Pg. 99: Amy Stanley's "Selling Women"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan by Amy Stanley.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book traces the social history of early modern Japan’s sex trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of “selling women” transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes’ economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large.

Learn more about Selling Women at the University of California Press website.

Amy Stanley is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University.

The Page 99 Test: Selling Women.

--Marshal Zeringue