Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Development of the Feminist Movement by Mara Patessio (review)

In the three decades since the publication of Flowers in Salt, Sharon Sievers’s seminal study of the early development of feminism in modern Japan, scholars including Patricia Tsurumi, Vera Mackie, Rebecca Copeland, and Marnie Anderson, to name but a few, have deepened understanding of the lives, thoughts, and activities of Meiji women at the same time that they have debunked the once-normative interpretation of Japanese women as devoid of all significant authority, rights, and initiative. Mara Patessio has joined their ranks with Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan. This well-crafted study, based on extensive archival work and incorporating an impressive array of primary and secondary sources in Japanese and English, focuses on the first two decades of the Meiji period. Patessio stresses the importance of examining these years in part because they witnessed a significant change in the nature of women’s activism, with early Meiji women, unlike their predecessors, critical of patriarchy, connected through supportive networks, and skilled at creating and using new public spaces to try to shape official and public opinion. Awareness of the extent of women’s involvement in debates over national issues ranging from the political and educational to the social and moral in the 1870s and 1880s is also essential for such engagement raises fundamental questions about the validity of the still often-cited conclusion that legislation adopted in 1890 banning women from certain kinds of political participation effectively silenced them. Contesting that notion, Patessio asserts that not only did women remain public and vocal throughout the nineteenth century, but the seeds planted by activists during the two decades after the Meiji Restoration also made possible the emergence of a national feminist movement in the early part of the twentieth century.

With her examination of Meiji pioneers, Patessio has a number of key additional objectives, which she spells out clearly and with the appropriate theoretical positioning in her first chapter. In particular, she aims to illustrate “how early Meiji women’s groups and their activities were interconnected” (p. 4). To this end, she utilizes a prosopographical approach; the absence of uniform details about individual activist women and the unreliability of certain statistical collections render the task of constructing a collective biography problematic through other means. More important, this line of inquiry sheds light on the kinds of networks that linked women, the organizations they established, the actions they took, and the opinions and arguments they put forth. Those same networks played a crucial role in providing women with the support and spaces they needed to express their views on the roles and rights they should have and thus were vital to their assertion of their citizenship, to their public quest for influence, and to the eventual formation of a women’s movement.

Among the most significant catalysts for the developing interconnectedness of early Meiji women were the new educational institutions that Japanese and foreign missionaries established, and Patessio devotes chapters 2 and 3 to an examination of facilities located in major cities, their students, and their faculty. As Patessio describes, the state’s aim to produce ryōsai kenbo (“good wives and wise mothers”) who would contribute to Japan’s advancement largely by raising model future citizens had the unintended consequence of creating a collective of opinionated, assertive, and vocal women. These same women believed their education had a “public use” (p. 39), and this conviction and the related desire to help to strengthen the nation led many to pursue careers as teachers, nurses, journalists, and reformers. Missionary and Japanese teachers and school administrators served as invaluable role models in the creation of such women through the personal examples they set of womanhood, the message they projected about the value of work by women, and often their propagation of Christianity. Coursework reinforced the lesson...