The "New Woman" and the Topography of Modernity in Colonial Korea

Author(s): Jiyoung Suh

Source: Korean Studies , 2013, Vol. 37 (2013), pp. 11-43
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press

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The "New Woman" and the Topography of
Modernity in Colonial Korea

Jiyoung Suh

This article intends to illustrate gender roles as related to modernity in colonial Korea
by focusing on the birth of the "New Woman" and its historical location. The New
Woman appeared as a new female icon all over the world in the early twentieth cen
tury and implanted a new female identity produced by the introduction of modern,
Western ideas in Korea. However, the embodiment of the New Woman in Korea
shows historical variation from the prototype of a more global New Woman. Further
more, in colonial Korea New Women did not present a singular, fixed collective iden
tity but included diverse layers of female subjectivities. Specifically, with the flow
of time, the representation of New Women shows the process of refraction and
implosion of "New Woman" images, each having different connotations. This article
traces the discursive transformation of the "New Woman" in mass media (mainly
newspapers and magazines) from the 1900s to the 1940s, and its significant asso
ciations with the relationship of gender and modernity in colonial Korea. It also
elucidates what it meant to be a New Woman historically in Korea.

The Eye of the "Other" and the Chosôn Woman

The American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) was secretary to

the first Korean delegation to the United States when diplomatic ties were
established in August of 1883. Lowell left one travel essay on Korea,

Korean Studies, Volume 37. © 2014 by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.

11

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 Chosôn, The Land of the Morning Calm: A Sketch of Korea (1885)，and in
it described the status of a typical Korean woman.

More properly, we may speak of it [her status] as her want of position; for the
principle is, in Korea, hardly more than a negation, and, like negations, generally
has been most influential, not in what it denies, but in what the absence of
it has permitted to take its place In other words, the withdrawal of the
influence of woman from the social system has not had destructive effect upon
that system which might have been anticipated for it; for in Korea woman prac
tically does not exist. Materially, physically, she is a fact; but mentally, morally,
socially, she is a cipher.1

The perception of Lowell, who regards Korean women as nearly nothing

in mental, moral, and social dimensions, though they are physically living,
shows the eye of the "Other," based on Western modernity as a measure
of objectitying and defining Korean women or the premodern Chosôn
society. It seems that Korean women ceased to exist on social levels, having
no social obligations, punishments, or even benefits, except that of keeping
their "physical place in reproduction，，and thus contributing to social "self
perpetuation." In Lowell's perspective, this social position displays the state
of women in Korea as analogous to the "primitive condition of savagery"
in ancient Rome. 丁he non-status of Korean women was seen by Lowell as
an indicator or barbaric brutality when compared to the political rights
of sovereign people, even women, in modern, Western ideals. In addition
to Lowell's identification of Korean women as non-beings (in "want of
position，，)，British traveler and geographer Isabella Bird Bishop (1831
1904) depicted the status of Korean women in the latter part of the
Chosôn dynasty as naturally inrenor and subordinate to men in her
travelogue, Korea and Her Neighbours (1898).

There are no native schools for girls, and though women of the upper classes
learn to read the native script, the number of Korean women who can read is
estimated at two in a thousand. It appears that a philosophy largely imported
from China, superstitions regarding daemons, the education of man, illiteracy，
a minimum of legal rights, and inexorable custom, have combined to give woman
as low a status in civilized Korea as in any of the barbarous countries in the world.
Yet there is no doubt that the Korean woman, in addition to being a born
intrigante, exercises a certain direct influence, especially as a mother and mother
in-law, and in the arrangement of marriages.2

In this book, Bishop indicated social mechanisms that led to the poor status
of women in Korea, such as the absence of an educational system for
women, superstition, male-oriented ideas, the legal system, and other
practices disadvantageous to women. The modern, Western viewpoint

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filtering into Korea began to problematize the low position of women,
regarding women as sacrificial lambs upon the altar of premodern patriarchy
in Korea.
Furthermore, the status of Korean women was seen as a "feudalistic
relic" and as an indicator of a tradition of "barbarism" which was wholly
denounced in the discourses on civilization and enlightenment produced
in the latter part of the Chosôn dynasty and the early twentieth century.
This representation of the Korean woman as an "inferior other” was
the projection of the Eastern or Korean traditions and was diametrically
opposed to Western modernity at that time. Consequently, the eye of
the "Other," which negated the status of Korean women as social beings,
became the ideological scaffolding around the drastically changing life
of women in Korea. It did so by producing a dualistic categorization of
women: a newly emerging figure of the "New Woman" and its backward,
negative counterpart the Old-Fashioned Woman."
The emergence of the New Woman implies that a new history of
women began to take place in Korea. This article investigates these changes
in female identity in early modern Korea by focusing on the birth of the
New Woman which was discursively constructed during the influx of
ideas of Western civilization and enlightenment in the mid-1800s and
early 1900s. Furthermore, it reviews the variation in New Women's
representation in the mass media and literature produced between the
1900s and 1940s, and in what it meant to be a New Woman, by tracing
the historic relationship of gender and modernity in colonial Korea. Pre
vious studies hitherto have widely dealt with the category of the New
Woman, life patterns, social position, and the overall social activities of
the New Woman in the areas of history (women's history), women's studies,
sociology, and literature. These studies on the New Woman have investi
gated the New Woman's way of being and various meanings with regard
to the representations of the New Woman.3
However, regardless of their abundant contributions, the previous
studies share a common error: they employ a stereotyped image of the
New Woman. Many existing studies on the New Woman have mainly
classified the New Woman based on the ideological biases of the authors.4
Furthermore, as Pak Sôn-mi argues, the dichotomous perspective that takes
the New Woman as just a sufferer and victim in a patriarchal condition or
a pioneer of national movements and feminist movements precludes the
diverse interpretations of New Women who don't fall in either of the
two categories.5 Consequently, this fixed framework imposed upon the
New Woman eventually makes it difficult to perceive the diverse positions
and differences among New Women beyond their external features.

Jiyoung Suh "New Woman" and Modernity in Colonial Korea 13

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 The restructuring of the historical existence of the New Woman in
this article will be discussed in four temporally based subthemes: the first
is the interrelationship between the modern nation-state and the birth of
the New Woman from 1900 to the 1910s; the second is the conflicting
encounter between nation and gender in the idea of the "wise mother and
good wife" in the 1920s; the third is an inquiry of the "Modern Girl，，as a
derivative of the New Woman from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s;
and the fourth is the composite image of the New Woman in the 1930s.
The historical approach taken toward the New Woman in early
modern Korea here does not mean a simple description of facts or enumera
tion of superficial images regarding the New Woman. Rather, the purpose
is the extraction of the "New Woman" episteme signified in each period,
based on the premise that the "New Woman" is not a historically single
and fixed concept. By reading the inner stream of New Women's con
sciousness crossing the ideological frame, examining the complex politics
of representation of New Women, and interpreting the historicity of New
Women between their images and real life, this essay adopts a method
ological approach based on the integration of historical reconstruction and
discourse analysis about the New Woman with a stereoscopic vision see
ing through the surface of the status quo.

The Modern Nation-State，Knowledge, and the "New Woman"

When emissary Kim Ki-su (1832-?) was dispatched to Japan in 1873，he

recorded the introduction of the Western educational system for women
to Meiji Japan in his travelogue Ildong kiyu (日東言己游，1877). After travel
ing to the United States, Yu Kil-chun (1856—1914) also emphasized the
role of women as educators of children and the necessity of education for
women, based on the theory of natural human rights and national pros
perity and defense, in Sôyu kyônmun (西遊見聞，1895). In this work, Yu
states that women are the root of the human world, analogous to a ridge
pole, the main supporting beam in the construction of the roof of a house.
If women are feeble and nave little knowledge, they will have little hope of
being equal to the importance of their duties.6
The movement advancing female education and the establishment of
girls' schools became one of the main issues in the discourses on civilization
and enlightenment in Korea, led by newspapers such as Tongnip sinmun
(Independence news, 1896), Hwangsông sinmun (Capital gazette, 1898),
Cheguk sinmun (Empire news, 1898)，and Taehan maeil sinbo (Korean

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daily news, 1904). These papers were mediators of producing a new
“people” (min,民）called sinmin (新民)，inmin (人民)，kungmin (國民)，
and summoning women as members of this new people into the public
sphere.

uirls are necessarily the children of Korean "people"... I hope the government
will impartially treat people without discrimination by gender, generation, class,
and the difference between rich and poor Girls will be the wives of men,
and if they are as knowledgeable as their husbands, the family will be prosperous.7

The new female figure in the discourses on civilization and enlightenment

was constructed based on the negation of the traditional Korean woman,
while admiring the Western woman as ideal. In TongniP sinmun (April 21,
189b;, a column titled Aeho a nyo ron!” (Alas, our women!) describes
the poor Korean woman as a prisoner, confined in jail without the right
of freedom一nothing but a blind, uneducable fool. Compared with Eastern
women, who lacked social rights and benefits, Western women were por
trayed as receiving privileges from society including the same rights men
enjoyed. While the Western women performed the roles of a wife prop
erly, by taking part in household matters with their husbands, educating
children, and ensuring that the family flourished, Eastern women were no
more than "the slave of man" who took charge of odd jobs around the
house.8
The column, Namnyô ui punbyol" (The distinction between man
and woman) from Cheguk sinmun (Sept. 29,1902) accentuates the supe
riority of the Western woman by giving examples of the endowment of
complete freedom and rights in morality, learning, and pontics to American
women and by embracing the legitimacy of gender equality in Western
ideas. Furthermore, the idea that the progress of civilization in Western
countries lay in the education of women' implied that the status of women
was treated as a barometer that could estimate the degree of societal civi
lization. These types of arguments emerged out of a complex sentiment
or rivalry with the West and an aspiration toward society's civilizational
progress.10
In the early twentieth century, the driving force of female education
in Korea came from the view that educating women and improving their
status would overcome the country's uncivilized state and its backward
ness. It was believed that such actions would also be a way to catch up
to Western civilization and to gain political independence and emerge as
a modern nation-state, a feat that had not yet been achieved in Chosôn.11
In the production of discourses, however, the "otherization of Eastern

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 women as unenlightened and shadowy was fixed; Korean women became
a signifier of national inferiority and a reason for Korea's falling behind
the West.

The arguments for achieving civilization and enlightenment" and

"national prosperity and defense" and the projects of modern building
spread as the latter part of the Chosôn dynasty became the foundation
of producing the New Woman. The modern mass media in Korea played
a central role in producing a new form of political subject, min (民)，and
New Women were called into the public sphere as an integral part of the
modern nation-state in various discourses.12
In the Taehan Empire period (1897—1910), min^ivdn (national rights)
originated from modern, Western political ideas, granting universal human
rights to all people; tnis was the basic element in the framework of the
modern nation-state.13 However, in reality not all people could naturally
achieve mingivon since these rights were most often limited to tne edu
cated people. Women were also encouraged to get a modern education
in order to achieve mingwôn as members of the nation.
The primary qualification of the New Woman was an education in
the Western style. The birth of New Women essentially stemmed from
modern nation-state ideology, which, combined with the discourse on
civilization and enlightenment introduced in early modern Korea, formed
modern knowledge and became a new criterion in defining a woman's
identity. In premodern Korea, women from the aristocratic class {yambari)
were assumed to have some knowledge of the Chinese language and of
Confucianism, though there was no official education system for them
and the female illiteracy rate was nigh. In an unofficial manner, female
education seems to have been accomplished in yangban families. In the
records of women of the noble class, the hackneyed expression, "I learned
from the books read aloud by my father or over my brother's shoulder"
implies that there were women who had considerable knowledge beyond
basic Confucian culture and ideas.14
What is even more notable are the attitudes toward knowledgeable
women. In the premodern period, knowledge and talent were not encour
aged as qualities for women to reveal; these were qualities they were ex
pected to hide through self-censorship. In the modern period, however,
knowledge emerged as a qualitication for women to be seen as modern
subjects." Knowledge became a valuation standard for women by catego
rizing them with the prefix new" or old": the educated "New Woman"
and the uneducated "Old-Fashioned Woman."
Knowledge, which was not considered a womanly virtue in premodern
Choson, displaced the ignorance" of women in the modern period, as

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educated women were warmly welcomed as embodying the new ideal
image of a woman. The division of women into New Women and Old
Fashioned Women became deeply intertwined with the construction of
modern “(il)literacy，” which functioned as a standard of establishing new
power relations and class systems, as well as a hierarchy in gender itself.15
In real life, knowledge was more like a double-edged sword for women.
On the one hand, Old-Fashioned Women without a modern education
were themselves blamed for their "ignorance" or were totally isolated一
spatially, culturally, and politicallyfrom the mainstream. On the other
hand, New Women, who were the beneficiaries of modern education,
were praised for their knowledge and took a leading role at the forefront
of modernity. However, as time passed, these educated New Women
would see trouble due to the knowledge they had acquired, which led
them to confront old customs and to therefore be scrutinized by an often
unsympathetic public.

The New Woman's Quandary Between "Women's Liberation” and the

Idea of the ‘Wise Mother and Good Wife” in the 1920s

One column in Tongnip sinmun (May 26,1899)，"Nyôhakkyo ron (An

argument concerning girls’ high schools), argued for the utility of female
education using three points:(1)the improvement of pontics through
husbands' discussions with wise wives; (2) the beneficial development of
the family through consultation with erudite wives; and (3) the existence
of a teaching mother" who contributed to the education of her children
before they enrolled in formal schooling. This argument included women's
political rights derived from Western ideas, but a consequence of having
women as part of the modern nation-state was the reification of women's
roles as reproducer, teacher, and leader of the members of the civilized
nation, fhese roles began to pin women to the idea of the "wise mother
and good wife."16
Starting from Cheguk sinmun in 1903，then in the mass media around
1906，terms such as hyônmo (wise mother,賢母)，toyonmo yangbu (wise
mother and good wife,賢母良婦)，yangmo hyônch o (good mother and
wise wife,良母賢妻)，and yangch o hyônmo (good wife and wise mother,
良妻賢母）variously appeared, and in the end, the term hyônmo yangch o
(wise mother and good wife,賢母良妻）was finally established. The "wise
mother and good wife in Korea historically originates from the idea of
the “good wife and wise mother in Meiji Japan, but with altered syntax,
placing "wise mother" before good wife.，，17 Tms goal、wise mother and

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 good wife") of female education, as it was called at the time, corresponded
with the Meiji idea of the "good wife and wise mother," the matrix of
Japanese female education based on a family-state ideology which imposed
a family structure upon the frame of the modern state.18
The wise mother and good wife" in discourses of this era had three
primary meanings:(1)a good educator of the children; (2) an efficient
administrator of the household; and (3) a supportive wife who had an
equal partnership with her husband. The idea of the "wise mother and
good wife” was the basis of the modern education New Women received
in Korea.19 Among them, the principal goal of female education was to raise
a mother who could educate one emerging member of the nation at home,
which was deeply related to the modern nation-state building project.20
The idea of the "wise mother and good wife," which was based on
modern, Western concepts such as the "equality of men and women"
and "the natural rights of man，，，can be seen as revolutionary, in that it
recognized a woman's political right as a member of the nation. The
idea also liberated women from premodern conventions by establishing
their position as the dominant figure in the home, which was different
from the traditional womanly virtues required to fulfill the roles of mother,
wife, and/or daughter-in-law in a strictly male-dominated hierarchy. The
progressiveness of the "wise mother and good wife ideas in this period is
evident in the view that they served as a means to "women's emancipation
from the ‘dark prison' of old-fashioned women's quarters."21
However, since the early 1900s when it was chosen as the motto of
female education in the school system, the idea of the "wise mother and
good wife” became â practical tool to set up and run girls' schools as
institutions. Yangkyuuisuk, a private girls' school that aimed at the pro
duction of "wise mothers and good wives," announced for the first time
in 1906 its slogan of combining elite women who possessed modern
knowledge and modern housework skills with traditional female virtues.22
The educational objective was estimated to be a complicated construct of
traditional values and modern ideas, focusing on the role of the "wise
mother，，and the "good wife in the family, rather their participation in
public affairs.
Since Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910, the idea of the "wise
mother and good wife" became the main policy goal of education in girls'
schools. In the magazine Ydjagye，for instance, which was first published
in 1917 by a community of Korean female students studying in Japan,
most articles supported the idea of the "wise mother and good wife."
That idea was considered modem, and it helped encourage the political
activities of women as news spread of female students getting involved

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with the Korean Independence Movement of 1919. At that time, the
phrase "women's liberation," connoting the awakening of modern gender
consciousness, was just beginning to appear. Within the consciousness of
the elite New Women in the latter half of the 1910s, there seems to have
been no marked discursive clash between the idea of the wise mother and

good wife，，and of women's liberation, or between the idea of the "wise

mother and good wife" and nation(alism) in Korea.
However, the alliance or collusion between nation and gender, which
was more conspicuous in "third world" colonies, became the root of the
New Women's conflicts later" The idea of the “wise mother and good
wire in early modern Korea provided the momentum for women's libera
tion from old oppressive customs, but in the end, it was simply another
framework which relegated women to a specific function in the family in
the name of vocation, placing women in a private sphere and forestalling
their true liberation.

The first woman who publicly criticized the idea of the "wise mother
and good wife" seems to have been Na Hye-sôk, a representative New
Woman studying in Tokyo in the 1910s. She contributed an important
article to Hakchigivang, a publication run by Korean male students studying
in Japan. In the article, "Isangjôk puin" (An ideal woman) {Hakchigivang,
Nov. 1914)，she denounced the idea of the "wise mother and good wife" as
a male-dominant ideology made to breed domestic, docile，and submissive
women, one that would ultimately enslave them to societal patriarchy.
However, during this period, the general ideological orientation of the
majority of New Women was based on the idea of the "wise mother and
good wire. And "women's liberation，，in those days meant "liberation
from an old home and achievement of a new home" by being a "wise
mother and good wire.
In the 1920s, the concealed conflict between women's liberation and
the idea of the "wise mother and good wife" was revealed, as the gender
consciousness of New Women became stronger. The New Women's
magazine Yôjagye (1917) raised the issue of "freedom of love and marriage,"
producing a new direction for "women's liberation" toward individual
desire. And with these ideas the clashes between women's liberation and
the idea of the "wise mother and good wife，，，and more broadly between
gender and nation(alism), intensified.24
The term "women's liberation in Yojagyev/d& based on the recognition
that "women are also human" under modern political ideas of freedom
and equality.25 Liberation stood for the idea of gender equality, but was
validated in the frame of the "wise mother and good wife," which finally
converged on narratives of national liberation and restoration. The women's

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 liberation narrative, combined with "wise mother and good wife，，ideas,
revealed a contradiction in that it tried to combine the distinction of the
sexes with the principle of equality between man and woman. The inter
pretation of women as members of the nation was based on the equality
of sexes, transcending biological and social differences. But in the frame of
the family and nation, women were prescribed by their unique female
attributes as "wise mothers and good wives," which was taken as an example
of ch onjik (天職)，a mission from heaven assigned to women.26 In partic
ular, as New Women began to regard the realization or individual desires
as a form of women's liberation in the early 1920s, the idea of the "wise
mother and good wire complicated the ways in which female identity
was restructured in a modern way. The intensification of the collision be
tween gender and nationalism in Korea of the 1920s lay in this dualistic
role and identity associated with women; women's liberation was funda
mentally implicated in the antinomic operation between equality and dif
ference of sexes as well as the conflicts between individual and collective
identities.27

