Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan - Hardcover

Faison, Elyssa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520252969 ISBN 13: 9780520252967

Verlag: University of California Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elyssa Faison is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma.

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"Managing Women is an important work, filled with fascinating description, and accessible to a broad audience. I expect this to become a widely known and much cited book."—Mark Metzler, author of Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan

Aus dem Klappentext

"Managing Women is an important work, filled with fascinating description, and accessible to a broad audience. I expect this to become a widely known and much cited book." Mark Metzler, author of Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan

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Managing Women

Discipline Labor in Modern JapanBy Elyssa Faison

University of California Press

Copyright © 2007 The Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25296-7

Contents

List of Illustrations..............................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments....................................................................................................................xiIntroduction: Women or Workers?....................................................................................................11. From Home Work to Corporate Paternalism: Women's Work in Japan's Early Industrial Age...........................................82. Keeping "Idle Youngsters" Out of Trouble: Japan's 1929 Abolition of Night Work and the Problem of Free Time.....................273. Cultivation Groups and the Japanese Factory: Producing Workers, Gendering Subjects..............................................514. Sex, Strikes, and Solidarity: Toyo Muslin and the Labor Unrest of 1930..........................................................815. Colonial Labor: The Disciplinary Power of Ethnicity.............................................................................107Epilogue: Managing Women in Wartime and Beyond.....................................................................................137Notes..............................................................................................................................163Bibliography.......................................................................................................................203Index..............................................................................................................................221

Chapter One

From Home Work to Corporate Paternalism

Women's Work in Japan's Early Industrial Age

When the Meiji state oversaw the opening of Japan's first government-run textile mill in 1872, its leaders had already decided that female labor would propel the early stages of Japan's industrial revolution. The government's part in initiating industrial development by funding and operating the Tomioka Silk Filature in Gunma Prefecture, and the strong role the state would play throughout the Meiji period (1868-1912) in directing the growth of capitalist institutions, ensured that the growth of industry could never be separated from the fortunes of the nation. If the industrial technologies of the Meiji period reflected the goals of a nation aspiring toward "civilization and enlightenment," it followed that industrial labor should similarly reflect the patriotic nature of the project of industrialization.

In the textile factories that fueled Japan's earliest and arguably most intense drive for industrialization, the vast majority of factory operatives were Japanese women and girls, ranging in age from approximately thirteen to twenty-five years old. In the silk-reeling factories women accounted for roughly 85 percent of all workers while in cotton spinning and weaving they made up 70 percent of the workforce, making Japan's early industrialization and capital accumulation dependent on the labor of rural women and girls. Their participation in the industrial project coincided precisely with the Meiji state's attempt to re-envision the parameters of Japanese womanhood and the place of women within the imperial state. As Japanese women's historian Koyama Shizuko has demonstrated, the womanly ideal of "good wife, wise mother" (ryosai kenbo) took hold as an organizing principle of female gender immediately after the Meiji Restoration (1868). "Good wife, wise mother" grew out of debates over women's education that began with the institution of compulsory elementary education for both males and females. With this ideology as its anchor, the modern family emerged as a primary site for the mobilization of national citizens by a new, modern nation-state undergoing large-scale urbanization, industrialization, and militarization. For female industrial labor especially, the family became the site first of recruitment efforts and then of corporate control, as companies invoked the authority of male family members (who in most cases had signed the employment contracts on behalf of their daughters) to induce desired behaviors in their workers. In some cases this invocation came in the form of admonishments to work hard so as to fulfill their filial duty to their parents, but in more extreme cases (as we will see in chapter 4) fathers and brothers were asked to come to the factory to take in hand daughters and sisters who had decided to participate in strike activities.

Because middle-class assumptions underlay the feminine ideal predicated on the "good wife, wise mother" ideology, wage-earning women and girls working in factories (and thus cut off from the domestic sphere) embodied the tensions inhering in classed understandings of female gender throughout the early twentieth century. This became particularly true once the "good wife, wise mother" ideology was supplemented by the birth of the shufu, or "housewife," ideal. The housewife ideal emerged from the confluence of new configurations of family life and domestic space and the appearance of a bourgeois middle class around the time of the First World War. The housewife embodied the modern and scientific rationalism found in the study of home economics, which she practiced with single-minded dedication. But as part of the acquisition of her specialized knowledge of domestic management, she was most frequently a graduate of a girls' higher school, which Jordan Sand has described as the "true hatcheries of professional housewives." Thus, the education and middle-class status required to attain the status of housewife and to be considered a true "good wife, wise mother" remained elusive for working-class women and for girls from poorer farming families.

Factory managers, concerned with disciplining Japan's first generation of industrial laborers to be productive workers, attempted to resolve tensions between gender and class by designating female textile labor a temporary condition and promoting the womanly values of motherhood and domesticity within the factory itself. This allowed them to offer to employees educational and cultural amenities that they framed as opportunities to become ideal (and presumably middle-class) housewives and mothers. A poor farming family might not be able to afford to send their daughter to the local elementary school, much less the girls' higher school that might make her into a "lady." But they could send her to work in a cotton-spinning mill that offered not only an attractive advance to the family, but also the hope that she might receive some basic education and training in the womanly arts. Such amenities were rarely offered during the Meiji period, but by the 1920s they had become a primary means of recruitment and retention for companies hungry for a stable workforce.

But in fact, many female workers did not leave the factory for marriage and a life of domesticity, but rather moved to positions in other better paying textile companies or else to new jobs in the service industry. A survey conducted in 1936 found that of 204 female workers who had quit work at large cotton mills to return home, 46 percent said they planned to go out and find employment in another cotton mill, and only 23 percent had gotten married. In other words, the standard narrative propounded by contemporary commentators that viewed...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520252969
• ISBN 13: 9780520252967
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 227
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar