18
Family, women, and gender in
medieval society
Hitomi Tonomura
This chapter examines family, women, and gender, three topics that developed along divergent, but
increasingly overlapping, paths of historiographical inquiry. In Japanese- language scholarship,
“family history” (kazokushi) emerged in the late nineteenth century and initially tended to ignore the
significance of women’s roles within the family or within larger historiographical questions.^1
“Women’s history” (joseishi) attained a commanding stature in academia in the 1980s, and cross-
pollinated with “family history” to generate critical questions. A decade later, “gender history”
(jendāshi) further expanded the scope of inquiry despite the conceptual challenge posed by the foreign
term, “gender” (jendā), for which there is no Japanese- language equivalent.^2 The English- language
scholarship on medieval women, family, and gender is far from copious, but hardly isolated. It arose
in conversation with women’s and gender studies that swept through North Amer ican and European
academia, and has promoted interdisciplinary and cross- cultural methods since the 1980s.^3
The multi- year intensive collaboration of Japanese and North Amer ican scholars in the 1980s
and 1990s has been strategically significant. Organized by Wakita Haruko, “The Gender and
Culture Project,” which included Japanese and foreign participants, convened numerous work-
shops and published several essay collections, including Jendā no Nihonshi (“Gendered History of
Japan,” 1994) and Women and Class in Japanese History (1999).^4 The latter was the first English-
language publication in Japanese women’s history to devote the majority of its space to pre-
modern topics.^5
Similar major collaboration was taking place in Buddhist studies. Beginning in 1988, Ōsumi
Kazuo and Nishiguchi Junko, editors of the seminal four- volume essay collection, Shirīzu josei to
bukkyō (“Series, Women and Buddhism”), collaborated with Barbara Ruch, the organizer of the
“International Workshop on Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan.” In 2002, Ruch com-
pleted Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan, a monumental collection featur-
ing a balanced mix of Japanese and Western scholars.^6
In one particularly innovative project, Japanese scholars sought to liberate Japanese women’s
history from purely parochial concerns and place it in an explicitly comparative framework.
They translated into Japanese Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot’s L’histoire des femmes en Occi-
dent (“History of Women in the West” (originally published in French in 1990–1991). The
translation was published in stages between 1994 and 2000 as Onna no rekishi (“History of
Women”).^7