The Implosion of the "New Woman”： The “Modern Girl" from

the Mid-1920s to the 1930s

Around the mid-1920s, representations of the New Woman began to

change more negatively: the mass media manufactured claims of the extra
vagance of New Women {^tnyosong, July 1924), their tendency to be easily
tempted {Sinyosong, Oct. 1925), as well as their frivolity ( Tonga ilbo, June
i/，1925/Aug. 8，1925). These negative images were mainly constructed
by focusing upon and attacking the images of the consumption and sexual
promiscuity of New Women. These images of New Women, which were
entirely distinct from the early pioneer image, targeted the purported
"bourgeois culture" of New Women, as well as their aspiration to the life
style of the upper-middle classes. Around 1923, socialism began to spread
to the intelligentsia, and after the establishment of the socialist women's
organization Kyongsông Yôjach ongnyôn Tongmaeng (Kyôngsông Female
Youth Alliance, 1925), socialist New Women took the lead in the feminist
movements in Korea.28
It is notable that at this time we see the advent of a particular neolo
gism about women, modongôl (Modern uirl), whose definition and con
notations overlapped with the negative qualities ascribed to New Women.
As with the Tonga ilbo (June 17，1925) article, "Ch'oegûn sinyôsông ûi

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kyônghyang" (New tendency of the New Woman), which pointed out the
“frivolity, shallowness, [and] carelessness of New Women," the production
of such negative images was closely connected with the emergence of
Modern Girl arguments, which reflected the downsides of the New
Woman. The first case of the Modern Girl issue being raised in the mass
media was the article "Kullae e ch'ach'a saengginun ‘modôn'gôl iran?’’
(What is this "Modern Girl” emerging in recent days?) in Chosôn ilbo
(March 31,1927).
This article classified two kinds of Modern Girls in Korea, both icono
clastic figures. The first were the "emancipated" girls who were outwardly
like "floating grass，，，with no political views but provocatively beautiful with
their Western clothes and hairstyles. The second were the "emancipated"
girls who were in the process of creating new opportunities for themselves
and trying to study, work, and enjoy their equal status with men. Further
more, they were the group fighting in concert with men to break down
the capitalistic economic system and to make reasonable judgments in
marriage, reproduction, and divorce. The article concluded that most of
the Modern Girls who currently existed in Korea were nothing more
than counterfeits and that the genuine Modern Girls were yet to come.
The major arguments over the issue of Modern Girls were contained
in the feature article of the magazine Pyôlgongon (Dec. 1927), titled
"Modôngôl modônboi taenonpyông" (A great controversy over "Modern
Girls，，and "Modern Boys"). The main writers were all socialist male intel
lectuals, including Yu Kwang-nyôl (1898-1981)，Pak Yông-hui (1901-?)，
Pak P'al-yang (1905—1988)，and Choe Hak-song (1901—1933). They
described the Modern Girl as a very luxurious and rrivolous woman in
alluring colored clothes with long silk stockings and high-heeled shoes,
short hair and a Western hat, having a roundish face with red lipstick.
In addition, they regarded the Modern Girl as a kind of prostitute, living
off of or selling her body to the "Modern Boys who were the prodigal sons
of capitalists and descendents of the private-propertied bourgeoisie. Puryang
sonyô (bad girl) was another name for Modern Girls, connoting those seek
ing urban decadence and enjoying the surface of modernity without any
knowledge, vision, or ethical sense.
The emergence of Modern Girls as a global phenomenon in the early
twentieth century was explained as the product of consumerism and urban
oriented middle-class culture. What identified Modern Girls was their ex
cessive consumption and pursuit of eroticism. Furthermore, Modern Girls
around the world were represented as transgressional figures, disregarding
traditional obligations and roles in the family system as a daughter, wife,

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 and mother. They were searching for romantic love and sexual, economic,
or political emancipation while donning provocative attire.29 On the sur
face, Modern Girls in Korea seemed to have many commonalities with
Modern Girls around the world, but in reality they were closer to hetero
geneous, elusive beings without clear social actualities such as class, occu
pation, or educational background. In the 1930s, the concepts of New
Women and of Modern Girls, with all of their negative connotations,
were used interchangeably in the mass media. In this period, the primary
image of the New Woman represented in the media was of an "unidenti
fied woman，” strolling about the streets, blurring the borders of class and
social position. They were depicted as "mysterious women in Western silk
with flashy colors and patterns, giving off overwhelming eroticism”30 or
represented as "man's concubines" and citizens of vanity," which corre
sponded with traits ascribed to Modern Girls in the mass media.31
Modern Girls in colonial Korea originated from an equivalent in Japan
referred to as modan gàru?2 In early 1900s Japan, new career women such
as office clerks and various girls” engaged in urban service industries,
such as "shop gins, mannequin girls, manicure girls," and "kiss girls,"
emerged with the commodification of female sexuality under the growth
of capitalism.33 Based on economic grounds, this new type of career
woman became the agent of enjoying modern urban culture. Being called
“modan gâru,” these women were seen as disregarding traditional female
virtues such as chastity, dutifulness, frugality, and sacrifice and instead
were pursuing their desires, though they were not female suffragists nor
did they have a clear social feminist consciousness like New Women.34
In Japan modan gàru were also devalued as decadent pleasure seekers
by socialist intellectuals, who denied modernism itself, and as sexually
licentious women by anarchist intellectuals.35 As in Korea, Japanese modan
gàru were the product of discourses by male intellectuals who constructed
an ideal image that satisfied their ideological directivity, while negating
the actual being of modan gàru?6
However, the discursive field producing modan gàru in Japan was
more diverse, although many male intellectuals showed their embarrass
ment and resistance regarding the violation of traditional gender norms.37
Unlike these various viewpoints in Japan, Modern Girls in Korea were
restricted to a fairly uniform representation. Specifically, the representation
of Modern Girls in Korea was confined by the ideological frame of the
socialist intellectuals who projected their class- and gender-consciousness
onto Modern Girls, while denying the diverse and layered desires and
fragmented voices of these Modern Girls in reality.

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 2.W丨1 ft;!*
3 a.- »5^H ^Mrïsr
朴蓄vlî
yd
女性宣傳時代对幺甩i £
'M

s—5®-î°#Ês3r*« (三代1l<rsy?olaT^s- $i^ §*^TAJ^s - a >8.§ov.ç'mwHI 讲atr！^FJ&fa2WT« 蚤：Rïslwo».费ÎT

Fig.1."Yôsông sonjon sidae ka omyôn (3)" [If the era of advertising women comes ...]
in Chosôn ilbo (January 14，1930).

Modern Girls searching for the Western look and urban material cul
ture in Korea were mainly depicted as an undefinable and amorphous
female group, akin to phantoms in the city.38 However, the discursive fea
tures in the representation of Modern Girls poses the question of whether
Modern Girls in Korea crossed the divide in gender and points to the
historicity of these Korean Modern Girls whose representation helped
mediate the precarious urban culture of colonial Seoul.39 One causerie
employing a single-frame caricature by An ^ok-yong (1901—1950), titled
"Yosong sonjon sidae ka omyôn (3)，，(If the era of advertising women
comes...)，in Chosôn ilbo (Jan.14,1930) presents crucial clues about
Modern Girls in Korea (see fig.1).
Figure 1 shows four types of Modern Girls: Modern Girl, kisaeng
(entertainer), a schoolgirl, and a café waitress. We can see that the usage
of the Modern Girl stereotype in the 1920s and 1930s had a double
meaning through this picture and its accompanying passage. The first
meaning was a "higher" version of the Modern Girl, covering the four
kinds of women depicted here. The second meaning was just one category
of the Modern Girl, denoting women who were engaged in the urban
service industry, such as "shop girls, department store girls" (shoppers
in department stores), "elevator girls," "hello girls" (telephone operators),
"bus girls" (conductors aboard buses), and "typist gins.
The Modern Girls in a narrow sense were educated women with new
occupations in urban areas who could not be absorbed into the prestigious

Jiyoung Suh "New Woman" and Modernity in Colonial Korea 23

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 professional sectors such as the medical profession, academia, education,
or nursing. These women, who were engaged in urban service industries
in Korea, corresponded to the Japanese modan gâruy but were unable to
establish a new social class based on economic status and cultural directiv
ity due to their unsettled and transient labor conditions. Rather, Modern
Girls in Korea ranged widely over various social positions, yet were singu
larly represented as an urban spectacle providing voyeuristic pleasure to
men. This caricature of Modern Girls is an indication of the hostility
against women who exposed their bodies on the street or elsewhere in the
public sphere and was directed at women who violated sexuality norms.
The fetishized and fragmented representation of the female body in
the mass media reflected the aversion to women's sexuality visualized in
the public sphere by the dominant gender's perspective (see fig. 2).
The masculine gaze, so pervasive on the streets, was the root of the
ideological power that controlled the form and content of Modern Girls'
images.40 In figure 2, the body of the Modern Girl is captured by male
eyes as an object of scrutinization and interrogation. The Modern Girl,
wearing a Western dress, sporting bobbed hair, ornamented by luxurious
accessories, is like a doll or commodity displayed to the public, materializ
ing and artificializing the female body. What is notable is the fragmentation
and arrangement of her body, each piece of it having one item: the brow
inlaid with jewelry, the nose being pierced, the leg in a splendid stocking
and high-heeled shoe, and the hand with a jeweled ring and well-manicured
nails. In the lower part of the picture, the image of the semi-nude Modern
Girl wearing only underwear exaggerates and satirizes exposure of the
female body in public. Through the dismantlement of the female body,
which is indulged in consumer goods and displayed in fragments, the
Modern Girl becomes a product herself.
Representations of Modern Girls denoted the subconscious layers of
desire for modernity that colluded with capital to establish nation, class,
and gender. Specifically, the body of the Modern Girl in Korea of the
1920s and 1930s signified the "other" itself that the dominant ideology
interrogated and attempted to nullify. The antipathy against the visualiza
tion of female sexuality in the public sphere and the excessive consump
tion of women reflected the consciousness of male intellectuals regarding
capitalistic modernity. The libidinal, fetishized, and commodified female
body was the manifestation of the repressed other." This body was depicted
as a counterpart to the "reason" of male subjects, who saw themselves as
autonomous and rational individuals, who took nationalistic, patriarchal,
and anti-capitalistic positions.41

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 Fig.
Fig. 2.2."Modônkkôl
"Modônkkôlui ui
haengnyôl"
haengnyôl"
[Parade
[Parade
of
of Modem
ModemGirls]
Girls]byby
AnAn
Sôk-yông,
Sôk-yông,
Chosôn
Chosôn
ilbo,
ilboyJanuary
January20,1932.
20,1932.

