| This work examines the development of cultural representation of the shojo, or the adolescent girl, as seen in shojo zasshi, or Japanese girls' magazines. The period of study, from the 1930s to the 1960s, saw Japanese society transformed by modernization, war, and postwar reconstruction. The spread of education led to rising literacy rates for all groups, including girls. The growing pool of young female readers along coincided with the expansion of mass literature, and led to the development of the shojo zasshi genre and a loyal girl-reader community. The dissertation demonstrates how the shojo as a construct developed in tandem to the ryosai kenbo (good wife, wise mother) model in girls' magazines, and how both changed over the course of wartime and the postwar from their late-Meiji roots. Both offered modern models of feminine propriety, a blend of various institutional norms that defined women's relationship to society, from Victorian domesticity and medical delineations of hygiene, virginity, and reproduction to girls' education as a homosocial period of sheltered tutelage. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
