Paper short abstract:

This talk will describe the lives of samurai women of the Mori house in Tosa domain in the Edo period. The abundant Mori family records allow us to reconstruct stories of their lives and also uncover many of the untruths in daimyo government records that were created to image a stable patriarchy.

Paper long abstract:

Telling the stories of samurai women of the Edo period is generally difficult because the paternalistic bias of surviving documentation has silenced most of their activities. Reading government documents makes it easy to imagine samurai women as ciphers who played small roles in the fortunes of their households. This, however, is a discursive artifact that does not reflect the reality of life. This paper reads surviving household diaries, letters, and lineages against the grain of documentary silence to provide a close study of the women of the Mori Kanzaemon lineage of Tosa domain, and pays particular attention to the social networks that these samurai women maintained and used in their lives. In the face of pervasive paternalism, these women played key roles in creating and maintaining social networks; many of them regularly provided leadership that protected the household and advanced its interests, even sustaining it at times when an adult male head was missing. Their networks connected them with their natal homes and their marital homes and included, if to a lesser degree, neighbors, doctors, and female entertainers.