Furthermore, the Modem Girl in Korea was a symbol representing the

deformity and decadence of modernity itself, as well as the superficial and
pathological modernism of Chosôn Korea and its lack of material and
cultural substance. As an intellectual at the time put it, "While the mod
ernism in foreign countries is morbid, that of Chosôn is deformea.〜
The negative representations of Modern Girls in 1920s and 1930s Korea
contained the multi-layered anxieties existing between the rifts of colonial
modernity, including the anxiety of men toward those women who made
themselves visible in the public sphere, the anxiety of male intellectuals
toward the capitalistic modernity occupying everyday life, as well as the
instability and deficiency of the colonial state.
In the urban space of Korea in the mid-1920s to 1930s, New Wom
en went through an existential variation called the "Modern ^irl," who
not only shows the implosion of the New Woman's identity that
stemmed from social consciousness based on educational grounds, but
also reflects an aspect of historicity of modernity in colonial Korea.

Neither Traditional nor Modern: Syncretic Images of New Women

in the 1930s

The general definition of the New Woman in the Korean mass media
since the 1900s was a "woman who was educated beyond the secondary
school level," while its counterpart, the Old-Fashioned Woman, referred
to uneducated women outside the modern educational system.43 Whether

Jiyoung Suh "New Woman" and Modernity in Colonial Korea 25

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 Table 1.Paradigms of Female Groups Reflected in Lifestyles

Qualifiers
Qualifiersofof
New
New
Women
Women Qualifiers
Qualifiersofof
Old-Fashioned
Old-Fashioned
Women
Women

"city,"
“city,”"high-school girls,"
“high-school "Western
girls,” "Western "a
“a secluded
secludedplace in the
place mountains,"
in the "a kitchen
mountains,” in
"a kitchen in

hair,"
hair,”"high-heeled
"high-heeledshoes,"
shoes,”
"a “a the
theyard,"
yard,”"pounding graingrain
“pounding with awith
pestle," "drawing
a pestle, “drawing

jeweled
jeweledring,"
ring，”"a gold watch,"
“a gold "car," “car,”
watch," water
waterfrom
froma well,"
a well,"
"cooking,"
“cooking,”
"washing
“washing
clothes in
clothes
a in a

"a street
"a streetcar,"
car,"coming
“coming
and and
goinggoing
in in hard
hardsnowy
snowywinter,"
winter,"
"helping
"helping
with farm
withwork
farmin work
hot in hot

all
all directions,"
directions,”"social
"social
life,"life,
"equality
"equality weather,"
weather,""desolate
"desolate
heartstrings,"
heartstrings,"
"passing
“passing
time time

of
of the
thesexes,"
sexes,”
"wonderful
“wonderful
woman"
woman” helplessly,"
helplessly,” "being
“being
in a in
melancholy
a melancholy
mood," mood,”
"sad heart"

the women were educated or not opened up or closed off the possibility of
encountering modernity. Old-Fashioned Women were regarded as living
behind the times, helpless and isolated from the changes accompanied by
new lifestyles and new ideas, staying indoors or in the countryside, and
adhering to feudal conventions.
One kyubang kasa (lady's narrative poem) produced and sung by Old
Fashioned Women in Kyôngbuk province in the early modern period
was known as "Hwachon'ga" (A song of flower pancakes). It conveys the
dividing line between the New Women and the Old-Fashioned Women
based on their differences in spatial and cultural location.44 This work
displays the paradigms of two female groups reflecting different lifestyles
according to the changing times (see table 1).
This work shows the physical condition of Old-Fashioned Women,
placed in a rural setting far away from the city, confined to the inside of
the house for household chores, and exhibiting low self-esteem and lone
liness due to their isolation from the outside world, fhis contrasts with
New Women, who exhibited confidence and high self-esteem; they were
considered to play a very active part in the center of the modern city.
The Old-Fashioned Women, recognized as the most tragic figures from
the perspective of the modernists, were the targets of enlightenment and
reorganization for reformist intellectuals, regardless of ideological directiv
ity, nationalism, or socialism. However, since the time when the women's
liberation movement collided with broader nationalistic ideas in the mid
1920s, society had tried to distance itself from New Women by looking
more scrupulously at them and reconsidering the virtues of Old-Fashioned
Women.

A special feature article, "Sinyosong ûi changch'ô wa tanch'ô” (Merits

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and defects of the New Woman), in Sinyôsông (June-July 1925) presents
the merits of New Women, such as intellectuality, determination, liveliness,
their loving natures, and their fresh looks. But at the same time, it high
lights many of their problems, and in the mass media more generally,
New Women gradually lost priority over Old-Fashioned Women. An
article in Tonga ilbo (Dec.11，1926) titled "Ch'ôngnyôn t'oron sônghwang"
(Success of a debate among youth) asks, "Who is more contributing to our
family, the New Woman or the Old-Fashioned Woman?" It then presents
three representative women from each camp, who debate their own posi
tions. In the judgment of the audience, the arguments of the Old-Fashioned
Women won in the long run.
This kind of article reflects the conservative gender perspective of
local governmental circles, religious communities, and the Young Men's
Associations run by right-wing nationalists. But these articles also show
the rise of the Old-Fashioned Woman in inverse proportion to the collapse
of New Women in the mass media from the mid-1920s, which indicates
the overall conservative views of society about feminism. It is clear that the
oppositional structure between the New Woman and the Old-Fashioned
Woman operated as a mechanism to provoke competition or conflict
between women, as well as to control womanhood through a modern,
patriarchal perspective.
One article, "Sin'gu yôsông chwadamhoe p'ungkyong" (One scene
from a roundtable talk between New Women and Old-Fashioned Women),
in Samch'olli (Feb. 1936) can be seen as a flash point of the competition
between these two groups of women who were continuously weighed
against each other by society. In the process of debate, women from
each side engaged in a ferocious battle with conflicting emotions. While
New Women provoked Old-Fashioned Women by attacking their sub
ordination to Confucian conventions and blaming them for being mere
sexual appendages to men, Old-Fashioned Women reproached New Women
for their extravagance, vanity, clumsy housekeeping, and misbehavior that
discredited promising men and caused family trouble.
New Women and Old-Fashioned Women were two categories of
women that modernity created in a new way; both were different faces
of "others” under modern patriarchy. In the previous two decades, New
Women regarded Old-Fashioned Women as requiring enlightenment,
which brought about the classification of Old-Fashioned Women as "the
other of the others." In the media of the 1930s, New Women and Old
Fashioned Women became rivals of each other—two different styles that
could be chosen to suit men's tastes and needs.45

Jiyoung Suh "New Woman" and Modernity in Colonial Korea 27

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 The most problematic conflict between New Women and Old
Fashioned Women was their competition as rival lovers. In this era,
most of the elite men at the age of fifteen or sixteen who entered secondary
school moved to the city after an early marriage and met New Women in
school and had love affairs with them. They tried to form a new type of
home with New Women, complaining about the ignorance of their old
fashioned wives and miscommunication with them.46 But in reality, it
was nearly impossible to divorce their existing wives because the tradi
tional family system was so strongly maintained. Illegitimate cohabitation
of New Women with married men was problematic to New Women
themselves, as well as to the wives of these men. This presented a dilemma
to New Women who identified themselves as "second wives" when they
could not achieve legal marriage through romance with married men, not
altogether different from premodern concubines.47 The encounter of New
Women with the reality of the premodern social system and its values
produced unexpected, self-contradictory phenomena, as well as a collision
with Old-Fashioned Women.
Entering the 1930s, as society became more conservative than in the
previous decade, the role of the "wise mother and good wife" reemerged
as a dominant subject of discourse on women, replacing the freewheeling
image of the New Woman of the 1920s. It should be noted that the con
cept of the "wise mother and good wife" became more restricted and
pragmatic during this period, as compared with the progressive tendency
it had in the 1900s and 1910s.
One popular magazine in the early 1930s {Sinyosong, Jan. 1933) in
vited several celebrated New Women to hold a roundtable talk. They
based their discussion on the play, A Doll's House, written by Henrik Ibsen,
in which the heroine, Nora, was â symbol of New Women's liberation. In
this talk, Nora s choice to run away from home was reexamined as an
unrealistic act, with more than half of the attendees arguing that women's
liberation would not be achieved in this manner.48
Another roundtable talk with celebrated New Women such as Ch'oi
Ui-sun (1904-1969, a reporter for Tonga ilbo), Kim Wôn-chu (a reporter
for Maeil sinbo), Ch'oi Chông-hui (1906-1990, a writer and reporter for
SamchWi), Hô Yông-suk (1908-1991,a doctor and wife of writer Yi
Kwang-su), Mo Yun-suk (1910-1990, a poet and reporter for Yôron),
and Ch'oi Hwal-ran and Pyôn Yong-ae (housewives) dealt with the same
dilemma and ultimate decision made by Ibsen's character Nora.49 A
majority of the New Women, including Hur Yông-suk, Kim Wôn-chu,
and Ch'oi Chông-hui, took a critical stand on Noras choice. Ch'oi Ui-sun
and Mo Yun-suk, conversely, advocated Nora s decision, calling for the

