Managing Women - by Elyssa Faison (Hardcover)

About the Book

""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"

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"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

Review Quotes

"An important contribution in the field of labour history."--Angela Chin "Canadian Journal Of History" (6/30/2010 12:00:00 AM)

"Faison has given us much food for thought on how we can continue to view her as important within Japanese social, economic, and gender history."--Helen Macnaughtan "Journal Of Japanese Studies" (1/1/2009 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

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