Beate Sirota Gordon, 1923–2013

Though she was neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar, it fell to Beate Sirota Gordon to draft women’s rights into Japan’s postwar constitution. She was in the right place at the right time to do so thanks to a remarkable confluence of talent and personal history, beginning with her firsthand experience of gender inequality in Japan during the 10 years she lived there as a child before World War II. “Japanese women were historically treated like chattel,” she recalled in 1999. “They were property to be bought and sold on a whim.” Her efforts to change that made her a feminist heroine in Japan.

Gordon was born in Vienna “as the only daughter of internationally acclaimed pianist Leo Sirota,” said The Japan Times. She moved to Japan at age 6, when her father was appointed to a teaching position in Tokyo. In 1939, shortly before turning 16, she moved to the U.S. to study at Mills College in California.

Gordon’s fluency in Japanese, Russian, and German made her “highly sought after” as a translator once war broke out, said TheAtlantic.com. In December 1945 she returned to a ruined Tokyo as part of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff, and was appointed—at only 22—to the team drafting a new Japanese constitution. “Her assignment: women’s rights.” Gordon read through other countries’ constitutions in the few libraries still standing in the city. The two provisions she wrote laid out a broad definition of equal rights and specific civil rights for women in marriage. The constitution went into effect in 1947.

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Gordon’s role was “nothing short of revolutionary,” said Bloomberg.com. Yet she didn’t speak of it for decades afterward, fearing that revealing her unlikely role would move Japanese conservatives to revise the constitution. After being reunited with her parents, she returned to the U.S. and eventually became director of performing studies at the Asia Society. Only in the mid-1990s did she write about her constitutional work, thus becoming known among the Japanese as “their answer to Gloria Steinem.”

Gordon’s provisions “set a basis for a better, a more equal society,” said Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University. “And what kind of 22-year-old gets to write a constitution?”