Description:
Since feudal times, sexual discrimination in Japan has been extreme. A wife was entirely subordinate to her husband and sons; a man might have any number of mistresses but a woman who took a lover could be jailed. Even today in conservative areas such as southern Kyushu, women's inferiority to men is assumed to be innate. Until recently, few Japanese women had the courage to defy social conventions and insist on exploring their own individuality. Modern Girls, Shining Stars describes five women who had that courage: two writers, two actresses, and a painter. Each caused a storm of controversy and paid for her audacity in ostracism and pressures that sometimes led to poverty, mental illness, and suicide. At the beginning of the 20th century, the actress Matsuo Sumako introduced Ibsen's Nora and Oscar Wilde's Salome--contentious figures even in the West--to scandalized Japanese audiences. She later hanged herself. The painter Takamura Chieko died in an asylum. Later, social attitudes began to loosen, and the novelist Uno Chiyo and film actress Takamine Hideko lived long and productive lives, long enough for Phyllis Birnbaum to interview the successful grandes dames in person. Birnbaum, a contributor to the New Yorker, writes in an engaging style as she describes the passions and strengths of these unusual women; it is through them that we can gauge the enormity of the social forces they confronted. --John Stevenson
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