This article explores female readers’ letters to a health advice column in the popular women’s magazine Shufu no tomo 主婦の友 (Housewife’s Companion) in the interwar period, with a focus on sexual health. While syphilis was regarded as the most dangerous sexually transmitted disease from a national standpoint, these letters suggest that gonorrhea, which was frequently transmitted by husbands to their wives, had a greater impact on women’s bodies, leading to gynecological diseases and infertility. Health consultant Yoshioka Yayoi 吉岡弥生 (1871–1959) played a role not only in assisting readers with their health concerns but also advising them on how to negotiate with their husbands’ infidelity. As a conservative female doctor, Yoshioka’s advice was instrumental in shaping her readers’ health awareness, but it was also ambiguous when it came to questioning men’s sexual morality. This article argues that although women during this period increasingly sought love in marriage and questioned the sexual double standard that neglected male chastity, the solutions offered in Shufu no tomo tended to reproduce, rather than challenge, existing social norms.
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The interwar era in Japan saw the beginnings of mass production and mass consumption. As industrialization and urbanization reached new heights, Japanese consumers enjoyed unprecedented access to new forms of media. Through higher levels of education, more and more men and women had the ability to purchase and read magazines. Mass women’s magazines sprang up in the late 1910s and quickly gained popularity among middle-class female readers, including professionals, housewives, and secondary school students during the 1920s (Nagamine Citation1997: 160, 198; Kimura Citation2010: 48–49). These magazines provided a platform for the imagining of new types of women. The “modern girls,” “housewives,” and “professional women” of the age were both shaped by and helped to define these new identities (Satō Citation2003: 8). The great variety of these mass publications meant that they reflected the consciousness and various lifestyles of the people who read them, and editorial decisions were strongly influenced by consumer choices (Kimura Citation2010: 23). At the same time, the magazines were also influential sites of power, where normative ideas about women could be either reproduced or challenged.