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psychological freedom of women in families and the improvement of the
social system. Kim Won-ju said that Nora's decision was from a false rec
ognition of the condition of women, who had no economic base and lacked
realistic vision. Many of the participants at the talk brought up the image of
"Nora who just returned home from the streets," indicating the more con
fined role of "wise mother and good wire ideas in Korea during the 1930s.
It is difficult to find the connection between the women's liberation
movement and the role of the "wise mother and good wire in this period.
The "wise mother and good wife in the family became the dominant
figure of New Women, much like the metaphor of "Nora who has returned
home." The "wise mother and good wife, however, did not take a simple
form but conveyed a more complex formula in the 1930s Korean context.
First of all, the image of the "good wife” began to be the object of
focus in newspapers and magazines, presenting the housewife as an ideal
prototype of the New Woman. The image of the housewife as a specialist,
who managed the household in a rational and scientific way as well as
serving as the core of the nuclear family and of conjugal affection, came
to be more focused upon and widely discussed in the mass media. The
discourses on being a good wife in the 1930s were based on modern knowl
edge such as home economics, science, and hygiene. New Women in the
1930s appear to have received the narrative of the "good wife" actively,
distinguishing themselves from old-fashioned women while trying to
devise various tactics to obtain their position as a "good wife" at home
and in society.50
The discourses on the "good wire in the 1930s reflected the desires
of New Women as they tried to realize a "new home in line with the ideal
prototypes of love marriage and the modernization of home management.51
However in reality, the new home sought by New Women was closer to a
discursive ideal; there was a large gap between what New Women dreamed
of and what they actually experienced. A novelist of the time, Ju Yo-sop,
asserted that unlike the image of the "good wife" and the "sweet home”
represented in advertisements of one Japanese seasoning called Ajinomoto,
the ideal home was in fact an imaginary one of films or novels, unattainable
in reality. He added that the proportion of men who would be ideal hus
bands for the New Women was only one in ten million.52
The absence of material and cultural bases supporting the "new home"
and the "modern housewife" discloses a cleavage between the "wise mother"
and the "good wife.” While the "good wife" was actively received by New
Women, the figure of the "wise mother” drew more public attention in a
vague combination with modern motherhood and the traditional female
virtues that were re-illuminated since the mid-1920s.)) One characteristic

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of the "wise mother" in the 1930s was a mother qualified in "modern
maternity，” who possessed a scientific method for childrearing. One maga
zine {Sinyôsông, June 1931) remarks that the ignorance of a mother was the
most terrifying thing in the world. A "wise mother" needed to be armed
with the knowledge and methods of Western scientific childrearing, a
far cry from traditional child care. It meant being a professional manager
and educator who could protect children from being attacked by disease,
feed them at regular intervals, and direct their psychological growth and
maturation.54
Meanwhile, the reconstruction of the "wise mother and good wife,
with the virtues of traditional women such as obedience, chastity, and
sacrifice, was conspicuously exposed in the 1930s. The male intellectual
discourses on the "good wife，，highlighted the retrogression to traditional
images of women, contrary to the desire of the New Woman to be a
modern "good wire in a Western way. In the mass media, a male intel
lectual expresses that he was sickened by New Women and presents a
composite figure of the New Woman and the Old-Fashioned Woman as
an ideal wife: "a woman who is good at housework with an average level
of literacy."55 The recognition of free love as being dangerous gave rise to
the preference for the traditional female image.56 In one roundtable talk,
men confess that they were fascinated by women with physical charms
and a refined style (such as Greta Garbo and Clara Bow from Western
films), but that their choice for a real wife was a woman with a sound
and docile image. This male preference for an obedient wife, taking
good care of her husband, clashed with the position of the "good wife”
sought by New Women themselves.57 Returning to a "traditional good
wife，，from this male-centric viewpoint brought discord between men and
women who were launching "new homes" with modern ideas of mono
gamy and the structure of the family system in the Korea of the 1930s.
The specific aspect of the "wise mother and good wife" of this period
that should be emphasized is the new arrangement of choosing the qualities
of a "good wife” and wise mother. JThis arrangment would lead to
the recombination of ideas regarding the "modern wise mother" and the
"traditional good wife.，，The selective mixture of "wise mother and good
wife" ideas and the synthesized image of the New Women who were
neither traditional nor modern is one historical by-product at this junc
tion of modernity and gender in 1930s Korea.
One article (Sin'gwang, Jan. 1931) points out that New Women in
Korea bore the heaviest burdens in the world because they were still forced
to abide by traditional womanly virtues and obligations as daughters-in-law,
as well as fill the role of the modern "wise mother and good wife.”58 This

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overlapping of tradition and modernity in women's identities and the
enlargement of women's obligations highlights the particular situations
faced in this era by New Women, who had difficulties stepping forward
into a modern value system and lifestyle.
In the 1930s, the idea of the "wise mother and good wife" was regarded
and attacked by socialist intellectuals as an assimilated ideology of the
colonizer and as the cultural product of the bourgeois class.59 Even though
the socialist group presented the definition of New Women in a different
way, the issue of women's liberation was eventually subjugated to that of
class liberation, and seen as a subsidiary issue in the socialist discourses
during the 1930s.60

Gender and Modernity Seen Through the Genealogy of

the New Woman in Colonial Korea

The New Woman and its counterpart, the Old-Fashioned Woman, are
two female figures showing the lineage of women from premodern to
modern times, and they depict the construction of the modern female
identity in Korea. They also indicate social class and the epistemological
gaps inside the women that were newly created through the medium of
education in the modern period. In enlightened and socialist discourses,
the New Woman and the Old-Fashioned Woman were partners who
should be joined in searching for civilization, women's liberation, and
class emancipation. However, the society took the "wise mother and
good wife" as the dominant female norm, so the two categories of women
were cast in a hostile relationship, connoting opposite ideals of woman
hood. In reality, though, they were two faces of one body, which could
not be easily merged or reconciled.
Specifically, the mother and daughter in a family structure embodied
the relationship between the New Woman and the Old-Fashioned Woman
in the 1920s and 1930s. Old-Fashioned Women, who did not have the
opportunity for a modern education, longed for the New Women's lives
and pledged with certainty to send their daughters to school.61 A New
Woman daughter was a vicarious being; she was expected to make up
for the lack of opportunity and to achieve the dreams of her Old-Fashioned
mother.

Meanwhile, there was a wide gap between the Old-Fashioned mother

and the New Woman daughter in terms of their way of life and manner
of thought. The New Woman writer Paek Sin-e's (1908-1939) first short
story, "Na ui ômôni" (My mother) {Chosôn ilbo, Jan. 1929), shows the

Jiyoung Suh "New Woman" and Modernity in Colonial Korea 31

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anxiety of an Old-Fashioned mother for her New Woman daughter who
has devoted herself to political activities, organizing women's associations,
while delaying marriage. This New Woman daughter confronts the dis
connection of her worldview with her mother's, seeing her mother as
stuck in "obstinate convention and morals." And although the daughter
feels deep compassion for her mother s anguish, she makes a resolution
to go her own way, refusing the traditional way of life given to women.
Though there was irreconcilable discord between them, the New
Woman daughter's path was closely connected with the Old-Fashioned
mothers trajectory that New Woman negated and became the foothold
of a new choice of her daughter. In a patriarchal history, the birth of the
New Woman originated from the paucity of the present, the aspiration
for new possibilities, and the deeply repressed regret of the Old-Fashioned
Woman. Consequently, the confined desire of the Old-Fashioned Woman
and the frustrated desire of the New Woman are connected in a circuit of
"othering" women.
New Women in Korea launched a vigorous but tough voyage to
modernity, making their way by penetrating the particular socio-political
conditions in colonial Korea. These conditions included the contradictory
affiliations between gender and nation(alism), the class gap within the New
Women group, the struggle against a male-centric social system, the episte
mological dilemma of women facing the incompatibility of equality and
the difference between the sexes (as in the conflicts of "women's libera
tion" and the "wise mother and good wife”)，risky encounters with urban
culture, and the collision and collaboration between gender and imperial
ism at the end of the Japanese colonial era.62
As Chandra Mohanty notes, there is no feminism that is utterly pure
or without contradiction, especially in colonial history.63 The realization
of a new agenda such as "women's liberation" led by New Women in
colonial Korea shows the complex process of women's alliance and collision
and their movements being appropriated by and resisting social mechanisms
such as nation(alism), capital(ism), patriarchy, and colonialism. What is
more remarkable in terms of modernity and gender for Korea are the his
torical scenes that reveal the myriad layered cracks between the "imagined
woman as modern" and "real New Women" in colonial Korea.

Notes

1.Percival Lowell, Choson, The Land of the Morning Calm: A Sketch of Korea
(Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1888), 143.

