In the 1970s, a group of women called themselves ‘Tatakau Onnatachi‘’ – ‘Women who Fight’, or ‘Fighting Women’. They were part of a movement of women's liberationists, disillusioned with the sexism of their male comrades in the ‘New Left’ and vigilant about threats to their bodily autonomy through proposals to tighten Japan's relatively liberal postwar abortion laws. Their movement had much in common with women's liberationists in the other capitalist democracies and they received inspiration from their sisters in other countries. They were also, however, responding to the dilemmas of their own situation in an increasingly prosperous capitalist nation.

Some of these 1970s feminists also went on to explore the history of women in their own country, and came to discover a history of feminism in Japan which stretched back at least to the 1870s. In every decade of Japan's modern history, men and women had been addressed in genderspecific ways in government policies and political statements and through cultural products. In every decade, some women (and a few men) had challenged accepted ways of thinking about women, men and society. This book is the story of those women who fought to create new visions of society and new kinds of relationships between women and men, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Feminists in the 1970s developed various strategies of understanding and changing their situation. Some engaged in consciousness-raising in an attempt to understand the politics of everyday life and everyday relationships.