Beate Gordon, Long-Unsung Heroine of Japanese Women’s Rights, Dies at 89 Beate Sirota Gordon, the daughter of Russian Jewish parents who at 22 almost single-handedly wrote women’s rights into the Constitution of modern Japan, and then kept silent about it for decades, only to become a feminist heroine there in recent years, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89. The cause was pancrea