“Like the ladies of Europe”? Female emancipation and the “scale of civilisation” in women’s writing on Japan, 1840–1880

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay explores discussions by Victorian women writers of the lives and degree of social freedom of Japanese women. It reads Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) alongside two earlier groundbreaking works: Mary Margaret Busk’s Manners and Customs of the Japanese (1841), written before the opening of the country to British trade, and Anna D’Almeida’s A Lady’s Visit to Manilla and Japan (1863), the first published account of Nagasaki by a British woman. The article focuses upon a rhetorical double movement in these texts, in which they simultaneously affirm imperial hierarchies about Japan’s status in the “scale of civilisation” relative to the West, while (often more indirectly and satirically) suggesting more subversive contrasts with female emancipation at home. Connecting these texts to an earlier tradition of Middle Eastern “harem writing”, the article shows how they make specific interventions into Victorian political debates – including female education, divorce, property rights and prostitution – in ways that challenge assumptions of Western “freedom” and Eastern “slavery”.