ENGLISH

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

Book information

Publisher
University of California Press
Year
2012
ISBN
9780520952386
DOI
10.1525/9780520952386
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
9 MB (9252670 bytes)
Series
Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes; 21
Pages
282\279
Library
degruyter.com
Time added
2023-08-21 17:06:43

Description

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.

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