Japanese Girls and Women

Alice Mabel Bacon spent a year teaching English at the Peeresses’ School in Tokyo, and she wrote this 1891 book because the half of Japan she knew best had gone almost unrecorded. No foreign man, she argued, could ever gain the intimacy the subject required. She traces a woman’s life from childhood through education, marriage and divorce, wife and mother, and old age, then sorts the picture by rank and setting: court ladies, women of the castle and yashiki, samurai women, peasants, city dwellers, and domestic servants. Much of the material came from long conversations with Japanese friends, Tsuda Umeko among them, who went through the manuscript with her. Project Gutenberg carries the 1902 revision, with an added chapter on household customs and a closing survey of the intervening decade.