Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945

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.

Gail Lee Bernstein is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Haruko's World: A Japanese Farm Woman and Her Community (1983) and co-editor of Japan and the World, Essays on Japanese History and Politics (1988).

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