Famous Japanese Feminist Authors. Left Yoshiko Yusa who was a famous russian/japanese translater and right her long term partner, another feminist author Toshiko Tamura.
First issue of Seito in 1911, which became an integral part of the Japanese Women’s Rights Movement.
“The magazine’s name, Seitō, translated to “Bluestockings,” a nod to an unorthodox group of 18th-century English women who gathered to discuss politics and art, which was an extraordinary activity for their time.
But Seitō was not intended to be a radical or political publication. “We did not launch the journal to awaken the social consciousness of women or to contribute to the feminist movement,” wrote the magazine’s founder, Haruko Hiratsuka, who went by the penname Raichō, or “Thunderbird.” “Our only special achievement was creating a literary journal that was solely for women.” Raichō was most interested in self-discovery—“to plumb the depths of my being and realize my true self,” she wrote—and much of the writing in the magazine was confessional and personal, a 1910s version of the essays that might now be found in or Catapult.
Women’s feelings and inner thoughts, however, turned out to be a provocative challenge to the social and legal strictures of this era, when a woman’s role was to be a good wife and mother. The Seitō women imagined much wider and wilder emotional and professional lives for themselves. They fell in love, they indulged in alcohol, they built careers as writers, and they wrote about it all—publicly. The stories were radical enough that the government censored them. The story that prompted policemen to visit the magazine’s office late at night was a piece of fiction about a married women writing to her lover to ask him to meet her while her husband was away.
As they attracted public attention and disapproval, instead of shying away from the controversy they’d created, the editors of Seitō were forced to confront more baldly political questions, and this in turn earned them more banned issues. In the pages of their magazine they came to debate women’s equality, chastity, and abortion. Without originally intending to, they became some of Japan’s pioneering feminists.”
-Excerpt from HERE documenting women’s history in Japan
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by scholars and philosophers, as considering happiness as a something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting. This is the sin of the artist: a refusal to admit that evil is dull and pain is boring.”
— Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
always remember that love will always come back to u. in a different form, different person, different hobby, different touch. but in any way, love will always come back.
“Franz Kafka, the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he went walking daily. She was crying. She had lost her doll and was desolate.
Kafka offered to help her look for the doll and arranged to meet her the next day at the same spot. Unable to find the doll he composed a letter from the doll and read it to her when they met.
“Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.” This was the beginning of many letters. When he and the little girl met he read her from these carefully composed letters the imagined adventures of the beloved doll. The little girl was comforted.
When the meetings came to an end Kafka presented her with a doll. She obviously looked different from the original doll. An attached letter explained: “my travels have changed me… “
Many years later, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll. In summary it said: “every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”
On This Day in Herstory, August 30th 1797, English novelist, and dramatist, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in Somers Town, London. Shelley is best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818), this novel was the first of its kind, and helped to create a new genre of literature, Science Fiction.
The daughter of political philosopher William Godwin, and philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley was raised by Godwin alone, as Wollstonecraft died less than a month after giving birth. Her father raised her with his radical political ideas, and her mother’s feminist texts. She went on to marry a political poet, and was friends with many well known writers, these influences pushed her to pursue a career in writing.
Her most famous work came about as a result of a game. One summer in Geneva, her friend Lord Byron challenged her to wrote a ghost story, and thus Frankensteinwas born. The book was widely popular, but Shelley was not recognized for her work; many people thought her husband had written the book. Shelley had to publish the first edition of her book anonymously, her name was then added in the second printing.
Shelley’s work brought her much success, and she continued her career as a writer. She paved the way for women in literature, and proved that women were as capable as men, a revolutionary idea at the time.
Shelley died on February 1st 1851, at the age of 53. She was buried with the cremated remains of her husband’s heart, that she had carried with her for nearly 30 years.
