A woman's place: Gender, politics, and the state in Meiji Japan.

This dissertation focuses on a series of public discussions about women's roles and the proper relationship between women and the state in late nineteenth-century Japan. In the 1870s, as Japan's leaders confronted a hostile world, they encountered an idea with great currency in the West, that the status of women reflected a country's level of civilization. Although Japanese elites initiated dialogue about women's roles out of concern for the country's reputation vis a vis the outside world, the conversation soon moved to an emerging public sphere, taking place in both speech and in print. Participants included men in and outside of government as well as women who made claims concerning their rights and responsibilities in the new polity. Talk about women had a variety of meanings depending on the speaker and the context. Commentators addressed subjects including the newly-assimilated concept of rights, the meanings of equality and the proper place of women in and outside of the home. Whereas previous scholarship assumes women's inevitable exclusion from public life, this dissertation reveals a much broader and far-reaching set of discourses on the subject of women's roles and rights than scholars have heretofore imagined. Never just about that status of women, discussions were connected to issues including the shape of the new polity, national rights, and Japan's place in the hierarchy of nations. Chapters move from an exploration of the meanings of terms to an investigation of the ways that women engaged in public. I pay particular attention to the process by which women moved from their status as objects of reform to participants in an increasingly expanded public sphere. At the same time, I show how women laid claim to new modes of public expression which they retained even after their formal exclusion from politics. The dissertation demonstrates that modernity gave rise to mixed consequences for women. On the one hand, women were given a language of rights, an opportunity to cast aside old notions, and the chance to represent themselves in print and to play a limited political role. On the other, as gender began to supersede status, women were defined as a group as never before and their sphere of action was restricted in unprecedented ways.PhDAsian historyModern historySocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125288/2/3192570.pd