Full Description
In thirteen wide-ranging essays, scholars and students of Asian and women's studies will find a vivid exploration of how female roles and feminine identity have evolved over 350 years, from the Tokugawa era to the end of World War II. Starting from the premise that gender is not a biological given, but is socially constructed and culturally transmitted, the authors describe the forces of change in the construction of female gender and explore the gap between the ideal of womanhood and the reality of Japanese women's lives. Most of all, the contributors speak to the diversity that has characterized women's experience in Japan. This is an imaginative, pioneering work, offering an interdisciplinary approach that will encourage a reconsideration of the paradigms of women's history, hitherto rooted in the Western experience.
Contents
Introduction, Gail Lee Bernstein Women and Changes in the Household Division of Labor, Kathleen S. Uno The Life Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan, Anne Walthall The Deaths of Old Women: Folklore and Differential Mortality in 19th-Century Japan, Laurel Cornell The Shingaku Woman: Straight from the Heart, Jennifer Robertson Female Bunjin: The Life of Poet-Painter Ema Saiko, Patricia Fister Women in an All-Male Industry: The Case of Sake Brewer Tatsu'uma Kiyo, Joyce Chapman Lebra The Meiji State's Policy Toward Women, 1890-1910, Sharon H. Nolte & Sally Ann Hastings Yosano Akiko and the Taisho Debate Over the "New Woman", Laurel Rasplica Rodd Middle-Class Working Women During the Inter-war Years, Margit Nagy Activism Among Women in the Taisho Cotton Textile Industry, Barbara Molony The Modern Girl as Militant, Miriam Silverberg Doubling Expectations: Motherhood and Women's Factory Work Under State Management in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, Yoshiko Miyake Women and War: The Japanese Film Image, William Hauser Afterword, Jane Caplan