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 2. Isabella Bird Bishop, Korea and Her Neighbours (New York: F. H. Revell Co.,
1898), 342.
3. Pak Yong-ok, Hanguk kûndaeyôsông undongsayôn'gu [A study on the history of
the Korean modern women's movement](しhongsin munhwa yôn'guwôn, 1984), Hanguk
yosong kûndaehwa ut yôksajôk maençnak [Historical context of Korean women's moderniza

tion] (Seoul: Cnisik sanopsa, 2003); Shin Yông-suk, Ilcheha Han'guk yosong sahoesa
yon gu" [A study on Korean women's history] (Ph.D. diss., Ewha Womans Univ., 1989);
Ch'oi Suk-kyông, Yi Pae-yong, Shin Yông-suk, and An Yôn-sôn, "Han'guk yôsôngsa
chôngnip ul wihan yôsông inmul yuhyông yôn'gu [A study on female characters for estab
lishment of Korean women's history一from 1919 to 194)]，\osonghak nonjip [Women's
studies review],10 (1993); Yi Pae-yong, "Ilcheha yôsông ui chônmunjik chinch'ul kwa
sahoejôk chiwi，，[Women's entering the professional job market and their social position

in colonial period], Kuksagivan nonch'ong [Treatises on Korean history], 83 (1999); Cho Un

and Yun T'aek-nim, "Ilcheha sinyosong kwa kabujangje—Kundaesong kwa yosongsông e

taehan singmin tamnon ui chaejomyong [New Woman and patriarchy in the colonial
period一reillumination of colonial discourse on modernity and womanhood], Kwangbok
osipch onyôn kinyom nonmunjip [Essays on celebration of the fiftieth independence], 8 (Korean

Research Foundation, 1995); Choi Hye-sil, SinyosongduL un muot ul kkumkkuonnunga

[What did New Women dream?], Saenggak ui namu (2000); Mun Ok-pyo et al., Sinyôsông
Han 'mk kwa Ilbon ui kundae yosongsam [New Woman——Images of the modern woman in

Korea and Japan] (Seoul: Ch'ôngnyônsa, 2003); Kim Kyong-il, Yosong ui kundae, kuTidae ui

yosong [The modernity of woman, woman of modernity] (P'urunyôksa, 2004); Kim Su

jin, "Cn on gubaek isamsimnyôndae sinyosong tamnon kwa sangjing ui kusong [Dis
courses on New Woman and composition of symbol in 1920—30s] (Ph.D. diss., Seoul
National Univ., 2005). These studies paid attention to the fact that New Women pro
tested against the national and sexual discrimination of colonial conditions, and they
sought gender equality through the feminist movements and economic activities, rhey
argued that New Women were modern beings who recognized individuality and accepted
modern concepts of family and relationships between men and women. Meanwhile, Kelly
Jeong's "Na Hyesok's Kyonghui: New Woman as a spectacle of femininity" (Study of
Korean Literature, 29 (2005)) looked into the New Woman's identity formation and the
public perception of her as a construction of a spectacle of new femininity.

4. The first example is the case of the liberalists/nationalists who pursued social
enlightenment and women's self-awareness, resisting Japanese imperialism. A second ex
ample is the case of the radical individualists who fought for free love, gender equality,
and women's identity as individuals. A third case is that of the socialists, who put class
consciousness before the individual and nation. 丁his kind of classification in previous
studies is summarized in Kim Kyong-il's article "しh on gubaek isamsimnyôndae han'guk
ui sinyosong kwa sahoejuui [The New Woman and socialism in 1920-30s Korea],
Hanguk munhwa [Korean culture], 36 (2005)： 249-95.
5. Pak ^on-mi, Chosen josei no chi no kaiyu—shokumincm bunka shihai to Nihon

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ryûgaku [Intellectual journey of the Chosen women: The cultural domination in colony
and studying abroad in Japan] (Tokyo: Yamakawa shuppansha, 2005).
6. Yu Kil-jun, Sôyu kyônmun [Travels in the West, 1895]，trans. Hô Kyông-jin
(Seoul: Sôhae munchip, 2005)，422-23.
7. "Namnyô kyoyuk non" [An argument on the education of men and women],
Tongnip sinmun, May 12,1896.
8. "Yôin kyoyuk non" [An argument on the education of women], Tongnip sinmun,
Sept.13，1898.
9. "Kup yôin kyoyuknon" [The urgent demand for women's education], Cheguk
sinmun，Jan. 22,1901.
10. This is similarly found in Japan. In the Meiji period, male intellectuals and
administrators thought that as long as the custom of devaluing women existed, Japan could

not be designated as a powerful and respected country in the world. To be considered

uncivilized by the West was humiliating to the Japanese male intellectuals and they tried to

eradicate the subjection of women, which came to be regarded as barbarity. Kato Chikako,

"Cheguk Ilbon eso ui kyubômchôk yôsôngsang ui hyôngsông—tangsidae wa ui kwan'gye

esô" [The formation of the normative female figure in Imperial Japan—in relationship
with the contemporary world], Tong-Asia ui kungmin kukka hyôngsông kwa chendo-yôsông

p'yosang ùl chungsim uro [Formation of the nation-state in East Asia: focusing on female
representation], trans. Yi Un-ju (Seoul: Somyôngch'ulpan, 2009), 92.
11.Many articles from this period postulate that the basic reason for the slow pro
gress and corruption of Korean society is the absence of female education ("Yôhak ûihung
non" [Promotion of female education], Taehan maeil sinbo, Dec. 8，190う；"Yôja kyoyuk
non [An argument on female education], Taehan maeil sinbo, Aug.11，1908). One article
shows that the loss of political independence of Korea was due to the absence of female
education and to reclaim it, a female education system needed to be established to civilize
home and country ("Anakkun yôhakkyo ch'ansonghoe ch'wijiso [One document of sup
porting Anakkun girls high school], Taehan maeil sinbo’ Aug. 26，1908).
12. Tongnip sinmun, May 12,1896; Hwangsông sinmun, June 8，1899.
13. "Nation-state means the modern state model which is based on the "nation as

a constituent unit and historically originated from Europe in the eighteenth and nine
teenth centuries. It requires a distinct territory, political sovereignty of the state, the con

cept of people and domination of national unity, the national apparatus, and institutions
controlling political, economic, and cultural space, ana international relationships. Nishi
kawa Nagao, The Monstrous Nation, trans. Yun Tae-sôk (Seoul: Somyôngch ulp'an, 2002),
289-90.

14. According to research by Yi Kyong-ha, women from the yangban class usually
mastered the Korean alphabet as a basic foundation and read normative books for women,
such as \oryojon [Stories of virtuous women], Sohak [Elementary learning], and Yôsasô [Four

books for women]. Some women, though not too many, were presumed to try to read the
Confucian scriptures, such as Nonô [Analects], Maengja [Works of Mencius], Hyogyông

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[Book of filial piety], Chungyong [Doctrine of the mean], Sangsô [Book of history], and
Si^yông [Book of poetry]. Some were also known to attempt history books, such as Chun
ch'u [Spring and autumn annals], Sagi [Historical records], and literary books such as the
poetry of the classical Chinese poets Li Po (李白)and Tu Fu (杜甫).They would accumu
late Confucian knowledge and literary accomplishments based on an understanding of
Cninese characters. Yi Kyong-ha, Sipch'il segi sajok yosong ui hanmun saenghwal,ku
pop'yôn kwa t'ûksu" [The life in Chinese of women in yangban families in seventeenth
century: its university and specincity], Kugôkungmunhak [Korean language and literature],
140 (2005): 109.
15. According to the research of Kim Pu-ja, until 1932 female school attendance
was less than 10 percent and in 1942, after the colonial policy for women's education by
the Japanese government, female school attendance increased to 34 percent. However,
even in the late colonial period, two of three women were still outside the modern educa
tion system. Indeed, the benefits of education were basically considered a matter of class

under colonial policy. Kim Pu-ja, Hakkyô pak ui Chosôn yosongdul [Korean women outside

the school], trans. Cho Kyong-hui and Kim U-ja (Seoul: Ilojokak, 2009), 263-93.
16. "\oja ui kyoyuk non，，[An argument on female education], Hwangsôngsinmuny

Feb. 6，1908; "Yôja kyoyuk non [An aigument on female education], Taehan maeil sinbo,
Aug.11，1908; "\oja kup nodong sahoe ui chisik pogup [A way of supplying knowledge
to the society of women and workers], Taehan maeil sinbo, Dec. 29，1908.
17. Kim Chin-suk, "Nihon no 'ryôsai kenbo' to Kankoku no ‘kenbo lyôsai ni miru
joshi kyôikukan" [Analysis of women's education through Japan's good wife and wise
mother' and Korea's 'wise mother and good wire，], Nihon kindai kokka no seiritsu to jendày

ed. L/jne Mikito (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobô, 2003)，29-30. Kim Pu-ja argues that the reason
wise mother" comes before good wife in Korea is that the Confucian norm was more
strongly at work in Korea than in Japan, and that the establishment of the modern nation
state on the basis of political independence out of colonization was a more urgent neea in
Korea. These specific reasons indicate that Korea saw national integration as fundamental
and that the role of the wise mother in the family was highly regarded as a basic unit of
the nation. Kim Pu-ja, Hakkyo pak ui Choson yosongdul, 224-47.
18. Hayakawa Noriyo, "Ilbon ui kundaehwa wa yôsôngsang, namsongsang, kajok
sang mosaek" [Japanese modernization and the grouping of the model of female, male,
and family], Tong-Asia ui kungmin kukka hyôngsômkwa chendo-yosongpyosang ulchungsim

uro [Formation of the nation-state in East-Asia: focusing on the female representation],

trans. Yi Ùn-ju (Seoul: Somyôngch'ulpan, 2009), 39.
The Japanese idea of the "good wife and wise mother has been an active research
object in Japan. One representative study by Fukaya Masashi sees the "good wife and
wise mother" as a historical complex that Japanese modernization produced, combining
the traditional female figure of the common class based on Confucianism and the Western

female figure in the rise of modern nationalism. Furthermore, he sees the good wife and
wise mother" as a model for female education which emerged from imperial ideology,

Jiyoung Suh "New Woman" and Modernity in Colonial Korea 35

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which was the main part of the kokutai (國體)concept with “good morals and manners"
of the family system ana simplicity and robustness in secondary education. He appraises
it as a specific construct that negated the hierarchy between man and woman, unlike the
Confucian idea. This also extended female action to the public sphere, but still confined
the main space of female activities to the house unlike in Western society. Fukaya Masashi
(深谷昌志)，Ryôsai kenbo shugi no kyôiku [Education of the good wife and wise mother;
1966] (Tokyo: Reimei shobô, 1981), 11-12，145.
On the other hand, research by Koyama Shizuko criticizes the arguments by Fukaya
Masashi in that the logical relations between the kokutai conception and the “good wife and
wise mother," and between Confucian female virtues and the "good wife and wise mother,"
are lacking. She finds more similarities and continuities of the good wife and wise
mother" with Western ideas, not seeing it as a specific female norm of Japan. She presents

the division of gender roles based on the division of the public and the private as a principle
of the modern nuclear family, the estimation of women's intellectuality and personality
as qualifications of the educator, and the integration of women into the nation. Koyama
Shizuko, Ryôsai kenbo to iu kihan ["Good wife, wise mother" as a social norm; 1991]
(Tokyo: Keiso shobô, 2007), 1-9.
The wise mother and good wire in Korea was a Kind of newly constructed idea
strongly influenced by the Japanese good wife and wise mother," which was one tool of
the modern nation-state building project led in East Asia by Japan in the early twentieth

century, even though the vestiges of the traditional female virtues in the family in premodern

Korea could not be negated. It became the basis of colonial female education in Korea, which
aimed at producing conformist Korean female subjects after Japan's annexation of Korea
in 1910.

