ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the question: How did modern1 pieceworkers and other urban lower-class women balance paid employment with domestic responsibilities during the early stages of Japanese industrialization? Framing my question in this way establishes a dichotomy between work and domestic life for the analytic purposes of this essay. Although it can be argued that emphasizing polarization between women’s work and home lives has a social basis in the increasingly visible separation of workplace and home which emerged during the industrialization of the modern period, developing an approach to women’s history grounded in this opposition is not my primary aim. Rather, in this essay I wish to probe the lives of working women of the urban lower classes-female pieceworkers, entrepreneurs, family workers and employees, especially the former, in a more unified fashion, in an attempt to bridge our current rather dichotomized understandings of modern Japanese women. While earlier western works have focused on the domestic life and concomitant public activities of modern Japanese middle-class women, including feminists,2 studies of urban lowerclass women have largely treated their recruitment to, and participation in, the public world of the economy as workers and labour activists.3 Yet it is surely important to begin to recover the domestic experiences of lower-class working women and to consider the lives of married women workers in cities, which differed in some respects from those of younger single textile operatives.4 Probing both the domestic and work activities of urban lower-class women and the relationship between the two enriches our visions of little-known aspects of their lives and the continuous reconstructions of womanhood and gender which took place in modern Japan.
