Two panelists focus on women’s role in local politics. Aoi Saito explores how geisha unions collaborated with regional politicians, officials, and business owners by organizing dance performances, founding geisha schools, and producing new songs. For geisha and their trade, performing artistry became a crucial political strategy to participate in the regional community and to secure their livelihoods in the 1950s and 1960s. Zhaorui Lu investigates how the residents’ committee – a grassroots organization made of and led by housewives – helped mobilize and govern urban neighborhoods in Beijing during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962). By organizing dining halls, childcare centers, and small workshops, housewives in the residents’ committees wielded substantial power to influence their neighbors’ everyday lives.

The other two panelists examine women’s advocacy for gender equality in national politics. Gina Tam probes how the politics of Hong Kong handover impacted how local feminists imagined a feminist future for the city in the 1980s and 1990s. With both key victories and disappointing setbacks, feminist activists introduced a feminist agenda to the politics of sovereignty transition. Zoë Gioja discusses how a small, elite group of Christian women advocated gender equality from the era of the American Military Government (1945-48) through South Korea’s First Republic (1945-60). Drawing on both support from the South Korean government and transnational networks enabled by the U.S. empire, these women led many campaigns to “enlighten” their fellow countrywomen and mold them into citizens equal to men.

Together, our session foregrounds women from various walks of life and excavates their political aspirations, strategies, and power in postwar East Asia. We draw attention to how gender serves an organizing principle of political life in East Asia, as well as how East Asia as a region offers a productive framework for analyzing diverse political strategies in global comparison.