Invisibility and Visibility of Samurai Women’s Lives in Tokugawa Japan

Invisibility and Visibility of Samurai Women’s Lives in Tokugawa Japan

Luke Roberts - Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara

Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Room 102, Rosenkranz Hall See map
115 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511

The formal patriarchal order of samurai life in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868) discursively erased women of samurai status from much public documentation and encouraged a misogynistic culture. Yet families still needed to keep some records by and about their women. This talk will discuss samurai women’s lives based on the family records of one samurai household and reveals a surprising degree of generalized respect for women’s authority in the family.


Luke Roberts is professor of history at UC Santa Barbara, where he focuses in early modern political economy and social history. He is author of Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain (1998) and Performing the Great Peace (2012) and is currently writing a social history centered around the life of a samurai who lived in the late eighteenth century.

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