ABSTRACT
This chapter examines family, women, and gender that developed along divergent, but increasingly overlapping, paths of historiographical inquiry. In the early 1900s, decades before "women's studies" emerged, scholars in Japan were already building what would become a rock-solid foundation for the historical study of women. "Japan's women's history began with the search for the origin of, that is, patrilineality and patriarchy, which has brought so much suffering to modern women", commented Nomura Ikuyo. Women's history as a recognizable academic field began with an underlying goal of overcoming what was considered to be centuries of victimization of women. The 1980s and 1990s were also a time in which English-language works on women and gender, situated at the intersection of literature and religion, flourished, represented by Bernard Faure, Rajyashree Pandey, Lori Meeks, Keller Kimbrough and others. Female entertainers, their sexuality and spirituality also received welcome attention in Western-language works of authors such as Jacqueline Pigeot, Janet Goodwin, Michel Marra, and Terry Kawashima.
