Organizer: Holly V. Sanders, Villanova University

Chair: Sally A. Hastings, Purdue University

Discussant: Barbara J. Brooks, City College of New York

Scholars have recently begun to move the study of gender beyond the history of women and to consider how gender interacts with other social forces to shape the lives of individuals. This panel sheds light on the interactions between gender and the law throughout modern Japanese history. In particular we are concerned with the ways by which gendered subjects pursued objectives in the context of the law, and how the law as an institution shaped social, political and moral imperatives throughout the modern period. Since gender is never an "absolutely defining category," all of the papers attend to the relationships between gender and other variables including class and status.

Anderson analyses a series of suffrage debates that took place in the early Meiji period, where status within the household was even more important than gender in determining access to political power. Jones addresses competing models of domestic womanhood in the early twentieth century—the state-sponsored "good wife, wise mother" ideal and what he calls the "self-made woman." Sanders examines the labor history of prostitutes through the prism of indentured servitude throughout the modern period, highlighting the ambivalent status of prostitutes both before the law and within the family. Saeki considers the activities of the Women's Democratic Club in the early postwar years, specifically how the democratic ideals enshrined in the new Constitution enabled the group to reflect critically upon a number of issues including women's wartime responsibility.

Marnie S. Anderson, Smith College

This paper explores the evolution of gendered notions of political classification and specifically the issue of suffrage rights during the first twenty-two years of the Meiji period. Within this time frame, I identify a move from status to gender as the primary axis of classification. For the reformers in charge of designing the architecture of a modern nation-state, the task of defining the role of women in a modern polity brought several issues to the fore. In the previous Tokugawa period, heterogeneous local customs and a status-based society meant that men and women lived very differently according to status and region. Women of wealth and means in some areas enjoyed limited political privileges at the local level if they were heads of household.

While the notion of status-based access to political participation persisted over the first twenty years of the Meiji period, it was gradually replaced by a new notion of the vote as centered on the tax-paying male. In order to shed light on this transition, I focus on a series of debates about suffrage rights carried out by government officials and private citizens in the 1870s and 1880s. A number of participants spoke in favor of rights for female household heads. Scholars have characterized these debates in terms of progressive or even feminist impulses at the local level which were later suppressed by the patriarchal state. However, I argue that because these debates were ultimately about status within the household, a continuation of Tokugawa customs, the rights of very few women—and men—were at stake.

Mark Alan Jones, Central Connecticut State University

Throughout the history and historiography of prewar Japan, the domestic woman known as the ryosai kenbo, or good wife-wise mother, is the restrictive, disempowered image of femininity against which different models of transgressive femininity—modan gaaru, atarashii onna—are counterpoised. While such an understanding of prewar models of femininity is not inaccurate, it is at best incomplete. For even within the strictures of domesticity, there was room to transgress. The transgression was not, however, one of gender but of class. In order to capture this transgressive model of femininity that failed to challenge the gender norms implicit in the ryosai kenbo ideal but frontally challenged its class norms, I have coined the term self-made woman.

This paper examines the entangled history of these two prewar versions of domestic womanhood, along with the competing ideals of the child and the social order that accompanied them. The ryosai kenbo of late Meiji Japan was both a progressive and conservative woman. She championed a new, nationalist vision of the child as "little citizen"(shokokumin) and put into practice a new global science of childhood within her home; yet, as an established elite, she embodied a conservative vision of society characterized by fixed social hierarchies and little social mobility. By contrast, the self-made woman of Taisho Japan was an aspiring elite. While still a domestic woman, she turned the home itself into a catapult to social mobility by turning her children into yutosei (superior students). As Japan’s first kyoiku mama (education mother), she challenged an established elite’s monopoly on educational achievement, transgressed class boundaries, and threatened the rigidity of the prewar social order.

Holly V. Sanders, Villanova University

This paper addresses the gendered history of labor contracts through the prism of the indenture. Even as many sectors abandoned indentured servitude, it remained a core practice within Japan’s sex industry well into the postwar era. Until 1955 Japanese courts recognized a brothel keeper’s right to sue for the return of wages paid in advance to a woman for sexual labor. By reversing this long-standing precedent, the Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s right to walk away from debts to employers. This is a significant yet little understood milestone in the history of prostitution and more broadly, labor in modern Japan.

By tracing the contours of major legal cases involving prostitute indentures, the paper highlights the ambivalent status of prostitutes before the law and within the family. A key finding is that indentures, while constraining personal freedom, gave women access to significant amounts of cash. This often meant that prostitutes were vital to family finances and enjoyed a degree of respect for exchanging control over their bodies for large advances. A second objective is to examine the changing, indeed narrowing, notions of what constitutes legitimate female labor. To explore this latter theme, the paper examines the emergence of a discourse of rehabilitation (kosei), strongly advocated by reformers and prostitutes alike, though in different ways, after World War II.