ABSTRACT
In Japan, as elsewhere, patterns and conditions of work in both the preindustrial and industrial economies have become differentiated by gender. The reasons for this are ideological, political, economic and social, or, more accurately, a complex interaction of all of these. For much of the twentieth century, in almost all countries, this differentiation was taken for granted. That women invariably earned lower wages than men, had less bargaining power in the labour market and only ventured outside the domestic sphere because of economic necessity, tended to be taken as axiomatic. Few asked why. In the early twentieth century a small, very exceptional group of writers began to question these assumptions by looking in more detail at the past and contemporary experiences of working women. In the case of England, for example, there are the pioneering works of writers such as Clementina Black (1915), Alice Clarke (1919), Vera Brittain (1928) and Ivy Pinchbeck (1930), but many aspects of women’s work remained unstudied. Following the appearance of pioneering theoretical and empirical works in the 1960s and 1970s, more attention began to be paid to contemporary issues of women’s work. Some of its neglected history began to be resurrected as scholars started to look further back, in an attempt to see how women’s economic position had changed over time, especially in response to the industrialization process. A partial integration of gender issues into theories of development followed, though there is still a long way to go. Sadly, gender studies-too often, but understandably, identified with women’s studies-remains a largely female area of research. It is regrettable, though unsurprising, that this volume has only one male contributor, while another recent compilation, Recreating Japanese Women, edited by Gail Lee Bernstein, can also boast only one out of a total of thirteen. This has not, however, totally prevented a wider recognition of the importance of women in the
economy, which has led in turn to substantial reappraisal of how economies operated in the past, and how they may develop in the future.
