The Huntington Library, Arts Museum and Botanical Gardens on Thursday, Nov. 19, is presenting a 90-minute virtual lecture that dives into the lives of Japanese women in the 19th-century city of Edo, now Tokyo.
The free event is hosted by Dr. Amy Stanley, professor of history at Northwestern University. Reservations are required.
In “Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Woman’s Life in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Stanley introduces the vibrant social and cultural life of early 19th-century Japan through the story of an irrepressible woman named Tsuneno, who defied convention to make a life for herself in Edo, decades before the arrival of Commodore Matthew C. Perry. Perry played a leading role in the opening of Japan to the West and the fall of the shogunate.
Stanley is a historian of early modern and modern Japan with special interests in women’s/gender history and global history. Her first book, “Selling Women: Prostitution, Households, and the Market in Early Modern Japan,” explored how an expanding market for sex transformed the Japanese economy and changed women’s lives in the years between 1600 and 1868.
She has also written about adultery in the Edo period, education for geisha in the first years of the Meiji era, and the figure of the migrant maidservant in global history.
Her most recent project, “Stranger in the Shogun’s City,” is a history of Edo in the early 19th-century, told through the life story of a runaway divorcee who married a masterless samurai and entered the service of a famous city magistrate. The book has been shortlisted for the Baillie-Gifford Prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for nonfiction.
The free event is held online via Zoom and begins at 4 p.m.
To register, visit www.huntington.org/events/
