On October 23, 1915, twenty-thousand suffragists marched on Fifth Avenue in New York City demanding the right to vote.
In the photo there is Komako Kimura (1887-1980), a prominent Japanese feministsuffragist, who arrived from Japan to help out her sisters in America and joined in the parade.
Kimura came from a poor traditional Japanese family, who had arranged a marriage for her when she was 14 years old with a man she had never seen. Like many women in Japan during that time, she was expected to obey the traditional customs. She was expected to be obedient, she was expected to follow the same traditions that generations of her forebears had followed before her.
But, on the way to the marriage ceremony, Kimura had other thoughts. She would slip out of the carriage and go into hiding. She sold her wedding finery and bought a ticket to another city. There, she started a career as a dancer to support her finances.
She then again defied Japanese convention by eloping with a young doctor. She would become a writer, publishing a novel, then edited a woman’s magazine in Tokyo, called Shin Shin Fujin, the first publication in Japan of its kind asserting women’s rights. It would be so controversial that the magazine would be suppressed.
The conservative government of Japan then started watching her and would refuse her to hold suffrage meetings in the streets of Tokyo.
She would also become a well-known actress in her country who would take on daring roles. Again, the government would step in, telling her that she needed to stick with nice and mild roles befitting of women at that time.
She responded to that edict by opening her theater to the public without fee. She would be arrested and put on trial. The government, however, never knew what they were truly dealing with: Kimura would defend herself, providing arguments that were so well thought out that her trial would receive much publicity. Because of her, the word “suffrage”, previously unspoken before in Japan, would be carried into the remotest districts of the empire.
I feel like a mom on facebook reblogging this but I genuinely like it. I want to make this into a full size poster and put it in my 3rd grade classroom but I’m 20 yrs old and not a teacher
If I drove a bulldozer through an apple store and the cops just shoved me in a closet and pumped me full of DMT for 8 hours id literally just do it again the second they let me out
This is like the best admission I’ve ever heard that prison sentences are about fucked up torture rather than keeping dangerous people out of society.
There’s literally an entire Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode about how effed up this concept is.
Something I found on Twitter that really puts things in perspective as a creator.
[id: Twitter post from Slightly Lower Value Man @Meatfighterr that says, “If one person loves your content, appreciate that shit, cuz that’s an entire human being, who has to wake up everyday and can die. People get caught up in not having hundreds or thousands of likes on something, when a solid 30 people is a lot. Imagine 30 people in your house rn.” :end id]
