Conclusion

Summary

This book shows the roles that the family and law played in identifying, reforming, and reinforcing gender relations in interwar Japan and colonial Taiwan. Since the late nineteenth century, men and women across the Japanese empire had different lived experiences within the contours of the family and marriage represented by bride prices, daughter adoption, and premarital relationships. In the late 1910s, however, those boundaries constituted forces that incorporated the seemingly private realm of relationships into the larger question of gender in the interwar era. Japanese and Taiwanese officials and nonofficials alike found gender relations to be changing in relation to the continuous tensions over metropolitan Japan’s positions in the world and the colony, to how men should situate themselves with women in and outside the male-centered Taiwanese households, and to the uplifting of Taiwanese women from such households. In other words, Geographies of Gender reveals the unsettled exchange of gendered norms, practices, and ideals about gender relations in relation to empire, domesticity, and personal autonomy in society and law.