A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan (review)

Anderson’s book seeks to move out from under a historiographical burden common in the history of feminism, and indeed in the history of any progressive ideology: the need to explain the failure of that ideology’s aims to be fully realized, at least during the period in question. This burden is particularly heavy in the case of Meiji-era Japan, because a period of vigorous, open discussion on this issue during the 1870s and 80s was followed by the emergence of a conservative orthodoxy in public policy around 1890. This orthodoxy expressed itself in a series of laws that narrowly defined women’s roles and excluded women from participation in the political life of the nation. Anderson points out that historians have constructed two primary explanations for this development. In the first, the failure of progressive voices to influence policy is attributed to a conservative backlash by the Meiji state. The second explanation recognizes this backlash but also points out both the limitations of the progressivism of the first two Meiji decades and the collaboration of women’s groups with the state. Anderson seeks to “move beyond the binary paradigm” by highlighting the complexity of early Meiji discourse on women and by calling into question the assumption that women were, in fact, excluded from public life beginning around 1890.

Anderson’s focus is on the early Meiji period (roughly from 1868 to 1890), which was an extraordinary moment in the history of women’s rights. The threat of Western imperialism had led to the overthrow of the Tokugawa government in 1868, and the direction of the new Meiji state was still very much in question. Yet at a time when there was no shortage of pressing national concerns—defending the state against insurrectionist samurai, overturning unequal treaties imposed by Western nations, and remaining fiscally solvent, to name a few—many of Japan’s most prominent intellectuals and officials put the issue of women’s rights near the very top of the list, and carried out a highly visible public debate on the matter. Anderson offers the most extensive analysis to date (in English) of these debates. She makes the important point that they served as a proxy for broader debates about social change, national identity, and Japan’s place in the world. Reformists argued that the low stature of women in Japanese society prevented Japan from becoming a civilized nation. Conservatives actually agreed with this concern, but worried more that the goals of some reformists—in particular, women’s participation in politics—would lead to disorder of all kinds.

These debates are familiar to historians of Japan, in part because some of the principals in the debates were famous public figures. However, Anderson helpfully complicates our understanding of the issue by bringing in some new sources and analytical perspectives. She points out, for example, that the position of women before the Meiji era was not so oppressive as it was represented in the writings of early Meiji reformers. She shows how reformist’s campaigns for women’s political rights were usually limited to the case of female household heads, thus cautioning us against overstating the progressive implications of reformist arguments. She does a thorough job of identifying the common ground that existed between the antagonists in these debates. Conservatives and reformists alike embraced the notion of essential sexual difference and bemoaned the fact that the mistreatment of women impeded progress and diminished the health and strength of the national body and diminished the health and strength of the nation. This common ground certainly made possible the conservative ascendancy in gender discourse at the end of the 1880s, but Anderson does not see this as pure cooptation. Rather, she emphasizes women’s agency in this development by pointing out how reformers actively deployed this rhetoric to earn a hearing within the public sphere. Finally, she draws from recent scholarship on the comparative history of women...