Gendered Power: Educated Women of the Meiji Empress' Court by Mamiko C. Suzuki (review)

In the nearly four decades since the publication of Sharon L. Sievers's seminal Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 1983), scholarship on women in the Meiji period has flourished, to the point that putting together a syllabus or even a qualifying exam reading list for a doctoral field on gender in modern Japan requires hard choices about what to leave out. A significant focus of that research has been on the vibrant debate about "proper" gender roles and education, femininity and the ideal woman, women's rights, and women's contributions to the making of the modern nation-state. This discussion had its origins in the Western claim that the status of women reflected a country's level of civilization and enlightenment and in consequent early Meiji government directives that aimed to address criticism of the place of women in Japanese society. Mandating compulsory elementary education for girls as well as boys and banning human trafficking were among those initial policies. Flaws in their implementation, though, showcased the lack of a clear official blueprint for what to do with women and helped open the floodgates to a very public debate on the subject, one that continued throughout the Meiji period and included men as well as women, traditionalists as well as progressives, and private individuals as well as government officials.

Gendered Power enhances understanding of that debate through an examination of the lives, words, and activities of three women who were involved, namely, Empress Haruko, Nakajima Shōen, and Shimoda Utako. More specifically, it explores the sources of social, cultural, and political power that these women enjoyed; their thoughts on the kind of modern education that Japanese women needed and the roles that women could and should assume to best contribute to national progress; their efforts to promote such; and the consequences of those thoughts, those actions, and the identities that they adopted for themselves in public and private.

As Mamiko C. Suzuki contends, the shifting Meiji landscape on gender roles both provided women with opportunities and imposed limitations, and examining the ways in which Haruko, Shōen, and Utako responded sheds light on the "paradoxes of Meiji womanhood" (p. 2). One key contradiction stemmed from the fact that, while these three worked to establish modern norms for female behavior, they themselves often challenged that vision of ideal womanhood with their life choices and actions. Moreover, although they exercised a marked degree of influence in helping to mold a modern identity and standards of education for women, that identity and those standards had a traditional side that circumscribed the ways in which women could participate in the development of the nation. As a result, the three's own empowerment contributed to the subjugation of their less privileged sisters. These and other paradoxes complicate Meiji feminist history, and Suzuki's work adds important nuances to that narrative.

The work also covers new ground with the choice of its main subjects. Of the three, non-Japanese readers will be most familiar with Nakajima, more likely better known by her legal name Kishida Toshiko than by the pen name Shōen because her participation under the former in the Movement for Freedom and People's Rights has attracted significant scholarly interest in English. Opting to go beyond that same territory, Suzuki delves as well into the less-mined diaries and classical Chinese poetry (kanshi) that Shōen wrote later in life. Utako has received less attention than Shōen, and that paid to the empress is scant outside of Japanese scholarship. The differences in their presence in historical scholarship aside, the three shared key experiences and connections, and those commonalities provide Suzuki's work with another layer of conceptual coherence. Most importantly, all had ties with the imperial institution, and all had received an education that steeped them in the Chinese classics (kanbun) and classical Chinese poetry...