19. Among the previous studies of the wise mother and good wire in Korea, Hong
Yang-hui examines the characteristics of education for "wise mother and good wife
operated by the imperial ideology in colonial Korea. Kawamoto Aya looks into the recon
struction or wise mother and good wife through the combination of traditional virtues
and modern womanhood in the operation of modern national ideology by comparing the
wise mother and good wire in Korea and Japan. Hong Yang-hui, “Ilche sidae Chosôn ui
hyonmo yangch o yosonggwan ui yôn'gu [A study of wise mother and good wife in
colonial Korea] (M.A. thesis, Hanyang Univ., 1997); Kawamoto Aya, "Chosôn kwa Ilbon
esô ui hyonmo yangch o sasang e kwanhan pigyo yôn'gu" [A comparative study on the
idea or a wise mother and good wire in Choson and Japan from the age of enlighten
ment to the early 1940s] (M.A. thesis, Seoul National Univ., 1999). Pak Sôn-mi illustrates
the modern characteristics or wise mother and good wire and the historical position of
Korean New Women who were in the margin of the imperial but had a yearning for the
imperial metropolis and tried to reach the center of the colony. Pak Sôn-mi, Chosen josei
no chi no kaiyû—shokuminchi bunka shihai to Nihon ryûgaku. Kim Su-jin pays attention to

the fact that good wife and “housewife were taken as desirable icons of New Woman
after the late 1920s. Kim Su-jin, "Ch on'gubaek isamsimnyôndae sinyosong tamnon kwa

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sangjing ûi kusông." All of this pioneering research focuses on the features and historical
location of the "wise mother and good wire in colonial Korea, but the multi-sidedness of
the idea of "wise mother and good wife" has not yet been deeply analyzed in these studies.
This article focuses on the fundamental contradiction inherent in the idea of "wise mother

and good wife" from the feminist view and its transformation of significance and the
change of usage of "wise mother and good wife" through the stream of history.
20. See Tongnip sinmun，Hwangsong sinmun, Cheguk sinmun, and Taehan maeil
sinbo produced from 1898 to the 1900s.
21."Puin kaemyông il yôja kyoyuk non" [Enlightenment of women—an argument
on female education], Mansebo, July 8，1906.
22. Hong Yang-hûi, "Ilche sidae Chosôn ûi hyônmo yangch'ô yosonggwan ui
yôn'gu," 24-25.
23. A British historian, Richard Evans, looks into the relation between Western

nationalism and feminism in European history and argues that in northern European
countries such as Norway, Iceland, and Finland, where struggles for political indepen
dence in the nineteenth century were imperative, nationalism acted as a force or a catalyst
in the feminism movement. He adds that in Asian and Middle Eastern countries in the

1920s, bourgeois nationalism brought about the growth of feminist movements as in

Europe. Richard Evans, The Feminists: Women s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America

and Australasia 1840-1920, trans. Chông Hyôn-paek et al. (Seoul: Ch'angjak kwa pip yongsa,

1997)，126-330. Jayawardena also examines the connection of women's voluntary politi

cial action with the national struggle for independence against colonizers in the developing
world. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London:
Zed Books Ltd., 198b;, 22-24. However, there was an antinomic reaction between the
nationalistic project and gender in the "third world" in the early twentieth century.
Chandra Mohanty examines the historical context of nineteenth-century India under
Britain's colonial rule in which male-led social reform movements encouraged women's
entry into the public sphere, but legislated and regulated the sexuality of middle-class
women. She questions the collusion of colonialist and nationalist discourses in constructions

of Indian middle-class womanhood，stating that no noncontradictory or "pure" feminism

is possible. Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders; Decolonizing Theory, Practicing
Solidarity (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2003)，62-64. Daniz Kandiyoti also grasps
the Janus-like contradictions in the gender agenda of nationalism through the case of the
Middle East in the early twentieth century. Daniz Kandiyoti, "Identity and its Discontents:

Women and the Nation, in Nationalism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, vol.4，ed.
J. Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1489-1505.
In Korea, a former "third world" colony in the early twentieth century where politi
cal independence was urgently sought after, gender was closely tied with the nation. But in

the 1920s, some radical feminists awakened by gender consciousness at an individual level
confronted the conflicting tensions of patriarchal regulations and ideas of middle-class
male intellectuals based on nationalism and socialism.

Jiyoung Suh "New Woman" and Modernity in Colonial Korea 37

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 24. The arguments on nationalism and gender have not been actively discussed in
Korean academia so far, compared to Western and Middle Eastern scholarship, which
have mainly produced feminist and post-colonial theories. Most of all, the history depart
ments in Korea have generally not considered the "gender" category when dealing with an

agenda of the "nation." Rather, the issue of nationalism and gender has been discussed in
the fields of women's studies, anthropology, sociology, and literature. The works in these
areas pay attention to the conflicts between modern patriarchy and the New Woman and
point out the male-centered ideology of nationalism which appropriates or subordinates
"gender" through the case of the "comfort woman" or the so-called foreigner's whore.
Kim LJn-sil, "Minjok tamnon kwa yôsông—munhwa, kwôllyôk, chuch'e e kwanhan
pip'anjôk ilkki rul wihayô" [Nation and woman一for critical reading about culture, power,
and subject], Han'mk yosonghak [Korean women's studies],10 (1994); Yun Taek-nim,
"Minjokchuui tamnon kwa yosong一yôsôngjuui yôksahak e taehan siron [Nationalistic
discourses and woman——an essay on feminist historical studies], Hanyguk yosonghak,10
(1994); Elaine Kim and Chungmoo Choi, eds., Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean
Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997); Yi Na-yông, "Ch'ogukchok p'eminijum一
t'alsingminjuui p'eministù chongch'ihak ui hwakchang [Transnational feminism——
expansion of post-colonial feminist politics], Kyonge wa sahoe [Economy and society], 70
(2006). Meanwhile, researchers in the literary field have argued about the image of woman

represented by nationalism in literary texts, the appropriation of femininity/womanhood

in national and colonial discourses, and the collaboration of pro-Japanese New Women at
the end of the Japanese colonial era. Yi Chong-ok, "Mosong sinhwa, yosong ui ttodarun
ôgap kije一ilche kangjômgi munhak e nat'anan mosông tamnon ui han'gye" [A myth of
motherhood, another repressive mechanism of women——the limitation of the discourses
on motherhood in literature produced in the colonial period], Yôsông munhak yongu
[Feminism and Korean literature], 3 (2000); Sim しhin-kyông，"Yôsôngchak ka ch inn
sosôl yôn'gu" [A study of women writers' pro-Japanese short stories in the 1940s], Paedalmal
[Korean language], 32 (2003); Kim Yang-sôn, "Singminji sidae minjok ui chagi kusong
pangsik kwa yosong" [The self composition of the nation and woman in colonial period],
Han'guk nundae munhak yon gu [A study on modern Korean literature], 4，no. 2 (2003).
However, a full-scale study from a historical aoproach on the issue of nation and gender
throueh a temporally based investigation of the New Woman in the colonial period has
not been attempted yet.

25. Chewôl, "Puin ui kaksông i namja poda kin guphan soi [The reason the awak
ening of women is more urgent than that of men], \o]agye、vol.2: 3o-o7.
26. Man and woman are sexually and biologically different, so it was argued that
female education should develop female attributes well and make women perform their
mission as wise mothers and good wives perfectly. Yôja kyoyuk non" [Argument on female

education], Ydjag^e，3 (1918): 7-15. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Camondge:
Polity, 1988)，argues that the distinction between sexes is related to sexual subordination
wmch operates in modern civil society, impacting women's freedom and equality. The

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social contract in modern civil society confines civil liberty to the public sphere, but it is

overlapped with modern patriarchy, which produces a son's civil liberation from his
father's domination but renders women subordinate to the son.

27. Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), 7—37, points out that feminism was a
protest against the political exclusion of women through the assertion of equality between

man and woman, and its goal was to eliminate sexual difference. But at the same time,
feminism had to claim political rights for women constructed by sexual difference. Scott
calls this situation of reproducing sexual difference which feminism had tried to remove,
the paradox of feminism.
28. The first female socialist association in Korea, Chosôn Yosong Tonguhoe
(Choson Female Comrades Association) was formed in 1924. Kyôngsong Female Youth
Alliance was a more radical organization of the socialist movement led by some of the leaders

of the しhosôn Female Comrades Association, such as Hur Chông-suk and しhu Se-juK. Kim
Kyông-il,"Cn on gubaek isamsimnyôndae Han'guk ui sinyosong kwa sahoejuui, 256
57.

