Fille de paysan, épouse de samouraï. Les lettres de Michi Yoshino

From peasant daughter to samurai wife. The letters of Yoshino Michi. A. Walthall. ; ; The household constituted the basic socioeconomic and religious unit in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868). Although it was nominally patriarchal, I argue that the emotional bonds between parent and daughter appearing in private documents, parti cularly letters and diaries, complicate what we mean by this term. These documents allow us to situate some women at the intersection of entrepreneurial and aristocratic, rural and urban cultures. They show how women could be used as vehicles for sociability in families of very different statuses through employment practices, marriages, and networks of social relations that lied the peasants to the military aristocracy in a vertical hierarchy. They also expose the dynamism of the ongoing relationships between daughters and their parents, relationships too often ignored in discussions of the family economy. In these documents women showed themselves to be resourceful and clever in preserving their positions, sometimes to the benefit of their marital households, sometimes to the benefit of themselves.