This perceptive, detailed biography traces the life of Katô Shidzue, one of Japan's most powerful female activists and politicians. Katô's activism initially was sparked by her friendship with Margaret Sanger, who inspired Katô to found a Japanese birth control movement in the 1920s.

Historian, social reformer, and women's suffrage campaigner, Mary Ritter Beard (1876-1958) was one of the most prominent intellectuals of her day. Co-author with her husband, Charles Beard of The Rise of American Civilization: and other works in US history, she also founded the modern field of women's history. This collection of her letters, offers in effect an intellectual biography which is considered to be better documented and more vivid than any previous book about her.

In thirteen wide-ranging essays, scholars and students of Asian and women's studies will find a vivid exploration of how female roles and feminine identity have evolved over 350 years, from the Tokugawa era to the end of World War II. Starting from the premise that gender is not a biological given, but is socially constructed and culturally transmitted, the authors describe the forces of change in the construction of female gender and explore the gap between the ideal of womanhood and the reality of Japanese women's lives. Most of all, the contributors speak to the diversity that has characterized women's experience in Japan. This is an imaginative, pioneering work, offering an interdisciplinary approach that will encourage a reconsideration of the paradigms of women's history, hitherto rooted in the Western experience.

This is an ethnographic study of the modern Japanese aristocracy. The author gained entry into the tightly-knit "kazoku" and conducted more than 100 interviews with its members. Winner of the Association of American University Presses Hiromi Arisawa Award

The American Historical Association's Committee on Women Historians commissioned some of the pioneering figures in women's history to prepare essays in their respective areas of expertise. This volume, the second in a series of three, collects their efforts. As a counterpoint to the broad themes discussed in the first volume, Volume 2 is concerned with issues that have shaped the history of women in particular places and during particular eras. It examines women in ancient civilizations; including women in China, Japan, and Korea; women and gender in South and South East Asia; Medieval women; women and gender in Colonial Latin America; and the history of women in the US to 1865. Authors included are Sarah Hughes and Brady Hughes, Susan Mann, Barbara N. Ramusack, Judith M. Bennett, Ann Twinam, and Kathleen Brown. Incorporating essays from top scholars ranging over an abundance of regions, dates, and methodologies, the three volumes of Women's History in Global Perspective constitute an invaluable resource for anyone interested in a comprehensive overview on the latest in feminist scholarship.

Constructing Subjectivities addresses the relationship between memory and modernity and its relevance to Japanese autobiographical texts. Tomonari construes autobiographies as embodying memory in modernity, and regards the conditions of modernity as having determined, in part, the shape of autobiographical texts. At the same time, however, he argues that Japanese autobiographies were not simply bound to the cultural and social norms of the time, but rather that the texts themselves were among the main agents of fostering Japanese modernity. The autobiographies he discusses served to initiate certain societal transitions and took part in the remaking of social norms and conventions. According to Constructing Subjectivities, mnemonic texts were crucial to the construction of modern ideological discourses such as those on the self, the family, entrepreneurship, the roles of women, and the nation. The study of this discursive process enables us to understand how the Japanese themselves tried to control the form of modernity that materialized in Japan. Because autobiography constructed and embodied collective memory at this time, analyzing the discursive process is also crucial to understanding both contemporary Japan and the self-perception of the Japanese people.

In Imperial times in Japan, women were subservient inferiors; in theory they were liberated by the democratic constitution imposed by the US after World War II; but, in real-life Japan, change is glacially slow. Here, that slow-changing reality is juxtaposed with the fast-moving aspirations of Japanese women. The author achieves this through wide-ranging interviews with Japanese women, and by using a range of contemporay Japanese literature.