Women in Public Life in Early Meiji Japan is an informative study on the “necessary precondition” for the emergence of a feminist movement in modern Japan (p. 31). Clearly written and well organized, this book will appeal to students and scholars interested in the historical experience of Japanese women in the late nineteenth century.
The strength and appeal of this work is the extensive archival research undertaken by Patessio across three countries (United Kingdom, USA and Japan). Patessio's labour in the archive allows her to piece together a unique and novel thesis: national and international axes of learning and exchange provided the impetus for women to form new social networks that transgressed established class, race and spatial boundaries. Patessio argues that these new networks of female association, a vital conduit for the “dissemination of female constituted knowledge” (pp. 109–10), had a historically unique productive quality. “Female constituted knowledge” enlarged the sphere of competence available to women in public life, whilst simultaneously empowering them with a voice to challenge existing social norms and legislation.
The power of these networks lies in their ability to form public opinion (p. 11). According to Patessio, the networks of female association were a space of freedom. They formed autonomously and spontaneously due to two distinct historical factors: changing attitudes in education and the development of print journalism in Japan. After the Meiji restoration, the education of women became a national issue linked with the survival of Japan. Consequently, young women from patriotic families – particularly from the former samurai strata – took up educational opportunities offered to them by Western Christian missionaries or newly formed girls’ schools (jōgakko), established by private benefactors and the fledging Meiji state. On graduation, many of the young women found employment as teachers. The associations and friendships the young women made outside their family became networks that “could be exploited when information regarding women's activities was to be circulated” (p. 54) and the means to “voice their opinions and ambitions” (p. 52). Print journalism also provided Meiji women with the potential to build horizontal solidarities between women from different regions. Meiji women utilized newspapers and magazines, and organized public speeches – which were reported in detail in print media – to “define their own vision of the Japanese imagined community and their own idea of nationalistic Japanese women” (p. 175).
Despite its subject matter, Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan has little to say about the institutions and material conditions that informed and shaped feminist politics and action. Patessio takes the shift from social relations determined by familial status to those arising from the choices and interests of individuals as the marker of progress and modernity. She subscribes to the naïve position that voluntarism provides the motor for “progress” in history, which effectively reduces female political agency and resistance to claims for equality with men, across time. The result is that feminist agency is reduced to a reactive, docile force in history that can only find voice and political significance in already existing male-driven nationalist discourses crystallized around national security and competition with the West. Patessio does admit that there is a “feminist nationalism”. However, she forgoes the opportunity to explain how the feminist ingenuity of the women she investigates challenges existing masculine constructs of nation, solidarity and the common good. Her silence begs the following questions: did these proto-feminist associations see their role as critiquing the Meiji state or enhancing it? And just as importantly, how were nationalism and civic freedom linked?
Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan is also weak around issues of class differences between women. Patessio follows the widespread tendency in Japanese historiography to see modernization as the downward diffusion of patterns of domesticity and womanhood from the former samurai strata to the rest of Japan. Her position is that modern Japanese womanhood was obtained by a singular route, constructed around the general doctrine of “good wife, wise mother” (ryosai kenbo). The work of Fujime Yuki, however, has challenged this narrative. In Fujime's account, Japanese womanhood crystallizes around the disparity between middle-class and lower-class women. Her position is that the first generation of upper-to-middle-class feminist activists was not a universally progressive force; they were blind to their complicity in amplifying state control targeting lower-class women, particularly in their draconian efforts to prohibit all forms of prostitution. Fujime's argument runs counter to Patessio's thesis. She sees upper-to-middle-class feminist activists as agents of social control rather than freedom. Others have argued that one of the reasons why the women of upper-to-middle-class associations such as the Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union (JWCTU) gained access to a public life and a degree of independence outside of the family was due to their eagerness to undertake corrective work to reintegrate the gendered poor to the discipline of the factory and the virtues of domestic life. While some may disagree about the significance of these concerns, thorough scholarship should attempt to assess their persuasiveness and meet their challenge. For this reader at least, Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan would have been a stronger and more interesting book if the competing historical explanations into the nature of the JWCTU – one of the first female organizations to become politically active – were addressed head on, rather than deftly side-stepped.
Despite the above reservations, historians interested in the experience of women in the early Meiji period will benefit enormously from reading Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan.
