Family, women, and gender in medieval societythat the patriarch’s wife was responsible for administering rituals, ceremonies, food, and so on;
cutting the fish was gendered male while cooking it in a pot was gendered female; childcare by
men typically began after the child had hair on the head while women took care of the nursing-
age infants. In this way, the chapters seek to describe both the male and female work patterns in
comparable topics, and reveals a multi- dimensional view of medieval society. It also highlights
measures, such as adoption of a male child and granting of the headship to the widow, which
were intended to fulfill the goal of ie, that is, its own survival and continuity. The chapters suc-
cessfully offer insightful reflections of the sources carefully excavated in previous scholarship.
Nevertheless, they also uphold the established linguistic authority of ie, as seen in section titles:
“The formation (seiritsu) of ‘ie’ and gender,” and “The establishment (kakuritsu) of ‘ie’ and gender.”
The titles suggest the deeply embedded analytical framework of “ie,” which threatens to confine
the meaning of gendered relationships within the abstract space associated with its predetermined
power.^62
Conclusion
I have touched on only a fraction of the works that deserve to be mentioned. The field of women’s
and gender studies has grown through cross- and interdisciplinary efforts that have employed a
wide array of sources in search of new questions and answers. Areas that have been classified as
religion, literature, art history, and performance arts, for example, have provided portals to
dimensions of society, human connections, and consciousness that often were closed to the
scrutiny of scholars confined to the world of historical documents. Since the 1980s, in Japan,
highly organized collaborative efforts, which were in turn founded on decades of solid research,
bore rich fruit and continue to energize ever more rigorous collective inquiries into new and old
questions. Fueling these scholarly pursuits, in part, is the realistic and lived sense of contemporary
inequity that is manifested in, for example, the concept of “ie” as exemplified in current law.
English- language scholars have benefitted from the deep pool of Japanese scholarship, while
carving out their particular methods of investigation and modes of inquiry that often sought to
counter the West- centric constructions of sex and gender that pervaded the academia.
Over the decades, medieval historical studies in general have moved away from the Marxian
teleological interpretive framework, to adopt a method that examines historical terms with more
rigor and fewer built- in assumptions. This trend is particularly evident in the study of family,
women, and gender, fields prone to interpretation through the lens of normalized constructed
categories of modern society. Reinterpretation of the term nyoki (female riders), described above,
is a pertinent example that has corrected the initial reading by shedding expectations about
women’s roles.^63 A greater sensitivity to the changing meanings of terms across contexts has
eliminated problems of hasty misinterpretation of terms such as “sokushi,” which in early modern
times meant “son,” but included daughters in early medieval writings. English- language histori-
ans have managed the issue of the absence of a gender in Japanese pronouns and the question of
how to translate terms such as “person (mono or hito),” without excluding women as referents.
As the field increases in sophistication in interpreting and scrutinizing sources, there is a press-
ing need for translated documentary sources, perhaps an English- language version of the seminal
anthology, Shiryō ni miru Nihon josei no ayumi (“Steps Taken by the Japanese Women Seen through
Historical Sources”). In addition, the study of men as gendered subjects and participants in histor-
ical transformations is sorely lacking in both Japanese- and English- language scholarship. From
diaries and tales to laws and letters, medieval sources, in fact, offer a multitude of opportunities
to historicize men as gendered figures.^64 Without understanding men’s action and concerns from
a gendered perspective, we cannot fully comprehend Japan’s medieval society.