Housewives, modern girls, feminists: Women's magazines and modernity in Japan

This dissertation explores the moment in Japan when women emerged as consumers of popular periodicals. In recent years, researchers in Japanese studies have begun to cull materials from women's magazines to pursue various topics in literary and historical inquiry. Yet although women's periodicals have been one of the most important forums for modern Japanese fiction writers and public intellectuals, the magazines themselves have never been examined satisfactorily. By turning attention directly to the texture of the journals themselves, this dissertation sheds new light on the central place of women's magazines, and of print culture in general, in the literary and intellectual production of modern Japan. It argues that these publications helped to construct conceptions of gender in modern Japan, particularly the meanings of women as readers, consumers, and writers of literature and journalism. More broadly, I argue that the material functioning of a publication is relevant to understanding its effects on audiences.; Each of the chapters analyzes the specific choices made by the editors, contributors, and advertisers of three women's magazines: Women's public review (Fujin koron, 1916--present), a intellectual commercial magazine focusing on women's issues; Housewife's friend (Shufu no tomo, 1917--present), a popular magazine focusing on domestic arts and entertaining fiction; Women's arts (Nyonin geijutsu, 1928--1932), a literary and political magazine printing only women writers and run by a group of leftist women activists.; The dissertation shows that as magazine producers negotiated the factors of popular reception, capital, and technology that all forms of modern print culture face, their decisions about the visual, formal, and commercial characteristics of these magazines intervened in the concepts of gender that were created in modern Japan. The dissertation alters the terms of an ongoing debate in cultural, literary, and gender studies: whether or not consumption can be a form of resistance. It shows that it is necessary to take into account both the fact that the concepts of "mass" and popular consumption had come to be gendered feminine in this period and that the material limitations experienced by both the producers and readers of the publications affected the political effects of their reception.