Description
Book SynopsisThe first book to tackle the importance of women's networks for civil society in Japan in th nineteenth century. The essays traverse the divide when Japan started transforming itself from a decentralized to a centralized government, and from legally imposed restrictions on movement to the breakdown of travel barriers.
Trade Review“Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan is an eye-opening, erudite, and engaging collection of archivally based stories. The webs of relationships the authors reconstruct, even when women themselves have been silent or left few traces, suggest that history should attend to such networks and webs as much as it does to states. Women and their networks were key to sustaining and shaping humanity, this book makes us believe, not just in Japan but across the globe.” —Bonnie G. Smith, Rutgers University
“This book gives Anglophone readers new access to the richness and range of work by pioneering Japanese historians of women. Its diverse but related chapters offer valuable new insight into the connections that women forged among themselves—and with men—across the land in many realms: religion, work, and political life.” —Andrew Gordon, Harvard University
