A Critique of The Greater Learning for Women

For two hundred years Japanese girls were raised on The Greater Learning for Women: obey your parents-in-law above your own parents, take your husband as your Heaven, and know that you may be sent away for childlessness, jealousy, talking too much or falling ill. In 1899 Fukuzawa Yukichi, founder of Keio and the most influential liberal of Meiji Japan, took the primer apart article by article in his newspaper.

His Critique quotes each of the nineteen articles and answers them with arithmetic, medicine, the new Civil Code and the demand that every rule laid on wives be laid on husbands too. His New Greater Learning for Women then sets out what a girl should really learn: rough games and physical training, physics, economics and law ("the dagger in the bosom of the civilized woman"), the right to a separate household, a share of family property at marriage, the right to resist a husband's concubines, and the right of widows to remarry.

Both works are translated complete and unabridged from the Japanese, with a translator's note, endnotes and source information.