The Feminine Mystique

Insight Myanmar · Aug 17, 2026 · 2h 27m

Episode #590: Chie Ikeya’s work on colonial Burma began almost by accident. Trained as a historian and originally planning to study the Japanese occupation, she found herself in Yangon waiting for archival access that never came. In the meantime, she read Burmese newspapers and periodicals from the early twentieth century, where the notion of the “modern woman” appeared again and again as a source of fascination, fear, hope, and moral panic.

Her later work, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, follows that figure through education, print culture, nationalism, consumer…