大正期における近代的結婚観の受容層

『讀賣新聞』「身の上相談」欄の結婚問題相談者の分析

抄録

　Sociological studies of modern families in Japan focus on new middle-class women as a group who held modern views of marriage in the Taisho Period, but do not provide substantial analysis. This paper examines who accepted the concepts of modern marriage in this period by quantitatively analyzing the correlation of the attributes of contributors to the “personal-advice column” in the Yomiuri Shimbun.　Careful scrutiny of the aforementioned sociological studies points the twocrucial elements in the concept of modern marriage: free will in choosing his/herspouse and emotional ties between them. With these two elements as criteria, thecontributions which revealed the concepts of modern marriage were selected.　Then, by reading the selected contributions intensively with regards tothe four categories of gender, residential area, educational background, andoccupations of the contributor, they were quantitatively analyzed. On the basisof the analysis, this paper brought forward the following findings about theacceptance of the concepts of modern marriage: 1. no correlation with residentialareas and educational background, 2. tendency of men > women, 3. high ratio ofstudents, white collar workers, and independent entrepreneurs, 4. high ratio ofstudents among men and of white collars among women. The examination of thecontributions concerning free will and emotional ties indicate that people witha high level of education, and students revealed a strong tendency to emphasize‘emotional ties’ and ‘emotional ties as well as free will’.　With these, it could be maintained, concerning the acceptance of the concepts of modern marriage, firstly that the findings do not necessarily support the view that mainly focuses upon the new middle class women, and secondly, that the school culture played an important role.