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Bill Mihalopoulos. Women activists across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans successfully extended their influence outside the domain of their homes by participating in orchestrated moral campaigns and philanthropic work advocating a healthy family life. Historians of nineteenth-century American women, such as Barbara Epstein and Ruth Bordin, see the WCTU either as a conservative organisation whose main function was to protect and maintain the existing socio- political order, or as a progressive social movement that led to thousands of women assuming leadership roles and adopting feminist principles.
She had been entrusted by Frances E. The call for prohibitions on all other forms of sexuality was ideological, argues Fujime, because they imposed on lower-class families the values necessary to reproduce the compliant bodies needed to work the machines of the capitalists or to fight the wars of aggression for the Japanese Empire. On the macro level, the importation by missionaries of Anglo-American ideals of domesticity based on the principles of monogamy, companionate marriage and domestic equality between men and women, is an example of cultural imperialism.
However, on the micro level, these new values provided Japanese churchwomen with the language and organisation to demand their own distinct political and economic agenda. While useful and informative, these studies share methodological limitations. The first is the propensity to explain the JWCTU as the product of the alignment of capitalist development and individual rights.
The key contention of this article is that the activities of the JWCTU involved a re- organisation of familial space, which opened the possibility for new lines of interaction between the family and political power. This process began when the JWCTU, in the name of preserving the family household ie , attacked the practice of men taking con- cubines.
