- Person
- Beate Sirota Gordon
- Lived
- 1923–2012
- Field
- Women’s rights, arts
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Beate Sirota was born in Vienna in 1923 to Russian Jewish parents. Her father, the pianist Leo Sirota, had left the Russian Empire because of antisemitic violence, and in 1929 he took a teaching post in Tokyo, where Beate grew up speaking Japanese and watching how little power Japanese women had over their own lives. She later said they were treated like chattel.
After studying in California and working for American wartime broadcast monitoring, she returned to Tokyo on Christmas Eve 1945 to find her parents and took a job with the Government Section of MacArthur’s headquarters. On February 4, 1946, about twenty staff members were told to write a model constitution for Japan within a week. Sirota, the only woman among the three people assigned to civil rights, was asked by her male colleagues to write the women’s rights articles.
Her draft declared that marriage and the family must rest on the legal and social equality of both sexes, on mutual consent instead of parental coercion and on cooperation instead of male domination. When Japanese and American officials negotiated the text through the night of March 4, the Japanese side fought hard against these clauses. Sirota was in the room as an interpreter, and Colonel Charles Kades persuaded the Japanese to accept the clauses because Miss Sirota had her heart set on them.
Some of her broader social provisions were cut, but the core became Article 14, which bans discrimination because of sex, and Article 24, which requires that marriage be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and that family law rest on individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes. The constitution took effect in 1947 and has never been amended. Gordon, who later spent decades bringing Asian performing arts to American audiences, kept her role quiet for nearly fifty years. When she died in 2012, her last public statement urged Japan to keep its women’s rights and peace clauses.
Why it matters
Japan’s constitutional guarantees of women’s equality in law, marriage and family, which she drafted, still protect tens of millions of Japanese women.
About Beate Sirota Gordon
Vienna-born daughter of Jewish émigrés who, at 22, drafted the women’s equality clauses of Japan’s postwar constitution, rights still in force for tens of millions of Japanese women.
Sources
- She put women’s rights into Japan’s constitution Asia Times
- Beate Sirota Gordon Jewish Women’s Archive
- Guest blog: Vale Beate Gordon Japanese Law and the Asia-Pacific, University of Sydney
- Beate Sirota Gordon Wikipedia
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