Japanese Women Emerging from Subservience, 1868-1945

Japanese Women Emerging from Subservience, 1868-1945
Author: Hiroko Tomida
Publisher: Women in Japanese History
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN:

This volume contains some of the most recent findings in the field of Japanese women's history in Japan, Australia, the United States and the UK, and introduces new approaches to studying Japanese women's history.

Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan

Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan
Author: Mara Patessio
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0472901605

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 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese history and is of interest to scholars of women’s history more generally.

Envisioning the Empress: The Lives and Images of Japanese Imperial Women, 1868–1952

Envisioning the Empress: The Lives and Images of Japanese Imperial Women, 1868–1952
Author: Alison J. Miller
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2024-12-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040264999

Envisioning the Empress illuminates dynamic and powerful empresses who impacted not only women in their own time but whose influence extended to later generations of royalty, creating a greater role for imperial women and elevating the status of women’s roles at a crucial juncture in Japanese history. The central focus of this book is visual monarchy, exploring how the empress’ biographies were primarily expressed in visual culture and how their images worked in support of Japan’s imperial policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book begins with a brief overview of premodern and modern imperial women to orient the reader. In each chapter, different media, audiences, and distribution channels for constructing the narrative of feminine imperial power in Japan are addressed alongside biographical information. It is argued that the ultimate purpose of all of these images was to elevate the empress and promote her image as a conventional role model for modern women, but one with enough celebrity cache to maintain popularity. The images of the modern empresses, as distributed by the Imperial Household Agency, strike a balance between propaganda and popular media, noble philanthropist and upper-middle class role model, celebrity and mother of the nation. The modern empress image was crafted to be both exalted and approachable and worked to establish individual biographies while simultaneously establishing the position of the empress as timeless in the public eye. Envisioning the Empress introduces students of royal studies as well as modern Japanese history and art history to this fascinating element of the history of monarchy and women’s history more broadly.

The Rise of Women's Transnational Activism

The Rise of Women's Transnational Activism
Author: Marie Sandell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2015-01-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857726226

What characterised women's international co-operation in the interwar period? How did female activists from different countries and continents relate to one another? Marie Sandell here explores the changing experiences of women involved in the major international women's organisations - including the International Council of Women, International Alliance of Women, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the International Federation of University Women - as well as the changing compositions and aims of the organisations themselves. Moving beyond an Anglo-American focus, Sandell analyses what the term 'international sisterhood' meant in this broader context, which for the first time included women from the beyond the Western world. Focusing on shifting identities, this book investigates how notions of 'sisterhood' were played out, and contested, during the interwar period and will be invaluable reading for scholars of women's history and twentieth-century world history.

Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun

Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun
Author: Kim Iryŏp
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2014-03-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0824840232

The life and work of Kim Iryŏp (1896–1971) bear witness to Korea’s encounter with modernity. A prolific writer, Iryŏp reflected on identity and existential loneliness in her poems, short stories, and autobiographical essays. As a pioneering feminist intellectual, she dedicated herself to gender issues and understanding the changing role of women in Korean society. As an influential Buddhist nun, she examined religious teachings and strove to interpret modern human existence through a religious world view. Originally published in Korea when Iryŏp was in her sixties, Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun (Ŏnŭ sudoin ŭi hoesang) makes available for the first time in English a rich, intimate, and unfailingly candid source of material with which to understand modern Korea, Korean women, and Korean Buddhism. Throughout her writing, Iryŏp poses such questions as: How does one come to terms with one’s identity? What is the meaning of revolt and what are its limitations? How do we understand the different dimensions of love in the context of Buddhist teachings? What is Buddhist awakening? How do we attain it? How do we understand God and the relationship between good and evil? What is the meaning of religious practice in our time? We see through her thought and life experiences the co-existence of seemingly conflicting ideas and ideals—Christianity and Buddhism, sexual liberalism and religious celibacy, among others. In Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun, Iryŏp challenges readers with her creative interpretations of Buddhist doctrine and her reflections on the meaning of Buddhist practice. In the process she offers insight into a time when the ideas and contributions of women to twentieth-century Korean society and intellectual life were just beginning to emerge from the shadows, where they had been obscured in the name of modernization and nation-building.

Gender and the Great War

Gender and the Great War
Author: Susan R. Grayzel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190271108

The centenary of the First World War in 2014-18 offers an opportunity to reflect upon the role of gender history in shaping our understanding of this pivotal international event. From the moment of its outbreak, the gendered experiences of the war have been seen by contemporary observers and postwar commentators and scholars as being especially significant for shaping how the war can and must be understood. The negotiating of ideas about gender by women and men across vast reaches of the globe characterizes this modern, instrumental conflict. Over the past twenty-five years, as the scholarship on gender and this war has grown, there has never been a forum such as the one presented here that placed so many of the varying threads of this complex historiography into conversation with one another in a manner that is at once accessible and provocative. Given the vast literature on the war itself, scholarship on gender and various themes and topics provides students as well as scholars with a chance to think not only about the subject of the war but also the methodological implications of how historians have approached it. While many studies have addressed the national or transnational narrative of women in the war, none address both femininity and masculinity, and the experiences of both women and men across the same geographic scope as the studies presented in this volume.

The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan

The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan
Author: Marcia Yonemoto
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2016-09-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520292006

Early modern Japan was a military-bureaucratic state governed by patriarchal and patrilineal principles and laws. During this time, however, women had considerable power to directly affect social structure, political practice, and economic production. This apparent contradiction between official norms and experienced realities lies at the heart of The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan. Examining prescriptive literature and instructional manuals for womenÑas well as diaries, memoirs, and letters written by and about individual women from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth centuryÑMarcia Yonemoto explores the dynamic nature of Japanese womenÕs lives during the early modern era.

The Fin-de-Siècle World

The Fin-de-Siècle World
Author: Michael Saler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 784
Release: 2014-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317604814

This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated collection of essays conveys a vivid picture of a fascinating and hugely significant period in history, the Fin de Siècle. Featuring contributions from over forty international scholars, this book takes a thematic approach to a period of huge upheaval across all walks of life, and is truly innovative in examining the Fin de Siècle from a global perspective. The volume includes pathbreaking essays on how the period was experienced not only in Europe and North America, but also in China, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, India, and elsewhere across the globe. Thematic topics covered include new concepts of time and space, globalization, the city, and new political movements including nationalism, the "New Liberalism", and socialism and communism. The volume also looks at the development of mass media over this period and emerging trends in culture, such as advertising and consumption, film and publishing, as well as the technological and scientific changes that shaped the world at the turn of the nineteenth century, such as the invention of the telephone, new transport systems, eugenics and physics. The Fin-de-Siècle World also considers issues such as selfhood through chapters looking at gender, sexuality, adolescence, race and class, and considers the importance of different religions, both old and new, at the turn of the century. Finally the volume examines significant and emerging trends in art, music and literature alongside movements such as realism and aestheticism. This volume conveys a vivid picture of how politics, religion, popular and artistic culture, social practices and scientific endeavours fitted together in an exciting world of change. It will be invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the Fin-de-Siècle period.

War and Sex

War and Sex
Author: John V. H. Dippel
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2011-09-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1616143134

Dippel reviews social circumstances leading up to conflicts from the American Civil War through the Vietnam War and the current clash with Islamic fundamentalists, and explores how tensions over gender roles affect men's willingness to go to war.