Arakida reijo biography

Hello all!  Allow me to introduce myself—I’m the mostly-delinquent second editor of Noticing Bones, Jessa.  Due to life and its complications, I haven’t managed to get a post in. (Megan has been more than making up for my slack, I think we can all agree)  So I thought I’d make it up not only by posting—but by posting something that ended up WAY longer than I intended. (Disclaimer: I’m trying to adjust from academic writing to blog writing—sorry if this sounds a little too official/jargony.) Here goes?  

The Tokugawa Period (c. 1600-1868) was long considered to be a “dark ages” for female literacy, where literate women were the exception rather than the norm.  Recent scholars have begun to debunk that theory, however.  It turns out that literate wives and daughters, especially among the burgeoning merchant class, were valued because—no surprise here—they were useful in running households and businesses.  Some women, often daughters of scholars or priests, even became intellectuals in their own right.  The qualifier for these new discoveries is that, as is often t

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