Beate Sirota Gordon, the Only Woman to Help Draw Japan Constitution: Obituary

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Margalit Fox, Beate Gordon, Long-Unsung Heroine of Japanese Women's Rights, Dies at 89, New York Times, Jan 2, 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/0 ... pan-dies-at-89.html

Note:
(a) For Beate, see Beatrice (given name)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_(given_name)
(derived from the Latin name Beatrix[, which] is a feminine form of the late Latin name Viator, which means "voyager, traveler"/ the spelling was altered by association with the Latin beatus, meaning "blessed"/ section 1 Name variants: Beate (German, Norwegian))
(b) Summary: The daughter of Russian Jewish parents (Leo Sirota and Augustine Horenstein, as maiden name), Beate (pronounced bay-AH-tay) Sirota was born i 1923, in Vienna, where her parents had settled. When she was 5, her father was invited to teach at the Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo, and the family moved there for a planned six-month stay but wound up living in Tokyo for more than a decade. In 1`939 at age 16, she left for Mills College in Oakland, Calif. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was no way to reach her parents. Out of money, she put her foreign language prowess to work: by this time, she was fluent in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish and Russian--by taking a a job at a United States government listening post in San Francisco, monitoring radio broadcasts from Tokyo. In 1943, she received BS from the college. At war's end, she secured a job as an interpreter on General MacArthur’s staff. Arriving in a devastated Tokyo on Christmas Eve 1945, she eventually found her parents in a prisons' camp. At 22 in 1946, Beate Sirota was deputized to compose the section of Japanese constitution on women’s rights. She had seen women’s lives firsthand during the 10 years she lived in Japan, and urgently wanted to improve their status. “Japanese women were historically treated like chattel; they were property to be bought and sold on a whim,” Ms Gordon told The Dallas Morning News in 1999. 'Women had no rights whatsoever.' She drafted Article 14 and 24. In 1948 married married Joseph Gordon, who had been the chief interpreter for American military intelligence in postwar Japan. Died on Sunday (Dec 30, 2012) at Manhattan.