Historians have long debated whether the Meiji Restoration marked a revolution or merely a transition. For political elites, it brought dramatic changes; life for the vast majority of commoners is said to have continued much as it had before. As Patessio shows, for women of the middle class and above, however, the first twenty years after the Meiji Restoration brought an amazing array of new opportunities that enabled them to broaden their horizons in ways their elders never could. This finely textured survey of women's schools, organizations, and publications demonstrates that incorporating women into Japan's modern history indeed provides an essential supplement that has to affect our understanding of what happened.

Patessio's goal is to uncover the beginnings of the feminist movement in Japan. In this she is closer to the classic study on this topic, Sharon Sievers's Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 1983), than are the other books on women's rights and women's organizations in the Meiji period that have appeared in English in the last couple of years. Unlike Sievers, however, Patessio focuses almost exclusively on the period before the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution and does a much more thorough job of tracking down women, schools, and women's organizations outside the major metropolitan centers, demonstrating that women such as Fukuda Hideko and Kishida Toshiko are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to female activists. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and his feminist critics, she argues that women as well as men contributed to the construction of civil society through their words and deeds in the public sphere that opposed government priorities. By working from a much more expansive definition of politics, she also highlights a wider range of activities performed by women in public space.

In defining what is modern about women's activities in the early Meiji period (1868–1890), Patessio is careful to distinguish how these differed from life under the Tokugawa regime. Even though some earlier women had managed to achieve a high level of education despite the widespread assumption that women were too feeble-minded to engage in the same studies as men, their numbers pale in comparison with those who took advantages of new schools to advance their education in Meiji (although the prevailing criticism of women's minds remained largely the same). And of course Tokugawa regime women never had the opportunity to study abroad, study under foreign teachers in Japan, or correspond with women in other countries. New courses of study provided some women with new employment opportunities, often as teachers, but also as nurses and even doctors (in a few well-known cases).

In addition, the old school tie provided the basis for the creation of bonds based on common experience, for the construction of social networks, and for connections that women might use after they left school to further their own interests or their political agenda, all opportunities lacking under the previous regime. These bonds, networks, and connections in turn underlaid the women's organizations and associations that arose starting in the 1880s. These fujinkai made it possible for women to do things they had never done before, and do them in public; they had an impact on public opinion; and the women who participated in them learned new skills, first and foremost how to deport themselves outside the domestic sphere. Although many such groups relied on male participation to ensure that they continued and expanded, without male support, it would have been difficult for them to be taken seriously.

Another trend that to some extent paralleled the formation of new collaborative efforts was the appearance of women as public speakers. By the mid- to late 1870s, women, especially young women, began to speak in public on a variety of topics, a demonstration both of the knowledge they had acquired through education and the confidence they had gained through working with other women on common projects. Patessio has uncovered an impressive range of venues at which women spoke, showing that although Kishida Toshiko may have garnered the most fame as a speaker, she was by no means the only one. In some cases, the women who spoke were extremely young, suggesting that novelty may have been part of the attraction for the audience. To avoid breaking the law, many women spoke to audiences of women only or spoke on topics that directly concerned women, such as hygiene. Nevertheless, simply by speaking in public, women broke new ground.

Finally, a few women published their writings or signed public petitions requesting that women be allowed to attend political meetings and view sessions of the Diet. Patessio argues that their activities provided a precedent for “establishing a dialogue” with male-centered institutions in the twentieth century, one that would lead ultimately to the suffrage movement. Even before Hani Makoto became a well-known twentieth-century journalist, women in the provinces were writing articles for local newspapers where they advocated for independence through employment and urged women to fight for responsibilities and rights.

The women on whom Patessio focuses did not see themselves as radical revolutionaries. Most married, many had children, and not a few gained access to the public sphere through their husbands. But they refused to remain satisfied with the narrowly defined paradigm for women dominant at the time. For example, they accepted the notion that women should become good wives and wise mothers, but they argued that in order to achieve this ideal, they had to be educated (what Patessio calls domestic feminism), and they even had to attend Diet sessions. A patriotic woman, one who loved her country, should be expected to try to reach her full intellectual potential, otherwise she would not be able to serve her country to the best of her ability – what Patessio calls nationalistic feminism. In neither case does the argument come down to a woman's self-interest or a woman's personal needs; that would come later in the twentieth century.

Although Patessio has done a prodigious amount of research that incorporates almost every monograph or article on the subject written in English or Japanese, the way she presents her material leaves something to be desired. It is not always easy to figure out what she is talking about in some of her long, rambling paragraphs. The topics she has chosen – education, the foreign experience both in terms of missionaries and opportunities for Japanese young women to study abroad, women's organizations, and women's political participation – are all informed by her quest to uncover the road that led to feminism in Japan. She fully acknowledges the opposition and criticism women faced as obstacles for them to overcome, and she celebrates their victories. But precisely because feminism is the book's guiding principle, it left me wondering what might have gotten left out because it did not fit the feminist paradigm. It is surprising that a scholar who calls herself a feminist would refer to her subjects consistently and repeatedly as “girls,” when they were clearly young women. Although the book contains many vignettes of varying length describing the life course and activities performed by women from across Japan and adds immensely to our knowledge of women's activities of the first two decades of Meiji, I would hesitate to assign it to undergraduates. Its chief audience is likely to be scholars of the Meiji period willing to entertain the notion that incorporating women into the history of politics has to change the way we think about what constitutes political action.