1868

Amy March and Meg March (in their glorious blue and grey silk) do not understand their sister and her rejection of conventional feminine beauty.

I’m a historian of Japan, so whenever anyone mentions 1868, I think of the Meiji Restoration. It’s one of the most important things you learn in the Japanese history survey: in January 1868, Emperor Meiji announced the abolition of the Tokugawa shogunate and the restoration of direct imperial rule. In the months and years to follow, the new central government embarked on a series of modernizing reforms, which were more consequential than the moment of restoration itself. But the year is still a marker, and in 2018, there was a flurry of scholarly activity – podcasts, conferences, special volumes, etc. – to commemorate the 150th anniversary. 

I commemorated and conferenced along with everyone else, even though (with the exception of one article) I tend to avoid the Meiji period entirely, and I can never even keep the events of the Restoration straight in my head.* In the middle of that year, 2018, which seemed endless for so many reasons, I tweeted: “I’m far more excited about the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Little Women than I am about the anniversary of the Meiji Restoration – maybe I’m in the wrong field.”

It was a joke, but I also meant it.

I read Little Women over and over again when I was a child. I picked it up again many years later, as a graduate student living in Osaka, during a year and a half that I spent compulsively reading novels. I checked out the book from the library at Kansai University, telling myself that the detour into American children’s literature was defensible. After all, it was women’s history, contemporaneous with the period I studied. 

When I reread Little Women in Japan, the parts of the book that had always bothered me seemed liberating, even radical. I had never been able to relate to Jo March, even though I felt like I was supposed to, because she so emphatically rejected conventional femininity. Her sisters Meg and Amy, who did not go on to write their own books, liked white gloves, lace-trimmed dresses, and delicate shoes with heels. Meg curled her hair. Amy slept with a clothespin on her nose to try to make it pointier. I have always been an Amy. I can’t manage a curling iron, but if I thought a clothespin would work I would try it. 

As a twenty-three-year-old woman in Japan, I was tired of everyone telling me that I was “cute,” or that I would be if I used more make-up or lost weight. “Cute” seemed like a mandate, not a compliment. For the first time, I envied Jo’s lack of vanity and understood her rejection of feminine beauty.

But as I sat through the conferences and commemorations of Meiji at 150, it was that mundane world of beauty and domesticity – the sewing kits and gilt-edged mirrors – that seemed unaccountably missing. The world of Little Women was the world of the Restoration: Louisa May Alcott began writing in May 1868, just as Katsu Kaishu surrendered the shogun’s capital to imperial forces. And yet, those two narratives could not seem more distant. In one, mud, guns, tense negotiations, the fate of a city and a nation in the balance; in the other, pen and ink, a wooden desk, a print run of 2,000 copies, and a woman’s livelihood at stake.   

In “domestic” histories of the Restoration, which focus on women, you can see the places where the two narratives might converge.** The Japanese loyalist activist Matsuo Taseko was, in some ways, much like Louisa May Alcott, though she was more than twenty-five years older. She, too, was a writer, and she, too, was passionately invested in the civil war that consumed her country in the middle of the nineteenth century. Both women reached toward traditionally feminine literary forms, love poetry and the domestic novel, but both were also ambivalent, at best, about femininity and domesticity. Louisa May Alcott, who was famous for her tender evocation of a household full of women, always spoke wistfully about liking boy things better than girl things. Her heroine, Jo, wants to be a boy so that she can fight in the Civil War. Matsuo Taseko, matriarch of a multi-generational household, wrote of her frustration with inhabiting the “weak body of a useless woman.” She, too, expressed her desire to be a man so that she could fight for a cause. 

These women were also connected by the global market in textiles, in ways Louisa might not have recognized, but Taseko certainly did. When Taseko was not writing poetry, she was raising silkworms. The intense, but unstable, foreign demand for silk cocoons and thread caused wild swings in price and fueled her xenophobia. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Louisa and her family contributed to the demand that destabilized Taseko’s community. Louisa’s characters used yards and yards of silk in their bell-like, full-skirted dresses. In Little Women, there is pink silk, violet silk, black silk (unsuitable), glimmering grey silk (coveted – “if only I had a silk,” Meg sighs), and a much-wished-for pair of silk buttoned boots. There is also Asian silk being carried on Laurie’s uncle’s ships, which are involved in the “India trade.” But there is not much cotton, possibly because abolitionist families like the Alcotts boycotted the products of American slave plantations.

To both women, then, the domestic realm was politically engaged, even if it was stifling to the individual, even if it was a world that they needed desperately to escape. Both discovered how to rework the material of domestic life into artistic accomplishment. They returned again and again to an ideal of feminine beauty for inspiration, even though they struggled to free themselves from the incessant, voracious demand for female labor that made that beauty possible. This fundamental conflict echoed in their writing about revolution, about politics, about change. But with few exceptions, it has fallen out of ours.

Sitting in the conferences and listening to the podcasts in 2018, I heard about historical actors who were predominantly men. This did not bother me as much as hearing about the intellectual debates over the Restoration, which happened a century later, and which invariably involved men and their ideas of what mattered. I heard a voice in my head that I often hear when I try to engage with high intellectual history, and which might as well belong to Amy March, or to her sister Meg: What does this have to do with nursing a baby? Or hanging out laundry, making pickles, bringing in water, worrying over a fever, sweeping a floor, scrubbing a child’s face? What does it have to do with falling in love, or wanting a violet silk dress, or getting angry at your sister? What does this have to do with anything that seems real to me?

I think we can do a better job of finding answers. 

*I have one document on my computer entitled “explaining the bakumatsu currency crisis to myself” and another called “Restoration timeline,” and I consult both far too often.

** Here I’m citing Anne Walthall’s amazing The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration — historians of East Asia already know this, but everyone else should go click the link!

Note: I edited this on 2/10/20 to add the explicit citation to Walthall (in addition to the link) and to be a little clearer in my second-to-last paragraph.