Early Life. The many contributions of Oku Mumeo to expanding the political and legal rights of Japanese women remained obscure to a postwar generation of Japanese until scholars began taking a closer look in the 1970s at Japan's feminist past and various women's movements.

Born in 1895 to a lower middle-class family in Fukui, Oku was educated at the Japan Women's Academy (now Japan's Women's University), graduating in 1916. In order to understand better the plight of lower class working women, she took a job briefly under an assumed name at a textile factory in the Tokyo slums. This brought her to the attention of women activists, and in 1919, she became one of the three officers of the Association of New Women (Shin Fujin Kyokai), sharing responsibilities with Hiratsuka Raicho, already famous for founding the Bluestocking Society in 1911, and Ichikawa Fusae, a young woman with a rural background and experience in journalism and teaching. By then, Oku was married and had given birth to a son. One of the main goals of the Association was to end Article 5 of the Peace Preservation Law (1900), which prevented women from joining political associations. Another was to amend the marriage laws by preventing men with venereal disease from marrying.

Activism. When the Society broke up in 1921—Raicho lost interest and Fusae went off to the United States for a year and half—Oku continued to press for women's political rights and helped to win that battle against Article 5 in 1922. Although she was of the first women to give political speeches after the ban, she became more interested in social conditions than politics in the mid and late 1920s and was for many years the editor of a small women's labor journal. Oku was also admired for her effective speaking style and use of rhetoric. Although well-read in Western social sciences, she did not go abroad as did many other Japanese women leaders in this period or develp ties in western women's organizations. After the Manchurian Incident of 1931, her main interest was the cooperative movement and social work. The project which meant most to her was a women's settlement house in Tokyo. Oku was well read in Western social sciences but did not go abroad as did many other Japanese women leaders in this period or develop ties with Western women's organizations. The mother of two teen-aged children, she lived close to the poverty line both before and after her divorce in 1933. Apparently, there was an arrangement with her husband and his family which allowed her to raise the children.

When Japan's aggressive policies in China led to total war in the fall of 1937, Oku was among the women leaders who gave patriotic support to the creation of the New Order at home and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere abroad. Her contributions to magazine articles in the period indicate complicity in Japan's war of expansion in East Asia and the Pacific. Basically, she and other feminists encouraged Japanese women to play a large role in neighborhood associations (tonarigumi), which had been fostered by the Japanese government in 1940 and after to promote the war effort at the local level and to implement wartime rationing and security measures. By showing patriotism in this way, housewives could enter the public arena. In 1942, all women had to be become members of the newly created Great Japan Women's Patriotic Association, which owed its origins to Osaka housewives in 1932 but was quickly taken over by military officers.

Occupation Years. When the war ended in 1945, Oku was deeply saddened by the destruction in a fire bomb raid of her beloved settlement house in Tokyo's Honjo Ward. For a time, she worked with old friends from the cooperative movement in growing food in the fields along the Tama River. But she was soon energized by postwar legal reforms and by the promotion of voting and electoral rights for women. The Allied occupiers of defeated Japan, primarily Americans led by General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, called for the emancipation of Japanese women and supported the decision of the cabinet and Diet in December 1945 in granting equal electoral rights to eligible men and women and lowering the voting age to 20. In 1947, Oku became head of the Women's Section of the National Cooperative Party, led by Miki Takeo (a future prime minister). After much urging by friends, she decided in April to run for a seat in the newly created Upper House of Councilors, which had replaced the old appointive House of Peers under the new postwar constitution. Drafted and debated in 1946, the new constitution became effective with much ritual and festivity on May 3, 1947. Although the first postwar election had been held in April 1946 when over 80 women had run for the lower house and 39 were victorious, this was the first election under the provisions of the new constitution. Oku won a six-year term and retained her seat in subsequent elections, serving a total of eighteen years in the Upper House.

Already involved in a citizens' movement to stabilize prices, Oku used her position to encourage various local and regional housewives' organizations to band together in September 1948 for demonstrations in Tokyo against shoddy products—the immediate target was defective matches—and high black market prices. From a series of similar protests, the Housewives League (Shufu Rengo Kai) evolved in October. Oku helped to edit the League's new newsletter, Shufuren tayori, which began publication in December 1948. While still serving the Diet, she was elected President of the League in 1949 and coined the phrase, "kitchen politics," to represent her attempts to empower women as expert managers within the home and as knowledgeable consumers outside the home. She explained this philosophy in Daidokoro to seiji (The Kitchen and Politics), a work published in 1952.

At first, General MacArthur and Japanese authorities, with the exception of the Women's Information Officer in SCAP (Ethel Weed) and the Price Bureau in the Japanese government, took minimal notice of her or the movement. The Japanese public and media were far more aware. The press covered the demonstrations over matches in September 1948, and Oku became famous for her public exhortations, her uniform of a large white apron worn over a kimono (ironically similar to the attire for the wartime Women's Defense League) and for the emblem she carried a large rice ladle. Before long, the women developed a bargaining position with Japanese officials and merchants. The rapid growth of the League owed much to Oku's strategy, tactics, and rhetoric. Although Shufuren became much larger than previous associations founded by and controlled by women, it greatly benefited from over a century of women's movements. Shortly before the end of the Occupation, Oku joined a delegation of Japanese women who made a trip to Great Britain and Europe to study social welfare policies and institutions. This was her first trip outside of Japan, and she wrote about it extensively in Akekure (Morning and Evening), published in 1957. Years later, she would meet American consumer activist Ralph Nader.

Consumerism. After the Occupation ended, Oku's kitchen politics evolved into consumerism as the economy not ony recovered but launched into high-speed growth in the mid and late 1950s. OKu has remained a difficult figure to analyze or compartmentalize. At various stages of her life she was a suffragist, a social worker, a labor newsletter editor, a wartime patriot, and a firm believer in using her postwar political position to help women, especially housewives. They in turn gave her strong political support and kept her alive in politics. In 1955, Oku became a leading figure in the New Life Movement to promote savings, thrift, and morality. She was also a critic of licensed prostitution and of the postwar GI bar and brothel culture around US bases in Japan and cooperated with other women in the Diet and women’s associations to ban licensed prostitution in Japan, 1955-1956. One of her greatest pleasures in these years, she has said, was the resurrection of a Women’s House in central Tokyo. Overall, Oku’s politics and positions reflect an intricate blend of socialist and conservative inclinations and convictions. In 1983, NHK (Japanese Broadcasting Company) helped to resurrect the intertwined story of Oku and Shufuren in a television documentary on her contributions to women’s and consumers’ rights. In 1965, she had received the Order of the Precious Crown; on the day of her death in 1997, she was awarded the Fourth Grade of Court Rank.