Knowledge, Power, and Women's Reproductive Health in Japan, 1690-1945

This book analyzes how women's bodies became a subject and object of modern bio-powerby examining the history of women's reproductive health in Japan between the seventeenthcentury and the mid-twentieth century. Yuki Terazawa combines Foucauldian theory andfeminist ideas with in-depth historical research. She argues that central to the rise of bio-powerand the colonization of people by this power was modern scientific taxonomies that classifypeople into categories of gender, race, nationality, class, age, disability, and disease. Whilediscussions of the roles played by the modern state are of critical importance to this project,significant attention is also paid to the increasing influences of male obstetricians and the partsthat trained midwives and public health nurses played in the dissemination of modern powerafter the 1868 Meiji Restoration.