Talk: Erin Trumble, “Rebirth after Retirement: How Elderly Women Reinvented Femininity in Edo Japan”
May 7 @ 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Speaker: Graduate Student Erin Trumble
Title: “Rebirth after Retirement: How Elderly Women Reinvented Femininity in Edo Japan”
Description: The talk will focus on retirement as a life stage and examine how it represented a time when women had both more freedom after being liberated from daily tasks and more authority due to their age. I will examine prescriptive literature and its silences around responsibilities for retired women, as well as use examples from the lives of Nakako, Ieko, Shigako, and Aijo to show how women engaged with travel, literature, and religion in new ways as a result of this freedom and authority.