was a Japanese essayist, activist, and socialist feminist who contributed to the development of feminism in modern Japan. Born into a highly-educated family of the former samurai class, Yamakawa graduated from the private women's college Joshi Eigaku Juku (renamed Tsuda College in 1948) in 1912. In 1916, she married the communist activist and theoretician Yamakawa Hitoshi, who, in 1922, founded the short-lived pre-war Japanese Communist Party and was a leader of the Labor-Farmer faction. In pre-war times, she contributed to the development of feminism as a founding member of the Red Wave Society (Sekirankai), Japan's first socialist women's organization, and she was one of the most visible socialist women. She is famous for "her position in debates on prostitution and motherhood, in which she consistently challenged liberal feminists (who she termed "bourgeois feminists") on the possibility of women achieving full rights within a capitalist system". While she is perhaps better known for these debates, "her participation in male-dominant socialist organizations and her interventionist writings on behalf of women within those organizations, directed toward her male socialist peers, were equally substantial". After the end of World War II, she became the first head of the Women's and Minors' Bureau of the Ministry of Labor from 1947 to 1951. In addition, she engaged in activism of women's and workers' rights. Early life She was born as Morita Kikue on November 3, 1890, in Kōjimachi, Tokyo. Her father, Morita Ryūnosuke, was born to the family of samurai of the lowest rank in the Matsue Domain (present Matsue City, Shimane Prefecture) and worked his way through language school in Yokohama City in Kanagawa Prefecture. Having mastered French, he became an interpreter in the army, and later he managed a meat business. Her mother, Morita Chise, was the daughter of Aoyama Enju, who was a Confucian scholar in the Mito Domain. Chise had a passion for learning and graduated from Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School (present Ochanomizu University) as a first-generation student of the school. Yamakawa Kikue's siblings were accomplished in languages; her older sister Matsue was a pioneer of female esperantists, and older brother Toshio was a scholar of German Literature in Japan. She also had a younger sister, named Shizue. In 1908, Kikue attended the private women's college Joshi Eigaku Juku (present Tsuda University) in Tokyo. According to one of her teachers, she almost failed college because when she took the entrance exam,