From the Back Cover
Women in Asia is one of four volumes in the Restoring Women to History series. The original teaching packets on which the series is based, published in 1988 by the Organization of American Historians, played a key role in the revision of the history curriculum and the incorporation of women into the study of world history. The explosion of scholarship on women over the past decade has prompted a major re-examination and expansion of the original materials into four separate volumes. Dealing with women in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East, these volumes consider what questions are in currency at this stage in the field of women's history, what type of evidence is available, and what gaps exist within the scholarship. Each volume features an introduction by an expert in the history of the area. The general introduction by Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel sets out the general themes and issues that emerge from the series and addresses points of comparison and difference between the regions. The aim of Restoring Women to History is to demonstrate the value of comparative history while generating new questions and shedding new light on current scholarship in the non-Western world.
In this volume, Barbara N. Ramusack writes on South and Southeast Asia, surveying both the prescriptive roles and the lived experiences of women, as well as the construction of gender from early states to the 1990s. Although both regions are home to Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim religious traditions and had extended trade relations, they reveal striking differences in the status and roles of women and the processes of cultural adaptation. Sharon Sievers presents an overview of women's participation in the histories of China, Japan, and Korea from prehistory to the modern period that provides a framework for incorporating women into world history classrooms. It offers analyses on major issues derived from recent research and discusses such stereotypical cultural practices as footbinding (long seen as "exotic" in the West) in the context of women's lives.
About the Author
Barbara N. Ramusack is Professor of History and Department Head at the University of
Cincinnati, where she is a founding member of the Center for Women's
Studies. She has published The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire
and several articles on British feminists and Indian women.
Sharon Sievers is professor of modern Japanese history and department
chair at California State University, Long Beach, where she has also
served as director of the Women's Studies Program. Sievers is best known
for her prize-winning book on turn-of-the century women in Japan, entitled
Flowers in Salt: The Beginning of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan.
