Abstract
Japanese married women only began participating widely in sports after the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964. It is often said that participation in sports by housewives symbolized their liberation from isolated domestic life, thereby promoting gender equality. This thesis examines the development of housewives' sports activities and the characteristics of the sports institution, taking “Mums' Volleyball” as the main example, and concludes that those housewives undertook their role without themselves realizing that they were contributing to national economic growth, thereby exaggerating the sexual division of labor. The perpetuation of “housewifeliness” signifies repeated states in which housewives were liberated from their daily household routine, and then were empowered to fulfill their roles as home-makers even more effectively by the sports activities in which they participated. Thus the perpetuation of “housewifeliness” could be expressed as a circular diagram illustrating repeated liberation from “housewifeliness” and its prepetuation. With the development of their sports activities, the image of housewives changed from “isolated” to “cheerful”, and then to “autonomous”, and thus the circle could be considered a spiral diagram.
In order to examine the concept of perpetuation of “housewifeliness”, how married women came to be regarded as “housewives” will be outlined, then the reasons why the housewives' sports movement occurred in the 1970s will be discussed. Finally, analysis of the institutional characteristics of “Mum's Volleyball”, such as ideology, rules, facilities for training, etc., will explain how “housewifeliness” was perpetuated.
“Mums' Volleyball” was an informal name, and “Housewives' Volleyball” was the official one. Although since the 1970s, the word “housewife” has almost never been used because of its gender inference, it has been used in many cases with reference to sports activities by married women. As the word “housewife”, however, symbolized a good wife and mother, sports activities were accepted and acknowledged by their husbands and their families and, ultimately by society.
The housewives who perpetuated “housewifeliness” contributed to the country's economic growth by ensuring that their husbands were always in top condition for work. In the meantime, they were required to have organizational skills, for example, skills for managing their teams, sports associations, and various tournaments in which they participated. Thus the housewives' sports activities could be said to have two faces: one was to free housewives from home-bound chores, encouraging them to have social empowerment, and the other was to accelerate their sexual division of labor as home-makers.
