According to Mara Patessio, historians have focused inadequately on the thoughts and actions of late-nineteenth-century Japanese women. Thus she sets out to study “what women themselves thought” about their own social roles and conditions during the early Meiji period (p. 2). In so doing, she engages a number of compelling questions: How can we account for women's increased participation in the public sphere by the early twentieth century? To what extent did early Meiji women prepare the way for the future activities of Taisho women? And how can studying “new female spaces” allow for a better understanding of “the full development of Meiji Civil society” (pp. 10–11)? Ultimately Patessio finds that women's involvement in the formation of early Meiji Japan cannot be understood as separate from—or a subset of—the activities of mainstream (male) society.
As the title of her book suggests, a core objective of her work becomes the investigation...
