"One year after the war ended, Mizoguchi's Japanese militaryoverseers were replaced by American ones. Suspicious of films that might rekindleenthusiasm for feudal or militarist values, they encouraged themes that wouldillustrate democracy in action. Women were to be given special prominence inbuilding a newly democratic Japan. Mizoguchi, who in many of his pre-war filmshad been obsessed with the theme of women victimized by society, embraced the newdirectives wholeheartedly" (David Owens, The Japan Society). Victory ofWomen is the story of a determined young lawyer, Hiroko (Kinuyo Tanaka), engagedto an imprisoned critic of the wartime government. While defending a destitutewoman who has killed her baby rather than see it grow up an orphan after the war,Hiroko's opposition to the harsh sentences meted out to wartime dissidents isradicalized: now she sees the problem in terms of the oppression of women. Thegreat actress Kinuyo Tanaka would become Mizoguchi's female alter-ego in hisfilms of the fifties.