Status, Gender, and the New Nation-State in Meiji Japan

Very few women participated directly in the events leading up to the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Still, the Restoration and the subsequent construction of a modern nation-state impacted gender relations in significant ways. My talk focuses on two sites of change: first, I examine a series of laws from the early 1870s that abolished hereditary social status (mibun) and created the modern household registration system that bound individuals directly to the state. Second, I address debates among government officials and private individuals about political rights for female household heads in the late 1870s and early 1880s. An examination of early Meiji legal debates and reforms underscores the fluidity of political and social classification in the 1870s and 1880s. The logic of the early modern status system (from the preceding Tokugawa period)--wherein status within the household often superseded gender--impacted debates about who should participate in local elections. It was logical in the eyes of some individuals that female household heads, some ten percent of the population, should vote. However, by the time the Meiji Constitution was promulgated in 1889, women were denied political rights as a group and women’s citizenship had come to be understood as indirect as women were based in households. Women became a discrete category in the eyes of the state as never before. Meanwhile the vote had become identified with masculinity and was open to a small number of wealthy men. Overall, then, I identify a move from status to gender as the primary axis of political and social classification across the first few decades of modern Japan and discuss the implications for constructions of citizenship.