Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THOUGHTS ON MOTHERHOOD REAT thinkers of every age have expressed VJI their conviction that love and motherhood are the deepest instincts of a woman's being, and that marriage and the production and rearing of offspring are her only real destiny. How comes it then that woman herself is, in every class of society and in every civilized nation, a vehement opponent of this doctrine? So vehement indeed has her opposition become, and so eloquent her pleading on her own behalf that she is steadily winning the deepest thinkers of the twentieth century over to her side. For years the European public laboured under the erroneous impression that the woman movement was confined entirely to a group of disappointed old maids and discontented masculine women, who threatened to grow beards and adopt male attire. The poet Ibsen did perhaps more than any other man to correct this mistake; his writings have had an almost revolutionary effect on the thought of Scandinavia, Germany and Italy with regard to the sphere and final destiny of woman; to-day those writings are affecting even England, not directly, but through the medium of sociological writers who have imbibed Ibsen's ideas and are giving them toEnglish readers, each in his own way. Behind Ibsen stood a woman, Camilla Collet.1 Ibsen's ' Doll's House' acted like a bomb on everybody, writes a Norwegian friend. There was no party, no discussion, and no newspaper in those days in which 1 Nora's' behaviour was not discussed. The result was that Norwegian women were let loose all at once, so to speak. As for Ibsen himself, he is one of the severest moralists of our times. Always in earnest, he shows us the inevitable consequences of our deeds?and, almost, of our thoughts. He urges upon us the truth that what we sow, that we ...

An insider's view of the world of contemporary Japanese women.

Young women in Japan: Transitions to adulthood received a CHOICE "Outstanding Academic Title of the Year 2010" award from the American Library Association. This book examines young women in Japan, focusing in particular on their transitions to adulthood, their conceptions of adulthood and relations with Japanese society more generally. Drawing on detailed primary research including a year-long observation of high schools and subsequent interviews over a 12 year period, it traces the experiences of a group of working class women from their last year of high-schooling in 1989 through to 2001 as they approached their thirties. It considers important aspects of the transition to adulthood including employment, marriage, divorce, childbirth and custody. It shows how the role and identities of young women changed over the course of the 1990s, exploring the impact of changes within Japanese society and global forces, and explains fully the implications for ordinary young people and their everyday lives. It considers to what extent young women’s perceptions of themselves and society are shifting, and how far this can be explained by external constraints and their own experiences and decisions.