Gendering Modern Japanese History / Edition 1

by Barbara Molony, Kathleen Uno, Barbara Brooks, Haruko Taya Cook, Theodore Cook

Overview

In the past quarter-century, gender has emerged as a lively area of inquiry for historians and other scholars, and gender analysis has suggested important revisions of the “master narratives” of national histories—the dominant, often celebratory tales of the successes of a nation and its leaders. Although modern Japanese history has not yet been restructured by a foregrounding of gender, historians of Japan have begun to embrace gender as an analytic category.

The sixteen chapters in this volume treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as well as heterosexual relations in the period from 1868 to the present. All of them take the position that history is gendered; that is, historians invariably, perhaps unconsciously, construct a gendered notion of past events, people, and ideas. Together, these essays construct a history informed by the idea that gender matters because it was part of the experience of people and because it often has been a central feature in the construction of modern ideologies, discourses, and institutions. Separately, each chapter examines how Japanese have (en)gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674017801
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	11/30/2005
Series:	Harvard East Asian Monographs , #251
Pages:	632
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Barbara Molony is Professor of History at Santa Clara University.

Kathleen Uno is Associate Professor of History at Temple University.

Andrew Gordon is Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University.

Table of Contents

	About the Contributors	IX
	Introduction	1
I	Gender, Selfhood, Culture
1	Made in Japan: Meiji Women's Education	39
2	Thoughts on the Early Meiji Gentleman	61
3	Commodifying and Engendering Morality: Self-Cultivation and the Construction of the "Ideal Woman" in 1920s Mass Women's Magazines	99
II	Genders, Bodies, Sexualities
4	"S" is for Sister: Schoolgirl Intimacy and "Same-Sex Love" in Early Twentieth-Century Japan	133
5	Seeds and (Nest) Eggs of Empire: Sexology Manuals/Manual Sexology	191
6	Engendering Eugenics: Feminists and Marriage Restriction Legislation in the 1920s	225
III	Gender, Empire, War
7	Making "Soldiers": The Imperial Army and the Japanese Man in Meiji Society and State	259
8	Reading the Japanese Colonial Archive: Gender and Bourgeois Civility in Korea and Manchuria before 1932	295
9	Women's Deaths as Weapons of War in Japan's "Final Battle"	326
IV	Gender, Work, Economy
10	Gendering the Labor Market: Evidence from the Interwar Textile Industry	359
11	Sorting Coal and Pickling Cabbage: Korean Women in the Japanese Mining Industry	393
12	Managing the Japanese Household: The New Life Movement in Postwar Japan	423
V	Theorizing Gender
13	The Quest for Women's Rights in Turn-of-the-Century Japan	463
14	Womanhood, War, and Empire: Transmutations of "Good Wife, Wise Mother" before 1931	493
15	Toward a Critique of Transhistorical Femininity	520
16	Feminism and Media in the Late Twentieth Century: Reading the Limits of a Politics of Transgression	555
	Index	591