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Having limited access to colleges and universities offering women the same educational opportunities available to men, elite women of the nineteenth century crossed national borders for advanced study and teaching opportunities. The career of Tsuda Umeko, founder of one of the first private institutions of higher education for women in Japan,1 leader in English-language instruction in Japan, author, and first president of the Tokyo YWCA, demonstrates the significance of a transnational network of advocates for women's education. Tsuda forged a network of personal and professional contacts in the United States and Great Britain that enabled her to envision, fund, and staff an elite academy for women in Japan. In this study I analyze Tsuda's development of a transnational network of supporters and argue that it was made possible by her skill in articulating shared values of educational reform.
Tsuda joined cause with the educators, philanthropists, and other social reformers in the late-nineteenth century who wrote and lectured on behalf of educational reform, established girls' schools and women's colleges, raised the funds to support them, and sat on the boards that governed them. Called "Victorian liberal feminists" by Joyce Senders Bsdersen, who has studied their work in Britain, they shared the belief that women and men had similar intellectual abilities and hence, the same rights to the benefits and pleasures of an education. They declared the necessity of women's economic independence and favored the ideal of companionate marriage. (Pedersen 1987a, 1987b) Unlike the "New Women," generally of a later generation, they did not assert the equality of men and women, nor did they work to secure the vote for women. They did not flaunt social conventions or disdain ladylike propriety. They were most often Protestant Christians, and their international ties were frequently based on Christian/mission organizations. Their reforms were wholly limited to the middle and upper-classes. While studies of these advocates for women's education have focused on Britain and the United States, Tsuda Umeko's achievements demonstrate that the values articulated by Victorian liberal feminists, the institutions they established, and the lives of the women whom they influenced, extended beyond EuroAmerican boundaries.
Born in Tokyo in 1864, Tsuda's life spanned dramatic shifts in Japanese attitudes towards the West, nation-building, the role of women, and education. With...