Women in Medieval Japan: Motherhood, Household Management and Sexuality (review)

For over two decades now, the scholarship of Wakita Haruko has played a central role in studies of gender issues in medieval Japanese history. Alison Tokita's English translation of a significant portion of Wakita's book Nihon chūsei joseishi no kenkyū: Seibetsu yakuwari buntan to bosei, kasei, seiai (University of Tokyo Press, 1992) makes this seminal work available to a wide audience and is therefore highly welcome. Rather than a monograph, Wakita's book is a collection of essays on overlapping issues, each crafted from a somewhat different perspective. The English version includes an introduction by the translator that outlines Wakita's arguments and provides useful information for the nonspecialist reader.

The book examines key issues in medieval women's history, such as the development of the stem family known as the ie, changing gender roles in all segments of society, and the increasing emphasis on women's function as mothers. In chapter 1, Wakita argues that the ie, although certainly patrilineal and patriarchal, nonetheless gave considerable authority to the wife of the household head. Additionally, she maintains, medieval women gained newfound security as wives within the ie's virilocal system, in contrast to the insecurity of Heian-period wives in uxorilocal and wife-visiting arrangements. In the latter situations, women could be easily abandoned by their spouses-a fate less likely when the wife's importance as household manager made her indispensable to the ie. Wakita's analysis challenges the common portrayal of women as simply experiencing decline from a relatively high status in the Heian period to a subservient position within patriarchal medieval society; instead she provides a nuanced picture of change that was not entirely disadvantageous to women.

The second chapter explores the way in which medieval texts conceptualized motherhood, weaving it into narratives of the bad karma that characterized women as a whole. On the one hand, according to Wakita, from late Heian times women were honored as mothers; on the other hand, motherhood, which required that a woman commit various misdeeds in order to feed and protect her children, was seen as an essentially sinful condition. In Wakita's view, the veneration of motherhood was linked to the rise of patriarchy; again, she eschews a strict linear narrative of decline in women's status, demonstrating that women gained authority as mothers while losing it more generally.

In chapter 3, Wakita examines changing gender roles in various social classes, beginning with the decline in ritual roles for women, a process that began under the ritsuryō system in the eighth and ninth centuries and culminated with the marginalization of female shamans in medieval times. Wakita then goes on to examine the growing tendency in elite society to hold labor in contempt, a process that eventually barred aristocratic women from productive activities; the shift in women's overt participation in land management and trade to participation in these activities under their husbands' names; and the decline, from the fourteenth century on, in the status of female shamans and entertainers. She then turns to specific examples of gender roles taken from two Muromachi-period sources: official records kept by court ladies who acted as administrators for the throne and illustrated scrolls depicting the activities of artisans, many of them women. The former indicate that within the rarified atmosphere of the court, women continued to exercise authority on a practical level, while the latter demonstrate their continued activity in such productive enterprises as textile manufacture and brewing. It was not until the sixteenth century, Wakita demonstrates, that women's work was generally confined to the ie.

The fourth chapter focuses on changes in the marriage system-from the wife-visiting to the virilocal form-and the effects those changes had on the life cycle of women, especially from the late Kamakura period on. Wakita argues that a true viri-local system, which she equates with patriarchy, could only...