Fukuzawa Yukichi, female education and the reception of Western culture: Translation and commentary of “Reply to a certain gentleman on the subject of female education” and “A theory of female obesity” (1879)

Abstract

Educator and thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi was arguably the most influential intellectual of the entire Meiji era, yet it is only in recent decades that his ideas on female education and women’s rights have begun to receive sustained attention, both inside and outside Japan. In this article, we present a Spanish translation of two short essays from 1879: “Reply to a certain gentleman on the subject of female education”, in which he argued that young women should prioritize an education suited to the customs and needs of Japanese culture, and “A theory of female obesity”, in which he resorted to scientific arguments in order to express his concern about possible changes in women’s dietary habits. In both texts, Fukuzawa appears to place great emphasis on women’s roles as wives and mothers; from this premise he derives his views on what their education should be —an approach that seems to sit uneasily with his better-known egalitarianism and his defense of women’s rights. In our commentary on the translations, we analyze their historical and ideological context and contrast them with other works by the author, in order to better understand his thought during the enlightened decade of the 1870s, before more fully established feminist voices emerged in the sociopolitical sphere. We will see how the apparent inconsistency in his views on women stems from the difficulty of maintaining a balance between the idealism he often championed and the realism he felt compelled to adopt in response to the changing sociocultural context of the time.