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I've read that The Tale of Genji, and similar Heian-era novels [such
as](http://www.csuchico.edu/~cheinz/syllabi/asst001/fall97/mat-wite.htm) The
Pillow Book, and The Gossamer Years were predominantly or exclusively
hiragana, which is also called "women's writing" (女手).

Was this because women weren't given the same level of education as men (as
claimed by the English Wikipedia's
[hiragana](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History) article), and that
Chinese characters (and possibly Chinese words) were seen as a masculine
pursuit (as claimed by its article on [The Tale of
Genji](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji#Literary_context))?
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kanji history hiragana
Were women unable to learn kanji during the Heian era?
Both those explanations seem slightly off to me. My own suspicion is that it
was because Chinese characters were associated with the language of
administration (the class of scholar-bureaucrats in China), and women were not
expected to serve in government positions. Since the educational purpose of
learning characters was to produce government officials, and women didn't
normally become government officials, then they automatically weren't expected
to learn characters.

So "not given the same level of education" seems to have been written from a
modern 'universal education' viewpoint. 'Masculine pursuit' makes it sound as
if characters were a pursuit in themselves, which probably wasn't the case for
most. Men learnt the characters for a purpose, not as a 'masculine pursuit'.
While the exclusion of women from administration was no doubt sexist, it has
different implications from saying that women weren't given the same level of
education as men. The problem is that people interpret the past in 21st
century terms, which isn't always a very accurate way of seeing things. As
someone said, "The past is a foreign country".
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Form what I remember, Kanji where used in official (read: "court") documents.
When you add this to the fact that the Japanese (and Chinese court, too) held
the opinion that women had no place at court, it could be intuited that most
women where not taught Kanji because they didn't need to know it.
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