struggles and campaigns for control of national assets and borders concentrated the minds of both male and female political activists throughout Asia after decades of colonialist expansion and imperialist aggression. During the years they pressed the case for women's political rights their countries frequently experienced grinding poverty, social chaos and military unrest. The twin fetters of patriarchy and colonialism generated unusual alliances for the women's suffrage activists. Ironically, Asia's women's suffrage activists often aligned themselves with women from the very nations responsible for the economic and social chaos their country was currently experiencing. Similarly, their participation in nationalist struggles for independence promoted strong and productive bonds with men in the anti-colonial movements. Patriarchy was a resilient enemy but, in the face of colonial oppression, men could be powerful allies.

Narratives of ‘modern citizenship’ forged in the face of threatened or perforated national borders presented Asia's women's suffragists with different challenges and different opportunities to those of western suffragists. Campaigns for national strengthening enabled women to mobilise narratives of ‘reform’ that destabilised long-entrenched patriarchal practice. National survival, they argued, depended upon reinvigorating the culture along modern, western lines. This argument carried particular force once the global powers of the USA and Britain granted women suffrage rights in 1920 and 1928 respectively. Two of the strongest nations of the world had granted women equal political rights, so why should not Japan, China or the Philippines? In this argument women's equal participation in the public sphere could be reconstructed as imperative for national benefit while undercutting traditional gender hierarchies. Women's rights activists presented gender equality in citizenship rights as emblematic of modernity and strength. In doing so they attempted to indelibly mark women's suffrage as an antidote to a central anxiety of governance — loss of control to a foreign power or inability to regain control from a foreign power. National independence and stability, they argued, would be best enhanced by the introduction of the key signifier of modernity and strength — women's engagement with public, national politics. Some governments had attempted selective westernisation in an attempt to maintain or construct patriarchal hierarchies to contain women's bid for political power. Japan encouraged the population's enthusiasm for a western-style constitutional monarchy in 1889 but only two years later reasserted Confucian values of female subordination when Japan's feminists invoked John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women to justify their participation in Japan's rush for western-style democracy.¹¹ As the chapters in this volume reveal, tensions in the public narrative between the tradition-bound ‘national woman’ and the international ‘national woman’ produced fraught speaking positions for Asia's suffragists. Furthermore debates about the ‘new modern woman’ or the ‘new woman’ raised different issues for Asian women, highlighting the tension between western colonial influences that empowered women, and the society's definition of women as ‘bearers of tradition,’ and women's own desires to be nationalists (since they were also part of the nationalist movements).

This current volume explores the Asian contribution to this global movement to reconfigure the nature of citizenship and national politics. It shows how the suffrage movements in Asia differed in outlook, opportunities and campaign strategies from those in the USA, Britain or Germany. Moreover, the diverse case studies outlined in the chapters below also reveal that factors contributing to the enhancement or impediment of women's suffrage in Asia differed markedly between countries in the region. The culturally and politically diverse region of Asia has a rich and diverse experience of women's struggle for equal political rights with men. These differences are determined as much by the local cultural expectations of womanhood as they do from their interaction with colonialist or imperialist powers.

At the broadest possible level, the publication of this volume will prevent the perpetuation of misinformation that denies Asian women's political agency. In 1994 Matsukawa and Tachi noted, ‘Japanese women did not achieve the vote until 1945, when the country was under direct Allied — mainly American — control. Subsequently, many Americans believe that Japanese women owed their suffrage to the Allied Occupation and that they had gained the vote without an organised struggle.’¹² In fact Japanese women suffragists had been active for decades and had strong influences on the Chinese women's suffrage campaigns. Japanese women had not waited quietly for ‘modernised citizenship,’ nor were they acquiescent, ignorant victims of Japanese patriarchy.¹³ Such widespread Eurocentric assumptions about the passive ‘Asian woman’ require painstaking dismantling. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, Asian women's political agency has a long and significant history.

Why have the Asian suffrage movements been ignored?

There are a number of reasons why women's suffrage struggles in Asia have not attracted scholarly attention in the past. Prime among these has been the absence of geo-political...