Promotional Information

A study of the "modern" woman in Japan before World War II

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Prologue: Women and the Reality of the Everyday 1
1. The Emergence of Agency: Women and Consumerism 13
2. The Modern Girl as a Representation of Consumer Culture 45
3. Housewives as Reading Women 78
4. Work for Life, for Marriage, for Love 114
5. Hard Days Ahead: Women on the Move 152
Notes 165
Bibliography 213
Index 233

About the Author

Barbara Sato is Professor of History at Seikei University in Tokyo. She is coeditor of Gender and Modernity: Rereading Japanese Women's Magazines.

Reviews

"In no other study of Japanese women are issues of gender and social history so magnificently intertwined. No other work in the English language provides such a detailed view of the multiple configurations of mass culture (film, radio, popular magazines, department stores, fashions, etc.) in the 1920s and 1930s. This is a remarkable accomplishment." Don Roden, author of Schooldays in Japan "Barbara Sato has produced a superb book on the construction of a new women's culture in Japan in the interwar period. It offers us the creation of a new subjectivity-'women'-through the interactions of middle class women with consumer capitalism and the mass media. What Sato's book does so well is to show us the myriad ways that women wrote themselves into the narratives of modernity." Louise Young, author of Japan's Total Empire