Education of Women

After the "opening" of Japan to the West in the mid-19th century, there was a great fascination with "things Japanese" in Europe and America. Europeans and Americans collected Japanese cultural artifacts and avidly read accounts of Japanese society and culture produced by missionaries, journalists, and tourists. Among the French Post Impressionists, Vincent Van Gogh had an unquenchable interest in Japanese woodblock prints, and while the woodcuts of the older artists were beyond his means, he managed to collect more than 400 prints of the 19th-century ukiyoe masters.

However strong the interest had been during the latter part of the 19th century, it is difficult to reconcile those early Western accounts describing the oppressed status of Japanese women with the historical fact of women's accomplishments during the course of Japanese history. Unfortunately, many of our impressions today continue to be stereotypes of the Japanese woman and are based on the accounts rendered when western visitors to Japan seldom had access to Japanese homes and there were few translations of Japanese literature. The rather negative portrayals of the Japanese woman as being abjectly submissive, accounts of the practice of footbinding, (which was Chinese and not Japanese), and the descriptions of female infanticide are grossly exaggerated. Japanese women contributed profoundly to Japanese culture and they were often better educated than their Western counterparts.

As early as the Heian Period (c. 794 to 1185) the powerful Fugiwara family sought to control imperial succession and meticulously educated and groomed its daughters for marriage into the Imperial Household. Heian women generally enhanced their prestige through literary expression in their native language and most of the poetry and prose collected by the imperial court in succeeding periods was written by women for women. Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), the first great prose novel (10th century) holds pride of place in Japanese literature. After the Heian period it was women who maintained literary traditions of pure Japanese expression by their production of prose and poetry in the Japanese syllabary.

The relative worth of women was actually greater in Japanese history than it was in the history of the West. Throughout the religious history of Japan, the indigenous Japanese religion, Shinto, exerted a powerful influence on Japanese notions of gender and preserved the memory not only of a remote past when women ruled as shaman-queens but also of the role of creative and benevolent female kami (gods) in the foundation and organization of the Japanese state. It was only after the 16th century that Confucianism began to disenfranchise women and many 19th century accounts incorrectly portrayed Japanese women as victims of Confucian misogyny and subordination from the earliest days.

On the question of the women's sexuality, the image of a seductive female was not negative in Japanese terms. Women traditionally had full control over their bodies and were expected to be well versed in the art of lovemaking so that they could instruct their partners, yet they could refuse intimacy with any partner, inside and outside of marriage. Even after the popularization of Confucian notions of feminine fidelity and submissiveness in marriage, women maintained their sexual independence and control within the confines of the home. Their public behavior outside the home, of course, was controlled by public morality and public expectations, but it was calculated behavior that women could use to attract the attention of the rich, the powerful, and even potential husbands.

During the Edo Period, under the Tokugawa Shogunate, women of high-ranking samurai status continued the traditions of the Heian court and maintained a scholar-amateur position. The importance of this "amateur ideal" in a female companion cannot be overstated. Women from aristocratic and samurai elite families received cultural training similar to that of court ladies, and included calligraphy, music, painting and composing of waka (poetry), as these skills were requisite in any cultivated aristocratic woman, or any woman of the merchant class seeking a good marriage. The great majority of women who achieved celebrity status as poets came from the lower samurai classes or from the middle class. Many were also courtesans, a vocation that allowed women the opportunity to display their talents to the public and to achieve a reasonably independent lifestyle. There were different levels of accomplishment within this profession, low-class prostitutes at the bottom, and highly skilled entertainers or tayu at the highest levels who had received years of training in music, dance, the tea ceremony, calligraphy and the art of poetry composition. A Japanese man seeking a courtesan as a companion, be he nobleman, samurai, or merchant, valued these cultural traditions that required a woman of merit to be educated.

The beauty, position and artistry of these intellectual women is celebrated in many of the woodblock prints in the Sweet Briar Collection.