Author: Mara Patessio

WOMEN AND PUBLIC LIFE IN EARLY MEIJI JAPAN focuses on women’s activities in the new public spaces of Meiji Japan. With chapters on public, private, and missionary schools for girls, their students, and teachers, on social and political groups women created, on female employment, and on women’s participation in print media, this book offers a new perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese history. Women’s founding of and participation in conflicting discourses over the value of women in Meiji public life demonstrate that during this period active and vocal women were everywhere, that they did not meekly submit to the dictates of the government and intellectuals over what women could or should do, and that they were fully integrated in the production of Meiji culture.

Mara Patessio shows that the study of women is fundamental not only in order to understand fully the transformations of the Meiji period, but also to understand how later generations of women could successfully move the battle forward. WOMEN AND PUBLIC LIFE IN EARLY MEIJI JAPAN is essential reading for all students and teachers of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese history, and should also be of interest to scholars of women’s history more generally.

Website: http://cjspubs.lsa.umich.edu

“In this clear and wonderfully informative study, Mara Patessio steps beyond the more traditional focus on ‘great lives’ or ‘important movements’ to explore the complicated social networks that drew Meiji women together across boundaries of class and region earlier imagined as impermeable. While offering affecting portraits of notable female educators, students, writers, and activists, Patessio suggests that a host of other voices, until now largely forgotten, was every bit as significant in contributing to the emerging nation and fomenting the feminist movement in Japan.”

—Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis

Direct Link: https://www.cjspubs.lsa.umich.edu/books/list/mono71.php