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Josephine Conger-Kaneko (1875-1934)
Jan. 10th, 2025 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomi[Kind of cheating, because she did not actually ever live in Japan as far as I can tell, but her marriage and her activism relate interestingly to her Japanese contemporaries.]
Josephine Conger-Kaneko was born in Missouri in 1875; she became involved with newspaper work early on, setting type for the newspaper run by her brother. She attended the socialist Ruskin College in the same state and began working for a local socialist newspaper, later founding her own journal, The Socialist Woman, which continued under various names for many years.
In 1905 Josephine married the Japanese socialist Kaneko Kiichi. After his death in 1909 (he had returned to Japan for his health, writing her letters promising to update her on the situation of the oppression of Japanese women and to be back in America within a few months), she moved to Chicago and continued to publish her journal as well as working in journalism elsewhere and running for office on the Socialist Party ballot. In 1911 her journal, then called The Progressive Woman, ran a special issue on Kotoku Shusui, a Japanese socialist who had been put to death earlier that year along with his girlfriend Kanno Suga among others; the articles included translations of letters from Kotoku and [Japanese male feminist] Sakai Toshihiko to Kaneko Kiichi.
In 1918 she edited an anthology called Woman’s Voice, which featured excerpts from the writings of some 250 women of note, including Susan B. Anthony, George Eliot, Cicely Hamilton, Ellen Key, Maria Montessori, and Rahel Varnhagen. The preface noted that “[i]t is the editor’s hope that this volume will circulate very largely in the small towns and country districts of our nation. I want the millions of women who are feeling, and thinking, but who are as yet inarticulate upon the larger affairs of life, to find their need and their voice in this volume.”
She died in 1934.
Sources
https://archive.org/details/womansvoiceanan00kanegoog/page/n12/mode/2up?view=theater (English) Josephine’s anthology, available on openlibrary.org
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2020/5/15/maedako-2/
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2020/10/16/takeshi-takahashi-4/ (English) Includes a newspaper photograph of Josephine and Kiichi.
Josephine Conger-Kaneko was born in Missouri in 1875; she became involved with newspaper work early on, setting type for the newspaper run by her brother. She attended the socialist Ruskin College in the same state and began working for a local socialist newspaper, later founding her own journal, The Socialist Woman, which continued under various names for many years.
In 1905 Josephine married the Japanese socialist Kaneko Kiichi. After his death in 1909 (he had returned to Japan for his health, writing her letters promising to update her on the situation of the oppression of Japanese women and to be back in America within a few months), she moved to Chicago and continued to publish her journal as well as working in journalism elsewhere and running for office on the Socialist Party ballot. In 1911 her journal, then called The Progressive Woman, ran a special issue on Kotoku Shusui, a Japanese socialist who had been put to death earlier that year along with his girlfriend Kanno Suga among others; the articles included translations of letters from Kotoku and [Japanese male feminist] Sakai Toshihiko to Kaneko Kiichi.
In 1918 she edited an anthology called Woman’s Voice, which featured excerpts from the writings of some 250 women of note, including Susan B. Anthony, George Eliot, Cicely Hamilton, Ellen Key, Maria Montessori, and Rahel Varnhagen. The preface noted that “[i]t is the editor’s hope that this volume will circulate very largely in the small towns and country districts of our nation. I want the millions of women who are feeling, and thinking, but who are as yet inarticulate upon the larger affairs of life, to find their need and their voice in this volume.”
She died in 1934.
Sources
https://archive.org/details/womansvoiceanan00kanegoog/page/n12/mode/2up?view=theater (English) Josephine’s anthology, available on openlibrary.org
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2020/5/15/maedako-2/
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2020/10/16/takeshi-takahashi-4/ (English) Includes a newspaper photograph of Josephine and Kiichi.
