This essay will examine the complex influences on the movement to create Iron Girls during the Cultural Revolution, evaluating the impact of the political campaign and accompanying administrative intervention on the gender division of labor. The analysis will consider the underlying economic motivations for the intervention, the ideological implications of the mobilization, and their relation to gendered social relations.
"Iron Girls" are one of the best-known artifacts of an extreme form of gender equality promoted during the Cultural Revolution, expressed under the slogan "men and women are the same." This essay examines the origins and decline of the movement for Iron Girls, asking why the government encouraged women to challenge the traditional model of the gender division of labor, why women responded so enthusiastically to the campaign, and whether their actions were carried out with a conscious recognition that they were struggling for equality with men. This essay will provide an objective and historical evaluation, considering whether the movement for Iron Girls was able to transform the traditional gender division of labor, whether it led to the liberation of women, and how in our own day we look upon the slogan of "men and women are the same."

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This paper will examine the visual representations of plague victims as a specific complex of gender and class images. After the 1630 pandemic in Italy, the images of plague victims appeared in the official plague altarpieces commissioned by the city authorities during or just after the epidemic; they served as the collective votive objects (ex. The Neapolitan altarpiece by Luca Giordano for the memorial church of S.Maria del Pianto, ca.1660-61). Analysis of the historical context and visual languages will contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of this genre and the unstated assumptions lying behind these paintings. In the foreground of the altarpiece, the miserable scene of the lazzaretto or quarantine camp is depicted with a crude realism. The victims in this scene are clearly represented as the Poor. On their naked bodies, one can easily distinguish the plague symptoms. In the 17th-century, the painters following Raphael's model, uniformly chose to insert a motif of a dead mother with a child clinging to her breasts and some male workers carrying the dead. This group became a leitmotif for plague imagery. In sharp contrast to the Virgin Mary and the interceding patron saints, who are depicted as standing or seated gloriously on the clouds, this figure of the dead mother lying at their foot could be read as a sinful daughter of Eve. Also the male workers are represented not as the agents of governance but as those who have a marginal existence exposed to contagion, for they are depicted among the Poor and placed outside the city walls. In conclusion, under the social crisis brought on by the plague, the city authorities tried to keep and reinforce their ideal social and gender systems by visualizing the plague victims as the Other, who should be excluded from their healthy society.

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In turn-of-the-twentieth-century America, a husband's desertion or failure to provide for his wife and children became problematized as a cause of poverty and delinquency. Every state enacted a law which punished a male householder who failed to support his family. This article scrutinizes how the workingmen responded to the legal treatment, and examines the consequences of the criminalization of male desertion or non-support, based on the court records in San Diego, California during the 1910s and early 1920s.
The legal treatment of male desertion or non-support was based on the assumption that the man failed to fulfill his economic responsibilities toward the family due to his moral weaknesses, manifested in the form of drunkenness, gambling and sexual immorality. After placing him on probation, judges, probation officers and social workers intervened in the private sphere of the defendant and monitored his ways of spending, leisure activities and family relationships. The defendant was forced to pay a certain amount of money to his family periodically and to refrain from activities which social reformers deemed immoral. However, these disciplinary measures failed to consider economic difficulties with which the workingmen were frequently faced, such as unemployment, low wages, industrial accidents and epidemics. Thus, the legal treatment tended to stigmatize as criminals those who were economically vulnerable—the unskilled workingmen, often of ethnic/racial minorities, some of whom were incarcerated in the state prison.
The workingmen who were charged with desertion or non-support criticized these disciplinary practices in the court. Some defendants emphasized economic difficulties beyond their control and denied the criminality of their behavior. Others problematized the gender biased legal system which only punished the man who failed to fulfill economic responsibilities, by claiming that their wives also failed to live up to the middle-class standard of domesticity.

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Although the 1955 International Planned Parenthood Conference in Tokyo brought drastic change in governmental efforts to promote birth control as a means to control population, little is known about how or why the conference was held in Tokyo. The official story according to the conference proceedings went that it was Clarence J. Gamble, an American philanthropist, who suggested that the conference be held in Tokyo. However, as this paper shows, Gamble merely happened to be in Japan when Yoshio Koya, a Welfare bureaucrat, and others were struggling to find a way to have the Conference take place here.
Gamble, who should not be given very much credit for his contribution to the Tokyo IPPF Conference, was a controversial figure. His main concern was the fertility differential between classes. As a fervent eugenicist, he supported the development of a simple contraceptive method, using salt solution and sponges. He strongly promoted the simple method as a means to control population when he extended his work in Asia. This shows his lack of empathy for Asian women. His arrogant acts in Asia, where he ignored local autonomy, led the board of IPPF to harshly criticize and finally to expel Gamble.
Nonetheless, Gamble was credited for his service to Japan. It impressed him that it was the Japanese birth controllers who appreciated his work. As a result, the Japanese birth control movement, already funded substantially by Gamble, was able to continue receiving financial support from him. However, by accepting Gamble's money and publicly praising him as "the Benefactor of the Family Planning Movement in Japan," the postwar birth control movement in Japan proclaimed its agendas of population control and eugenics.

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