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  • Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Development of the Feminist Movement
  • Emily Anderson
Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Development of the Feminist Movement. By Mara Patessio. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2011. 232232 pages. Hardcover $65.00; softcover $25.00.

Were activists like Kishida Toshiko and Fukuda Hideko exceptional women who emerged out of a vacuum onto the public stage as advocates for women's rights? Or were they simply the most public and visible figures among a vibrant and dynamic community of women in the early Meiji period? This is the question that prompted Mara Patessio to embark on her study, Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan. Her goal is twofold: "to demonstrate that the individual remarkable women we know of were but representatives of larger social and political women's movements" (p. 3) and to provide "a historical analysis demonstrating how early Meiji women's groups and their activities were interconnected and why these links were significant" (p. 4). In other words, this study seeks to shift the perspective on early Meiji women's activism from a focus on a visible few to an excavation of a community of many. Limited in terms of timeframe to the first two decades of the period, this is nonetheless an ambitious project. It remains marked, however, by a consistent dissonance between the sources used and the conclusions drawn from them.

The first chapter, which also serves as the introduction, presents the book's framework, principal questions, and methodology. Patessio uses the concept of the "public sphere" to describe the sense of shared community that she proposes developed across diverse groups and regions even among women who were not personally acquainted. She argues at the same time that these women, rather than being passive objects of changing state policy or shifts in social movements or ideological trends, played an active role in debating and discussing their own roles. Alongside her deliberate choice to leave the more prominent figures in the margins and focus instead on a broad swath of the female population, Patessio also elects to use a prosopographical approach. Instead of presenting a few in-depth studies, she mines a vast and diverse body of sources for what are often brief mentions or a few sentences that hint at the extent to which the lives of women may have been fundamentally altered not only by the abrupt changes of early Meiji society, but also by their own deliberate choices of paths previously unavailable to them. In the following chapters she focuses on the key developments that contributed to the emergence of this distinctly female public sphere.

One new development was educational reform, the subject of chapter 2. The chapter is roughly divided into two parts, first, an examination of shifts in policy as well as public discourse concerning education for girls and second, a discussion of what individual girls and young women thought about education, how they sought out schools and learned of educational opportunities, and what types of education they actually received. In this chapter Patessio convincingly makes the case that even governmental efforts to educate more women were challenged by social and economic hurdles that made it difficult for girls to be enrolled in school for even brief periods. At the same time, the manner in which Patessio develops her argument—particularly in her incorporation of the prosopographical approach—results in what appear to be confusing or contradictory conclusions. As she herself acknowledges in her introduction, the nature of the subject matter makes it impossible to rely on detailed sources. Her objective is to demonstrate that many women, no matter how briefly, attended [End Page 352] schools and were exposed to publications about women, thereby being helped to "find the means to voice their opinions and ambitions," and that "girl students and women teachers had begun to form an imagined community" (p. 52). She presents, with very little additional analysis, a long list of women who attended schools for varying lengths of time, but unfortunately this solution does not provide sufficiently convincing evidence. That more and more women were both attending school and employed as teachers...

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