Ichikawa Fusae

Ichikawa co-founded the Women's Suffrage League of Japan in 1924 and campaigned for two decades against laws that barred women not only from voting but from joining political parties or attending political meetings. Women voted in Japan for the first time in April 1946; Ichikawa herself was briefly purged by the occupation for wartime collaboration, then sat in the House of Councillors for 25 years, running clean, low-budget campaigns as a rebuke to money politics.