Constructing Opportunity

In the 1850s, after two and a half centuries of self-imposed isolation, Japan opened to the outside world, creating the possibility for profoundly new cultural interactions and experiences. Constructing Opportunity: American Women Educators in Early Meiji Japan tells the story of Margaret Clark Griffis and Dora E. Schoonmaker, two extraordinary women who transcended the traditional boundaries of nation, class, and gender by living and working in an alternative cultural setting outside the United States in the 1870s. Elizabeth K. Eder draws on numerous primary sources, including unpublished diaries and letters, to give both an intimate biographical account of these women's lives and an examination of the social and institutional frameworks of their professional lives in Japan. Thoroughly researched and immensely readable, Constructing Opportunity expands and challenges current views of the history of the U.S. teaching profession and the role of women as institution builders in Meiji Japan.