Family, women, and gender in medieval societyfor having treated Japan and all women as one nationalistic whole and charged that her work served
to support the 1930s nationalist imperialist ideology.^38
Regardless of her errors and sins, the 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of this seminal independent
female historian- researcher amid the vast terrain of the established male historians. Structuring
her argument around the stage theory delineated by Engels, Takamure proposed an entirely
revolutionary way to periodize Japanese history and, while giving primacy to the location of
marriage as a definitive analytical framework, she confronted the hitherto unquestioned view
that Japanese society was always governed by a patrilineal principle.
Medieval historians writing in postwar times generally framed historical questions from a
Marxist perspective, with different degrees of theoretical commitment to Marxian vocabulary
and analytical methods. In studying women, questions that fit a Marxist analysis, such as work,
production, productivity, labor, and economic rights, tended to overshadow questions about
sexuality and human reproduction. But Takamure planted the new possibilities for considering
women’s lives on a totally different plane. The historiographical foundation for the study of
family, women, and gender in Japanese scholarship was laid out long before the rise of the second
feminist movement in academia in the 1970s.
Gaining legitimation in Japanese scholarship
Women’s history as a recognizable academic field began with an underlying goal of overcoming
what was considered to be centuries of victimization of women. Its increasing significance
prompted the Historical Science Council (Rekishi kagaku kyōgikai), a mainstream organization,
to name the promotion of women’s history as one of its larger goals in 1972. Every March issue
of the Council’s journal, Rekishi hyōron, would henceforth be dedicated to women’s history. The
1970s saw intense debates over the meaning of “women’s history” in relationship to various
types of oppression, including those caused by capitalism, patriarchy, and sexual differences, and
to the connection between women’s liberation and class struggle.^39
Often self- consciously harking back to the paradigm introduced by Takamure Itsue, histori-
ans intensified efforts in the 1980s by networking and publishing. This was also a time of what
Kuroda Hiroko describes as “social/women’s history” (shakaishiteki joseishi), a confluence of two
strains—feminism and a society- focused perspective influenced by the mutated Marxist methods,
represented most clearly in the works of Amino Yoshihiko.^40
Beginning in 1982, the Women’s History Research Collective (Joseishi sōgō kenkyūkai),
under the leadership of Wakita Haruko published the truly seminal five- volume Nihon joseishi
(“Japanese Women’s History”), followed by Bosei o tou: Rekishiteki hensen (“Questioning Mother-
hood: Historical Transformations,” 1985), and Nihon josei seikatsushi (“Japanese Women’s
Everyday Life History,” 1990).^41 The second collection examines how women and men, and
political and military authorities, as well as Buddhist teachings, regarded the oft- naturalized
notion of “motherhood.” The last collection was called a sister series to the 1982 volumes and
examined women’s lives from the perspective of their actual activities and material life, with less
emphasis on the structure within which women lived, moving away from discussions of prop-
erty and lineage. The medieval chapters feature examinations of women’s salvation; life stages
from birth, sexuality, childbirth, widowhood, and death in the court and city; wives and female
attendants in the shogunal court and other warrior houses; and more.^42
These works developed in association with a parallel trend that incorporated visual materials,
such as scrolls, and successfully generated imaginative questions dealing with the body, sexuality,
and subjectivity. Kuroda Hideo’s Sugata to shigusa no chūseishi: Ezu to emaki no fūkei kara (“Medi-
eval History of Figures and Gestures: Seen through Maps and Scrolls”) and Hotate Michihisa’s,