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.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Women or Workers?
1. From Home Work to Corporate Paternalism: Women’s Work in Japan’s Early Industrial Age
2. Keeping ‘Idle Youngsters’ Out of Trouble: Japan’s 1929 Abolition of Night Work and the Problem of Free Time
3. Cultivation Groups and the Japanese Factory: Producing Workers, Gendering Subjects
4. Sex, Strikes, and Solidarity: TQy Q Muslin and the Labor Unrest of 1930
5. Colonial Labor: The Disciplinary Power of Ethnicity
Epilogue: Managing Women in Wartime and Beyond
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Elyssa Faison is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma.
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