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Reviewed by:
  • The Japanese “New Woman”: Images of Gender and Modernity
  • Sally A. Hastings (bio)
The Japanese “New Woman”: Images of Gender and Modernity. By Dina Lowy. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2007. xiv, 176 pages. $24.95, paper.

Dina Lowy tells the story of the women who established Seitō, the first literary magazine in Japan by women for women, which they named after the British Bluestockings. She shows how the self-identity of these women and their public reception were linked to the international phenomenon of the “New Woman.” Drawing on her thorough knowledge of the existing historical scholarship, Lowy situates the Seitō women in the narrative of the modernization of Japan. The basic outline of the story she tells about the “New Woman” in Japanese history has been available in English since 1983 in Sharon Sievers’s book, Flowers in Salt (Stanford University Press). Thanks to Sievers, even basic textbooks now make passing mention of the women’s movement of the Taisho era (1912–26) as part of “Taisho Democracy” and Seitō is the usual starting point for the narrative of twentieth-century Japanese feminism. Until very recently, however, there was little scholarship available in English to deepen our understanding beyond Sievers’s account. Our knowledge of the “Bluestocking” periodical and the organization that published it remained fixed on a certain few quotations from Hiratsuka Raichō and the poet Yosano Akiko. The importance of Lowy’s topic is highlighted by the number of books recently published on the Seitō organization, which include Hiroko Tomida’s book on Raichō, Teruko Craig’s translation of Raichō’s autobiography, and Jan Bardsley’s collection of translations from Seitō.1

Even in the midst of this abundance of scholarly work, Lowy makes a distinct contribution. Hers is a careful and thoughtful history rather than a translation, and she has done a great service to students of Japanese history as well as women’s history in making her contextualized account of the events of the 1910s so readable. Lowy guides her reader from controversial dramatic figures such as Henrik Ibsen’s Nora and Hermann Sudermann’s Magda, made known to the Japanese public through the New Theater movement, to the emergence of the founders of Seitō as colorful public figures, emblematic of the “New Woman.” Lowy’s highly accessible account is all [End Page 497] the more valuable for the meticulous research that provides the underpinning for her narrative. Using newspaper accounts, she establishes the connection between the modern theater, women as writers, and women writers as public figures. In contrast to Tomida’s focus on Hiratsuka Raichō, Lowy reports on the views of a number of writers for Seitō. Steering clear of polemical debates on the nature of true feminism, she allows us to understand the dialogue among social critics that was going on at the time.

Because controversial dramatic characters such as Ibsen’s Nora were so central to the public discourse about the “New Woman,” Lowy devotes two of her seven chapters to theater. The Seitō literary association was founded in September 1911, the same month that Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll House (the English title Lowy prefers) was produced for the first time in Tokyo. In a January 1912 supplement to the journal, the women of Seitō joined the lively debate on whether the flight of the play’s main character, Nora, from her marital home was something to emulate or rather something to condemn. Hiratsuka Raichō criticized Nora for impulsivity and naiveté and argued that Nora had not entirely awakened. By contrast, other Seitō authors concluded that Nora had found her true self. Lowy observes, however, that none of the Seitō women questioned the law that made it illegal for Nora to obtain a loan under her own signature.

The staging in Japan of Hermann Sudermann’s Magda in May 1912 was even more controversial than Ibsen’s play, for the government intervened and prohibited future performances. Magda, the main character of Sudermann’s play, is an unfilial daughter who leaves home, becomes an actor, and bears an illegitimate child. When she refuses to accept a marriage proposal from her child’s father because her prospective husband...

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