Transnational Women's Activism : : The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859-1920 / / Rumi Yasutake.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Yasutake, Rumi,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2004]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2004
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Following landmark trade agreements between Japan and the United States in the 1850s, Tokyo began importing a unique American commodity: Western social activism. As Japan sought to secure its future as a commercial power and American women pursued avenues of political expression, Protestant church-women and, later, members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) traveled to the Asian coast to promote Christian teachings and women's social activism. Rumi Yasutake reveals in Transnational Women's Activism that the resulting American, Japanese, and first generation Japanese-American women's movements came to affect more than alcohol or even religion. While the WCTU employed the language of evangelism and Victorian family values, its members were tactfully expedient in accommodating their traditional causes to suffrage and other feminist goals, in addition to the various political currents flowing through Japan and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. Exploring such issues as gender struggles in the American Protestant church and bourgeois Japanese women's attitudes towards the "pleasure class" of geishas and prostitutes, Yasutake illuminates the motivations and experiences of American missionaries, U.S. WCTU workers, and their Japanese protégés. The diverse machinations of WCTU activism offer a compelling lesson in the complexities of cultural imperialism.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Tilling the Ground: American Protestant Foreign Missionary Women in Early Meiji Japan, 1859-1890 -- 2 Sprouting a Feminist Consciousness: Japanese Women’s WCTU Activism in Tokyo, 1886-1894 -- 3 Managing WCTU Activism: The Japanese Way in Late Meiji Japan, 1890-1913 -- 4 Beyond Japan to California: Issei Christian Activism in Northern California, 1870s-1920 -- Epilogue -- Appendix: List of Organizations -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author