Gender and the Public Sphere in Modernizing East Asia

As one learns from both monographs and general histories, the encounter between East Asia and the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prompted numerous conversations about self-strengthening in China, Japan, and Korea. One area of concern was the position of women. The Confucian idea that men took responsibility for affairs outside the home, whereas women focused on internal matters could be justified in traditional culture,¹ but it did not work as well in an industrializing and modernizing world. When it meant that women were quite ignorant of their surroundings, it aroused concerns that the enforced ignorance of past generations might have weakened East Asia on the world stage.

Moving into a leadership position, Japan was the first among the three countries to articulate a need for change. Entrenched ideas on gender did not vanish altogether in the face of rhetorical pressure, and few Japanese leaders proposed making women into full-fledged citizens. Nevertheless, the exigencies of the era set men wondering how to bring women into the public sphere. The formula “good wives, wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo 良妻賢母; also rendered as “good mothers, wise wives,” ryōbo kensai 良母賢妻) was promulgated in the Meiji Civil Code of 1898.² The advantage of this formulation was that it allowed women some basic education while preserving the idea that their true place was in the home. Significant differences among the three countries meant that their trajectories were not identical, yet there is plenty of evidence of a common core.

A series of books and articles from the past fifteen years or so has laid down the parameters as far as Japan’s role in the project is concerned. From the work of scholars like Barbara Sato, Barbara Molony, Kathleen Uno, and Sarah Frederick a fairly clear picture has emerged.³ Political crises like the first Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I mark stages of a distinct progression. During these emergencies, women were needed to help weather national crises, and they took part in public activities.⁴ More and more took advantage of public education, but women’s magazines were also thought to complement schools in informing women about the world.

These magazines were of various types. Some emphasized virtues like self-cultivation, alongside their informational and commercial outreach. Magazine-based instruction could be promoted as an enhancement to women’s schooling, in that it did not require women to leave home. Thus it allowed the good wife–wise mother to remain in her residence even while she interacted as reader with the world outside. Intellectual women (known in Japan and elsewhere as bluestockings) might decry these magazines as conservative, for they did nothing to challenge old ideas about male superiority, but for women of more modest backgrounds they could still be deemed progressive in two important ways. The first was the feeling of choice that they promoted. Whereas the good wife–wise mother concept had been handed down from on high, magazines gave the reader pride and a sense of agency over how she ran the home. In this way, she might come to see her home as part of a wider public sphere. The second great advantage was the feeling of community to which these magazines gave rise. Especially due to readers’ columns and other interactive features, women could look upon their fellow readers as a kind of focus group and on the magazines themselves as friends and hence as antidotes to the isolation of earlier days.

Another important development was the emergence of...