2010/01/01 by Kelli Y. Nakamura · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Aesthetics #Agency (philosophy) #Art #Asian American and Pacific Histories #Gender studies #Historiography #Identity (music) #Law #Oppression #Political science #Politics #Race, History, and American Society #Resistance (ecology) #Silence #Social science #Sociology #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies #Wife #Women's history
paper · doi:10.17953/amer.36.1.456118723874082k
openalex publication_date 2010/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
Much of the literature on the history of the Issei, or first-generation Japanese migrants, has focused on the experiences of men and their struggle against political, economic, and social discrimination both in Hawai'i as well as in the United States. In an attempt to understand the history of this pioneering group and restore agency and individuality to these predominantly male migrants, Japanese women have been relegated to occupying secondary or supportive roles as wives, mothers, and lower paid workers with little voice. Women, notes scholar Alice Yun Chai, were both victims of oppression and active agents of change.2 The absence of their voice and of their individual identity in the dominant historiography was not just a reflection of controlling male patriarchal institutions both in their communities and in academia, but was also a strategy of resistance. Women reinforced a certain image of a good wife and mother through a constructed silence of activities that defied proper female conventions...