Hello /r/askhistorians! I'm writing a novel based on a fictional version of Japan, and one of the things that has surprised me during my research was the level of freedom and rights women had in the Heian era (i.e. the right to inherit, education standards etc).
When we come to the Edo period, it seems that women have lost many of those rights, and are treated far more like second class citizens. I was wondering if anybody could shed some light on how abruptly this happened. Was it a sudden thing, or did rights gradually decline over the earlier periods too, like the Muromachi and Sengoku periods? What were the factors that led up to these loss of rights?
Thank you!
Hey, I'm not much of an expert in Japanese history, although I'm doing a paper in it at the moment. I was just going to point you towards Karl Friday's Japan Emerging, particularly pages 267-277.
I'll give a rudimentary breakdown:
Up to the Kamakura period (1185–1333), women had property, taxation & military duties like men, and they could write and receive documents because they held titles (esp. Jitō-shiki), which they could inherit, transmit to their heirs, or make the subject of disputes. Women were actually the main prose writers in Japanese culture during the time when the Fujiwara clan was in ascendancy (the Heian period essentially).
After the 14th century, female-related sources get largely eclipsed and women get pushed behind the scenes. They're still there, they're still playing significant roles, supporting the goals and strategies of their houses, but our sources about them decline. The decline is linked in my mind to the jitō. The warrior government granted a military and landholding title (jitō), which vested in its holder the privilege to extract profits from the land and the requirement to serve in the shogunate’s guard and pay land fees. The jitō was transferred to next generation in accordance with custom of divided inheritance. Crucially, this title was ungendered. Titles were left regardless of gender.
So there's some conflict over power (I'm not really on top of the nature of this particular conflict - if someone else wanted to jump in that would be super, or just have a quick google), and the shogunate condemned women for not fighting in person, and it targeted only women in this regard. In 1286, it issued an edict prohibiting future conveyance of jitō property to daughters of warriors living in Kyushu. This law doesn't get strictly enforced - warrior families for the most part ignored the edict. However, divided inheritance over generations was shrinking each landholder’s income and by the end of the 13th C families were attempting to consolidate their lands under a single male heir.
What then happens is you get war tales, beginning with the 14th C Taiheiki and followed by many others, glorifying masculine courage in killing and dying, often expressed in phrases such as “Let us embellish our name by being the first to charge into the enemy”. Women were not included in this rhetoric. Women did fight, but normally outside of the spectrum of rewards. Louis Frois, a Jesuit missionary, observed that women defended Amakusa Hondo Castle against Konishi Yukinaga’s attack so bravely that “they filled the moat with the bodies they slew."
Marriage becomes patrilocal in late medieval Japan, as opposed to earlier matrilocal practices and it gets a new symbolic meaning: "For major warlords the splendid procession that carried the woman’s body, trousseau, and entourage to the man’s house visually and symbolically declared the military might of the two houses." (Friday Pg. 272) Female aristocrats received less inheritance after the 14th C - the reduced economic prerogatives of women occurred as part of the broader dissolution of the courtiers’ landed wealth into the hands of the rising warriors.
Let me know if you want me to develop a bit more and talk about women outside the courtier/warlord/clan sphere, and apologies for being super reliant on one source, but Karl Friday is pretty well regarded. I also might be able to churn up some primary stuff if you need it, but you could also just check out Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, they've got some funky tales in there.