抄録
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.
