抄録
At first glance, it looks as if we know a lot about the lives of the women who, born in needy rural areas, worked in the silk spinning industry in prewar Japan. Many researchers have described their poor working and living conditions in the silk spinning mills, giving us a hint of what the reality of their lives might have been. Still, because they almost systematically investigated this topic in the macroeconomic context of the Japanese industrialization, they mainly criticized its negative consequences and argued that these workers, exploited and oppressed, led a horrendous life in these mills. Therefore, most people remember them as victims and commonly refer to the history of their lives as "the pitiful history of women workers" (jokou aishi).
But what do the women who worked in the silk spinning industry in prewar Japan have to tell us about their own version of their past? Did they consider themselves as victims and describe their experience in pitiful terms at all? Very few scholars have looked for some answers to these questions. In this respect, this study, which is based on the analysis of oral testimonies by ex-spinning mills' operatives, aims at reexamining this "pitiful history of women workers" through the lens of life history, so as to try and get, a fuller understanding of how these workers perceived their experience at the factory.
This study revealed that a positive representation of these women workers is indeed possible. If the informants often described their work as "hard", they did not go as far as presenting themselves as exploited victims of the factory system. On the contrary, many of them insisted on the numerous sources of joy and content, not to mention a certain "window on modernity" factory life offered their workers. In this perspective, one can think that, for most of these women, "the factory experience" may at least have been a lesser evil than the life they led at their parents' home.
