How are women in Osaka, and in Japan, living and what are they
thinking now? Do they have many problems in common with women in other countries
or not? I'll write a brief report on this theme after two years of counseling
practice at the Dawn Center.
At the Dawn Center, face-to-face counseling and telephone counseling are offered
every day. In fiscal 1995 (from April 1995 to March 1996), nearly 5,000 cases
were consulted (see figures 1 and 2). As is seen in figure 1, most clients are
in their thirties and forties. However, there is a subtle difference between face-to-face
and telephone counseling. In face-to-face counseling, women in their thirties
are at the top of the age groups, as in thirties > twenties > forties >
fifties, while in telephone counseling, the order is forties > thirties >
twenties > fifties. In the case of face-to-face counseling, 62% of the clients
are in their thirties and younger, which is about two times as high as this groups
34% in the case of telephone counseling.
The Dawn Center, Osaka Prefectural Women's Center, is situated in the central
part of Osaka City, so it is accessible for working women. This may be one reason
why younger women come for counseling without reluctance. With regard to the contents
of face-to-face counseling sessions, more than half of them are about "how
to live" (33.8%) and parent-child relationship (20.1%), which shows that
younger women's problems center on the search for "how to live", conflicts
with the social expectation of their roles, and pressure from the traditional
view of the family and the parent-child relationship. The average life expectancy
of Japanese women is reaching 83 years, and the urban style of nuclear families
of salaried company employees has been dominant since the economic growth period
after the '60s. Nevertheless, young women seem to go out into the world from homes,
schools, and communities without questioning the traditional framework of marriage,
housework, and mothering.
In Japanese society, which has outstandingly strong stereotypical sex-roles compared
with other developed countries, even though an increasing number of women get
a higher education and go to work soon after graduation, they wish to stay at
home after marriage or the birth of their first child and devote themselves to
child-rearing. This wish meets with the needs of both society and companies for
women to work as unskilled laborers for a short time and afterward expect them
to take care of the male employees who dedicate all their time to their work.
A gap has, however, appeared between this sex-role system of the society and women's
consciousness. For women who begin married life with the tentative identity of
housewives and mothers, they find themselves in their second adolescence in their
thirties. When their children start schools, they realize as long as fifty years
of life stretch ahead of them. They have to start again to search for individual
fulfillment, their true identity.
According to a recent research about women in their thirties by a private institution
in Tokyo, 65% of respondents are full-time housewives, and 80% of them want to
work outside the home. They want "to find their own goal apart from their
husband and children," "to have their own life-work," and "to
have something more than child-rearing." But, instead of pursuing their true
desire, women tend to choose part-time jobs or hobbies and cultural activities,
which do not conflict with housework, and depend on their husband economically.
This is because opportunities for married women to return to the labor market
on a regular, full-time basis are extremly limited, and they can not expect their
husbands and children to share household chores.
When women in their twenties or thirties begin to grope for "how to live
from now on," it is necessary to reexamine their relationships with their
husband and children. Sometimes their own stereotypes of sex-roles and femininity
worry them. Some women feel their character is not suitable to be active in society
because of the way they were brought up. As a mentioned earlier, one-third of
women's problems are concerned with "how to live."
This is because Japanese women today are forced to choose their way again in their
twenties or thirties due to the strong gender stereotypes of the society.
Troubles in the parent-child relationship account for one-fifth of the face-to-face
counseling sessions. Women often find more difficulties in the relationship with
their parents than in that with their children. Above all, some women feel irritated
about having been expected to take care of their parents and brothers only because
they were girls. Some women feel frustrated and sorry that in their childhood
they could not help their subjugated mothers and they themselves could not rely
on their mothers' favor or express their self. These are so-called "mother-daughter"
problems.
Feminist study now pays special attention to this unhappy psychological cycle
of mothers and daughters as a gender problem. Among women now in their fifties
and sixties who lived through the traditional family system and male chauvinism,
many have conflicts with daughters now in their thirties.
These ambivalent feelings toward their mothers, struggles in their lives, expected
care-giver roles, and their hunger for love in their childhood prevent women from
having loving and healthy relationships with their own children. Now they are
mothers who are embarrassed by or irritated with their children.
Furthermore, there has been a strong emphasis on idealized "motherhood"
in Japanese culture. In the modern society it takes the form of the "3-year-old
myth," which means mothers should raise their children at home while they
are very young. This myth has helped support the highly developed Japanese economy
by forcing women to stay home and take care of her husband who is working "24
hours a day" for his company. But mothers in urban nuclear families have
to live with their children all alone in their apartments for 24 hours a day,
365 days a year. This closed situation not only puts a burden on the women themselves,
but also suppresses their children emotionally, ocassionally resulting in child-abuse
in the disguise of "discipline".
Though every woman's problems are individual, when we think about the counseling
at the Dawn Center as a whole, the present situation of the society can be seen
through them.
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