Opportunities and Constraints for Late Meiji Women: The Cases of Hasegawa Kitako and Hasegawa Shigure

Mara Patessio is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Development of the Feminist Movement (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2011), and with Peter Kornicki and Gaye Rowley has edited The Female as Subject. Reading and Writing in Early Modern Japan (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010). She is working on a manuscript on women during the late Meiji period, addressing the questions of modernity, lesbianism, employment opportunities, education at home and abroad, love–marriage–divorce, the wars of the late Meiji years, Japanese women working in East Asia, and the New Woman. Opportunities and Constraints for Late Meiji Women: The Cases of Hasegawa Kitako and Hasegawa Shigure