At the turn of the twentieth century, Japan embarked on a mission to modernize its society and industry. For the first time, young Japanese women were persuaded to leave their families and enter the factory. Managing Women focuses on Japan's interwar textile industry, examining how factory managers, social reformers, and the state created visions of a specifically Japanese femininity. Faison finds that female factory workers were constructed as ''women'' rather than as ''workers'' and that this womanly ideal was used to develop labor-management practices, inculcate moral and civic values, and develop a strategy for containing union activities and strikes. In an integrated analysis of gender ideology and ideologies of nationalism and ethnicity, Faison shows how this discourse on women's wage work both produced and reflected anxieties about women's social roles in modern Japan.
Author(s): Elyssa Faison
Edition: 1
Publisher: University of California Press
Year: 2007
Language: English
Commentary: 31963
Pages: 244
Contents......Page 8
List of Illustrations......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Introduction: Women or Workers?......Page 16
1. From Home Work to Corporate Paternalism: Women’s Work in Japan’s Early Industrial Age......Page 23
2. Keeping “Idle Youngsters” Out of Trouble: Japan’s 1929 Abolition of Night Work and the Problem of Free Time......Page 42
3. Cultivation Groups and the Japanese Factory: Producing Workers, Gendering Subjects......Page 66
4. Sex, Strikes, and Solidarity: Toyo Muslin and the Labor Unrest of 1930......Page 96
5. Colonial Labor: The Disciplinary Power of Ethnicity......Page 122
Epilogue......Page 152
Notes......Page 178
Bibliography......Page 218
Index......Page 236
