Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (review)

Christopher Gerteis's Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan is a solid account of women's engagement in early postwar labor activism. Gerteis examines a wide range of unions from private-sector organizations, such as the infrequently studied filmmakers' union that organized Tōhō studio workers, to better known public-sector unions such as the Japan Rail workers' union and Nikkyōsō, the teachers' union. In all of these unions, Gerteis traces the many efforts female union activists made to protect their access to good jobs and good wages, to protect family incomes, and to advance public policy agendas supported by politically ambitious union federations such as Sōhyō (General Council of Trade Unions), which worked along with the Japan Socialist Party on foreign policy issues, among others.

The period Gerteis examines, from the late 1940s until about 1960, is well chosen. Labor unions were generally quite active in this period of economic and political transformation. By the end of the 1950s, corporate leaders had succeeded in taming union activism and, in return, unions had received a stable family wage for male breadwinners. Women who wanted to stay in the labor market after marriage or the birth of children were largely relegated to the part-time or temporary workforce. Tax and benefit structures discouraged married women from seeking better wages in more secure jobs. Unions, focused on protecting male breadwinners' jobs and wages, were more willing to mobilize women as housewives who were supportive partners of male workers than as wage earners as equally deserving of union protection as men.

But as Gerteis demonstrates through his careful examination of union publications, transcripts of union leaders' debates about how to mobilize women, and oral histories of union women, the male breadwinner-female housewife model was not the only one women workers considered in those immediate postwar years. Certainly, wives of union men, especially coal-miners' wives, did organize to push for better family incomes, a move that translated easily into support for male breadwinners' wage protection at the expense of women's wages and job security. However, many women workers argued they were deserving of union support for equal pay for equal work schemes, and when they did not get it, they sometimes offered sharp criticism of male union leadership.

Gerteis does an effective job of documenting the male leadership's conflicting approach to women. On the one hand, union leaders saw their female members as a real asset when it came to popularizing unions' political positions. For example, female members of Nikkyōsō were described as essential to Sōhyō efforts to increase public support for the postwar peace movement. Both as the teachers of children and as mothers themselves, female Nikkyōsō members earned public respect for an activism they argued was designed to protect the future of Japanese children.

When it came to dealing with women members as workers, however, male leaders—and some female leaders—took a much more conservative line. The association of women teachers with children paralleled a general association of women with their roles as caretakers in the home. "The battle of all our unions will hinge on the collaborative power of the labor movement's housewives [sic] in cooperation with organized labor," quotes Gerteis from a Sōhyō document of 1958 (p. 143). But, despite the fact that they quite self-consciously relied on women's activism to spread their messages to a public leery of leftist politics, male-dominated union leaderships were not inclined to think of women as equals at work. Unions worked much harder at supporting union families than female wage earners.

Gerteis draws on a rich variety of evidence to make the point that gendered imagery divided union men from wage-earning union women. Along with meeting transcripts and oral histories, he looks at unions' political cartoons, films, and editorial comments made...