Selling Women Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan.pdf

Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan By Amu Stanley
2012 | 258 Pages | ISBN: 0520270908 | PDF | 9 MB



This book traces the social history of early modern Japan's sex trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of "selling women" transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes' economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large.