Women's Asia: American women and the gendering of American Orientalism, 1870s-WWII

This dissertation examines the roles of American women in the development of America's gendered ideas about Asia in the period between the 1870s and WWII. It investigates the gender politics that operated in the discourses about Japan and China in three areas of cultural production and consumption: material culture, literature, and anthropology. I examine the ways in which domestic ideologies about race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States shaped American women's ideas about, and relationship to, Asia as the racial and cultural Other.I demonstrate that women's positions in the dominant American society, as shaped by white, middle-class ideologies, directly affected their relationship to Asia and argue that American women played pivotal roles in inscribing gendered meanings to Asia in the American mind. I further argue that their participation in Orientalist discourse offered many American women an effective avenue through which to gain authority and agency which were denied to them in other realms of sociopolitical life. The dissertation thus explores the intersection of gender and race in American ideologies about Asia.I analyze the ideological and social structures which shaped women's relationships to Asia as well as interrogate women's individual agency and efforts to intervene in those structures. The first chapter traces the history of the use of "Asian" arts and artifacts in America's domestic settings and examines the roles of American women in the commodification of Asia in the American market. The next three chapters provide case studies of three women writers (Amy Lowell, Pearl Buck, and Agnes Smedley) who adopted Asian styles, themes, or settings in their writing or who wrote specifically about Asia. These chapters analyze how each woman's discursive, cultural, and/or political positions shaped her relationship to, and representation of, Asia. The final chapter examines anthropologist Ruth Benedict's account of Japanese national character and situates her in the anthropological discourse on race, gender, and culture.