A fascinating book about what it means and feels like to be a housewife in 2000s Japan . . . This is an imminently readable book that engages Japanese history, gender theory, and media studies to describe the options facing housewives in the contemporary moment. As omnipresent as housewives remain, this book shows us how varied and reflective they can ... Read morebe about their status, responsibilities, and degrees of satisfaction. - American Ethnologist An innovative attempt to trace the history and lived experience of Japanese professional housewives. From popular media portrayals to 'housewife debates' and government propaganda tying women to domesticity even in the 2000s, Goldstein-Gidoni demonstrates the strength of the forces that propagate the housewife paradigm even as she reveals women's myriad responses to this lifestyle in the post-Bubble era. - Glenda S. Roberts, Professor and Director of International Studies, Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University, Japan Goldstein-Gidoni gives voice to the lives and work of 'professional' housewives and to the vicissitudes of that especially salient category and status of Japanese women. Her work is a new and welcome addition to a long genealogy of the literature on Japanese housewives, and is the first, to my knowledge, to combine information about 'the professional housewife' with a reflexive interrogation of the process of ethnographic fieldwork. This book will greatly augment and update the body of scholarship on Japanese housewives and state formation from the perspective of domesticity. - Jennifer Robertson, Professor of Anthropology and the History of Art, University of Michigan, USA Show Less