Beate Gordon Long Unsung Heroine of Japanese Women's Rights, Dies at 89

	Beate Gordon Long Unsung Heroine of Japanese Women's Rights, Dies at 89 Beate Gordon Long Unsung Heroine of Japanese Women's Rights, Dies at 89 Beate Sirota Gordon, the daughter of Russian Jewish parents who at 22 almost single-handedly wrote women's rights into the Constitution of modern Japan, and then kept silent about it for decades, only to become a feminist heroine there in recent years, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89. Enlarge This Image Beate Sirota Gordon in 1947. A search for lost parents led to Japan. Connect With Us on Twitter Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines. Twitter List: Reporters and Editors Enlarge This Image Stuart Isett Ms. Gordon at the Diet Building in 1998, the year Japan's government gave her a high honor. The cause was pancreatic cancer, her daughter, Nicole Gordon, said. A civilian attached to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's army of occupation after World War II, Ms. Gordon was the last living member of the American team that wrote Japan's postwar Constitution. Her work — drafting language that gave women a set of legal rights pertaining to marriage, divorce, property and inheritance that they had long been without in Japan's feudal society — had an effect on their status that endures to this day. "It set a basis for a better, a more equal society," Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University, said Monday in a telephone interview. "By just writing those things into the Constitution — our Constitution doesn't have any of those things — Beate Gordon <b>...</b>	From: tmjrnews Views: 0 0 ratings
	Time: 00:27	More in News & Politics