Dissertation Information for Elyssa FaisonNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Producing female textile workers in imperial Japan Abstract: In the textile factories that fueled Japan's earliest and arguably most intense drive for industrialization, the vast majority of factory operatives were not only "industrial workers," but also Japanese women and girls, ranging in age from approximately thirteen to twenty-five years. Their participation in Japan's industrial project coincided precisely with the Meiji state's attempt to re-envision the parameters of Japanese womanhood, and the place of women within the imperial state. It is my contention that factory managers already concerned with disciplining Japan's first generation of industrial laborers to be productive workers attempted to resolve tensions between gender and class by designating female textile labor a "temporary" condition, and upholding the womanly values of motherhood and domesticity. This dissertation thus argues for the following propositions. First, female labor--especially in the textile industry--of the early twentieth century cannot be dismissed as merely "temporary" labor that contributed nothing to the labor movement, and whose disputes were, as one contemporary expert on textile labor put it, "devoid of any cultural meaning." Second, industry managers actively constructed female factory workers as "women," rather than as "workers," inculcating them with moral and civic values, as well as practical domestic training more consistent with the needs of housewives than industrial workers. Third, the "womanly ideal" promoted by textile companies produced a counter-discourse by female textile workers themselves, who sometimes rejected the claims of parental benevolence on the part of employers and their related demands for filial obedience. Instead, they constructed "woman" in a way that allowed for oppositional action and broke free of the familial bonds imposed by both company and state rhetoric. Finally, looking at "colonial labor" and the conditions of Korean and Okinawan female migrant workers to textile factories on Japan's main islands, I demonstrate how the feminized bodies of Japanese female textile factory workers stood in contrast to the highly ethnicized bodies of colonial women workers, thus mirroring in industrial labor relations the highly fluid boundaries of inclusion and exclusion playing out among Japan and its colonies. |
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