Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan / Edition 1

by Amy Stanley, Matthew H. Sommer

Overview

This book traces the social history of early modern Japan’s sex trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of “selling women” transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes’ economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520270909
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/19/2012
Series:	Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes , #21
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Amy Stanley is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword, Matthew H. Sommer
Acknowledgments
A Note on Currency and Prices

Introduction
Part One: Regulation and the Logic of the Household
1. Adulterous Prostitutes, Pawned Wives, and Purchased Women: Female Bodies as Currency
2. Creating “Prostitutes”: Benevolence, Profit, and the Construction of a Gendered Order
3. Negotiating the Gendered Order: Prostitutes as Daughters, Wives, and Mothers

Part Two: Expansion and the Logic of the Market
4. From Household to Market: Child Sellers, “Widows,” and Other Shameless People
5. Glittering Hair Ornaments and Barren Fields: Prostitution and the Crisis of the Countryside
6. Tora and the “Rules of the Pleasure Quarter”

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Amy Stanley's book provides a detailed and informed information to recent scholarship on the topic of prostitution."

The Journal of Japanese Studies

Fascinating and often tragic. . . . Stanley’s writing style is both exact and fresh. . . . This book satisfies more than the academic.

Japan Times - Kris Kosaka

"An exceptionally sophisticated and extensive study . . . A careful and nuanced retelling . . . lively, insightful, and unique."

Monumenta Nipponica - David Eason

An important book. . . . Illuminates governance and economic change in early modern Japan. . . . Highly recommended.

Choice - S. A. Hastings

Vivid and engaging. . . . A compelling and meticulously researched piece on the evolving place of prostitutes in Early Modern Japanese culture.

Criminal Law & Crim Justice Bks / Criminal Justice Abstracts - Sam Bieler

"An important book. . . . Illuminates governance and economic change in early modern Japan. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice

"Vivid and engaging. . . . A compelling and meticulously researched piece on the evolving place of prostitutes in Early Modern Japanese culture."--Criminal Law & Crim Justice Bks / Criminal Justice Abstracts

"Fascinating and often tragic. . . . Stanley's writing style is both exact and fresh. . . . This book satisfies more than the academic."--Japan Times

From the Publisher