Education
A manual widely spread throughout Japan from the Edo era to Meiji period was Onna Daigaku, Great Learning for Women, which aimed to teach women to be good wives and wise mothers. Women were to maintain the strict family system as the basic unit of Japanese society by unconditionally obeying their husbands and their parents-in-law. Women were confined to their households and did not exist independently. They were subordinate to their father's or husband's family. A woman was divorced and sent back to her family not only for bad health or barrenness but disobedience, jealousy, and even talkativeness.
During the feudal era, women lucky enough to be educated were instructed by their fathers or brothers. Women of the higher class were discouraged from becoming educated more than women of the lower class. The men in the higher classes enforced social norms more strictly than men in lower classes. This made women of higher class more likely to be bound to the norms. Soon after the Meiji Revolution, in an effort to spread practical knowledge and practical arts needed to build society, children were required to attend school. In 1890, forty percent of eligible girls enrolled in school for the allotted four years. In 1910, over ninety-seven percent of eligible girls enrolled in school for the then-allotted six years. These schools were meant to teach feminine modesty.
Read more about this topic: Feminism In Japan
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)