Alice Schalek: Finding the Neue Frau in 1920s Japan

Although best known for her reports from the front lines of World War I as the only female member of the Austro-Hungarian War Press Office, Alice Schalek (1874–1956) was by trade a travel writer and photojournalist. Working for the prominent Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Pressebeginning in 1903, Schalek forged a career covering areas from Samoa to Egypt, often commenting critically on women’s situations abroad in short articles. When she left Vienna for Japan in 1923, she expanded the international travel writing that gained her popularity before the war. Her book Japan, das Land des Nebeneinander (1925) pairs text and photographs to reveal Japan and its neighboring territoriesto be full of surprising contrasts, especially regarding the status of women. While criticizing cultural fixtures like the geisha, Schalek also sought to impress her European readers withhow Japanese women and girls were advancing the “new ideals” of self-sufficiency.Her visit coincided with a time of agitation in the Japanese women’s movement and she photographed and profiled many of its leaders.From picturing female journalists in Tokyo to Chinese women with bound feet in Manchuria, her photographs demonstrate tensions between modern life and tradition in East Asia. Yet ultimately her project reveals less about the people and places before her lens than about her own positionality.Schalek expresses not only her interpretation of shifting gender dynamics in Japan, but also her views on women from a global perspective, as well as her own struggles as an emancipated Austrian woman.