Modern Girl As Militant Summary

In Japan, the images of women have undergone rather remarkable transitional changes. In her article "The Modern Girl as Militant", Miriam Silverberg focuses on the category of Modern Girl ("moga," or modan gaaru), a topic of debate in Japanese society during the 1920s and early 1930s. She argues that the Modern Girl was a media creation designed to portray women as promiscuous and apolitical. It was a way of displacing the militancy expressed in their political activity, her labor in new arenas and their adoption of new fashions.

Therefore, when examing the history of Japanese women during that era, the historian should not be trapped in viewing her as just an epitome of moral decadence, but rather should become conscious of her militant nature.
She then proceed to discuss some of the contemporaries such as Kitazawa Shuichi, Nii Itaru, Kishida, Kataoka Teppi etc., who tried to define the characteristics of the Modern Girl. Despite the fact the contemporaries writing about the Modern Girl struggle to find an absolute definition, the essence of who the Modern Girl remains clear to society. The Modern Girl stood for everything modern and non-Japanese. It stood for all the materialism and decadence in Japanese society at that period, and all "modern" ideals and lifestyle that threatened the traditional social order of Japan. It was a conservative construct, a symbol of what women should not be, and a reflection of the negative social phenomena in Japan 's modernisation
Depending on the perceiver, the Modern Girl presents to us many models. On one hand, it can come to portray all the paradoxical values that were pulling Japanese society part, an "emblem for threats to tradition." On the other hand, the Modern Girl could be seen as a negative cultural construct by the media to hide the real identity of the Modern Girl in Japan, which defined by Silverberg, was militant in character. In both cases, the description of the Modern Girl becomes a creation of either the media or the historian. As gender is a socially constructed and culturally transmitted organiser of our inner and outer worlds, this definition of the Modern Girl will continue to be an ongoing, dynamic and even problematic