Abstract: Yamakawa Kikue was one of the most important Japanese socialists in the 20th century. Her thoughts on the emancipation of proletarian women became the important reference for the Japanese feminist movement in the early 20th century. Yamakawa Kikue believed that the Japanese proletarian women were trapped in the predicament: the interference of the bourgeois feminist movement, the constraint of the feudal family system, and the old ideology of male superiority and female inferiority. In this regard, starting from Marxism, she pointed out that the root of womens problems lay in economic problems, and clarified the hypocrisy and oppression of the bourgeois feminist movement against proletarian women. She pointed out that the inner strength of realizing proletarian womens emancipation is the unity of all workers, the external support is the proletarian movement, and the practical return is the socialist mode of production. Once translated into Chinese, Yamakawa Kikues works on womens liberation exerted a certain influence on the early Chinese Marxists exploration of the road of Chinese womens liberation.

Key words: Yamakawa Kikue, the thoughts on womens emancipation, Japanese socialism, feminist movement