| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Constructing Opportunity: American Women Educators in Early Meiji Japan. By Elizabeth K. Eder. (Lanham: Lexington, 2003. xiv, 273 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-7391-0640-6.)
Elizabeth K. Eder uses the life stories of two American women educators who taught in Japan in the 1870s to explore how the opportunity to work abroad allowed them to construct opportunities for themselves. Margaret Clark Griffis (1838–1913) taught at a government school for girls. Dora E. Schoonmaker (1851–1934), who went to Japan as a missionary of the Women's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, set up a girls' boarding school with permanent, Western-style buildings. Eder sets these two lives in the context of a broad array of scholarly work on women in nineteenth-century America.	1
Eder's most valuable contribution to our understanding of American women who sojourned in Japan is her attention to their careers before and after their time abroad. Without her archival research in Illinois, we would not have a sense of the successful teaching career that Schoonmaker was enjoying when she committed herself to missionary service. For Schoonmaker, who returned to the United States to marry, her experience in Japan was reflected in her prominence as an activist and fund raiser on behalf of missionaries abroad. Griffis, on the other hand, settled into a career at a girls' school that would undoubtedly have been open to her even if she had never been to Japan.	. . .

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