29. Alys Eve Weinbaum et al., eds., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption,

Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2008), 1-2. "Modern
uirls around the world in the 1920s had various equivalents, such as America's "flappers,

India's kallege ladkû Germany's neue Frauen, France's garçonnes，China's modem xiaojiey and

Japan's modan gàru. However, "Modern Girl' itself etymologically referred to the Asian
woman seeKing Western modernity. Modern しiris were a new breed of young women in
Asia who wore Westernized fashion and embodied the western lifestyles in the 1920s.
30. Pak Ro-a, "Saeroun kyonghyang ui yoin chômkyông" [One sketch on a new
type of woman], Pyôlgôngon (Nov. 1930): 92-93.
31.An Sôk-yông, "Yôsông p'alt'ae一modôn'gôl" [Eight figures of women一
Modern Girl], Chokwang (May 1937): 234.
32. Modern Girls in Korea were regarded as an example of colonial mimicry with
the prevalence of Japanese cultural ideas such as ero-guro-nansensu. The emergence of ero
guro-nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) in Japan indicated a turn to frivolous, glitzy, and
kitschy escapism against the background of economic depression in the late 1 aishô to early
Shôwa periods (the early to mid-1920s). The humor of ero-guro-nansensu expressed a self
consciously modern ethos that challenged state ideology and expansionism between the
leftist and right-wing parties in 1920s Japan. Oya Sôichi (八宅壯一)，"Ero-guro-nansensu
jidai [The era of erotic, grotesque nonsense], Bungei shunjû (July 1954): ol-o2. The
term modan gàru was introduced in Korea with ero-guro-nansensu and it is presumed to
have affected the Dirth or Modern Girls in Korea. In discourses by socialist intellectuals,
mobo (modern body), moga {modan ぬr«), ero-guro-nansensu, it (the naming of "Seoul"
from the American movie, It, connotating sexual attraction) were dealt with as the constitu

ents of decadent Japanese culture, a derivative of Americanism. O Sôk-ch'ôn, "Modômjum

manp'yông" [Satire on modernism], Sinmin (June 1931):29.

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 33. Fujime Yuki (藤目ゆき)，Sei no rikishigaku (Tokyo: Sanshinsa, 1998), 286.
34. Kitazawa Shuichi (北澤秀一)，"Modan gâru," Josei (1924.8): 227. Miriam
Silverberg, "Modern Girl as Militant," in Recreatim Japanese Women) 1600-1945, ed.
Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: Liniv. of California Press, 1991), 239-66, pays attention
to the subversive image of Japanese modan gàru who resisted gender and sexuality norms
in the 1920s.

35. Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman一Modernity, Media, and Women in
Interwar Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 76.
36. Barbara Sato, Modan gâru no tôjô to chishikijin" [The rise of the Modern v^irl
and the intellectual],Rekishi hyôron (1991.3): 18-20; Sato, The New Japanese Woman,
45-49.
37. Kitazawa Shuichi (北沢秀一）and Kiyosawa Kiyoshi (淸沢例，1890-1945)
recognized the realization of the liberal self by the modan mru who pursued rationality
and progressivity without being shackled to tradition, though Kiyosawa has more critical
views on the modan gàru than Kitazawa. Kitazawa Shuichi, "Modan gâru [Modern Girl],
Josei (Aug. 1924): 227; Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, "Modan gàru" [Modern Girl], Josei (Dec.
1927): 123-37. Meanwhile, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (平林初之輔，1892-1932) analyzed
the social grounds which produced the moaan gàru in Japan: the formation of popular
culture, including film, and the development of new technologies such as mass printing
and record manufacturing. Hirabayasni Hatsunosuke, "Ken'i hôkaiki no fujin—Modan
gâru hassei no shakaiteki konkyo [Married women in the period of social collapse一The
rise of the Modern birl and her social context], Hujin koron (1928): 3; Sato, "Modan gâru
no tôjôo to chishiKijin," 24.
38. Pak Ro-a, "Saeroun kyônghyang ui yôin chômkyông," 92-93; An Sôk-yông,
"Yôsông p'alt'ae—modôn'gôl," 234.
39. Kim Su-jin argues that Modern Girls in Korea were a symbol representing the
vanity and "supernciality of New Women and were closer to an imaginational object
than a real one. She concludes it was a discursive construct that reflected the incomplete

and "bad imitation of modernity in colonial Korea. Kim Su-jin, "Ch on'gubaek isamsim
nyôndae sinyôsông tamnon kwa sangjing ui kusông," 272-311. The suggestion that Modern

Girls in Korea were not substantial, but rather a sign of the excessive discourses of modernity

waged by male intellectuals has been raised. But Modern Girls were not just a discursive
product but real beings, and this historical fact compels us to further inquire into the
various modes of Modern Girls in colonial Korea.

40. Women are the material of spectacle, which serves the male desire of visually
enjoying them. At this time, the ability to make a scrupulous examination of the female
body presupposes male dominance, which controls the actual culture and produces a
cultural image by this gendered perspective. Susanna D. Walters, Material Girls: Making
Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory, trans. Kim Hyon-mi et al. (Seoul: Ttohana ui Munhwa,
2001), 85-91.
41.Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,

Korean Studies VOLUME 3712013

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1995), 61-90. In the early twentieth century, the implications of Modern Girls in nation
alistic discourses in East Asia, such as China and Japan, have similar aspects. For the argu

ments on the New Woman and Modern Girl in China, see Sarah E. Stevens, "Figuring
Modernity: 丁he New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China," Feminist
Formations,15，no. 3 (2003): 82-103.
42. Im In-saeng, "Modônijûm" [Modernism], Pyolgon'gon (Jan. 1930): 140.
43. Chu Yo-sôp, "Sinyôsông kwa kuyôsông ui haengno" [Paths of the New Woman
and the Old-Fashioned Woman], Sinyôsông (Jan. 1933): 34.
44. "Hwajôn'ga" [A song of flower pancakes], Kyubang kasa-1 [A lady's narrative
poem-1],ed. Kyôn Yong-ch ol(The Academy of Korean Studies, 1979)，363-64.
45. According to the article "Sinyosong kwa kuyosong [New Woman and Old
Fashioned woman] by Sim Ùn-suk in Yosong (June 1936)，a distinction or the New
and the Old" became a new criterion of social distinction, besides that of wealth and poverty
or that of high and low status in Korea. Old-Fasnioned Women abused New Women and
New Women despised Old-Fashioned Women, so the history of Korean women can be
seen as the history of conflicts between New Women and Old-Fashioned Women," such
as the relation between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, between daughters-in-law, and
between mother and daughter. The article "Mulbyorak majun sinsik myonuri" [A new type
of daughter-in-law who is poured over with water] by Hong Son-p'yo in Sinyosong (Jan.
1933) satirically described the breakup of one New Woman's marriage due to the conflicts
between mother-in-law (Old-Fashioned Woman) and daughter-in-law (New Woman).
46. Pak O-hûi, "Sin'gu kachong saenghwal ui changchom kwa tancnom [Merits
and defects in the new and old forms of marriage life], PyoLgon'gon (Dec. 1929): 27.

47. "Che i buin" [The second wife], Sinyôsông (Feb. 1933): 12-21. One of the pre
vious studies on New Woman as a second wife in the colonial period is Jung Ji Young's
"Ch'ôn' gubaek isamsimnyôndae singyôsông kwa 'Ch'ôp/Che i buin': Singminji kùndae
chayu yône kyôlhon ui kyôlyôl kwa singyosong ui haengwisong ['Concubine' or ‘second
wife，?： New woman and the rupture of love marriage in colonial Korea from 1920s to
1930s], Hanguk Yôsônghak [Korean Women's Studies], Vol.22, no. 4 (2006).
48. "Myong'il ul yaksokhanun sinsidae ui ch'ônyô chwadamhoe" [A round table of
girls promising tomorrow in a new age], Sinyôsông (Jan. 1933).

49. "Yosong munje chwadamhoe" [A round table about women's problems],

Sindonga (Nov. 1930): 81-83.
50. Kim Su-jin argues that the good wife" became a symbol of desirable imitation
to New Women in the 1930s through the analysis of the magazine Sinyôsông, including
the active strategies or New Women. Kim Su-jin, "Ch on'gubaeK isamsimnyôndae sinyôsông

tamnon kwa sangcning ui Kusông," 345-91. But more investigation is needed on how
the discourses on the "good wire collide with those on the "wise mother" or the images
intermingled between tne traditional" and "the modern in reality.
51.In the case of Japan, the idea of the "good wife" and ‘ wise mother" summoned
by the modern nation-state ideology established a modern housewife group based on the

Jiyoung Suh "New Woman" and Modernity in Colonial Korea 41

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new middle class of the same period. Kawamoto, "Chosôn kwa Ilbon esô ui hyônmo
yangch'ô sasang e kwanhan pigyo yôn'gu,"19.
52. Chu Yo-sôp, "Sinyôsông kwa kuyôsông ui haengno," 34-35.
53. Kim Yu-kyông, "Yôsông cnigop munje" [The problem of women's occupa
tions], Sinyôsông (Nov. 1924); Yi Ùn-sang, "Chosôn ui yôsông un Chosôn ui mosông"
[Korean women are Korean motherhood], Sinyosong (July 1925); Pak Sun-ok, "Yosong
kwa chigop [Women and occupations], Sinyosong (Nov. 1931); "Chigop puin munje
t'ûkchip" [The special feature of women's occupations], Sinyosong (April 1933). Yun
So-yong argues that the "wise mother and good wire in Korea thought much of being
a wise mother who would be an affectionate educator, giving modern knowledge to
children, while the "good wife and wise mother" in Japan placed stress on the role of
being a good wife as an equal partner based on Western monogamy rather than that of a
patriarchal mother. Yun So-yông, "Kundae kukka hyôngsônggi Han-Il ui hyônmo yang
ch'ô ron，，[A study on the ‘wise mother and good wife' in Korea and Japan in the modern
nation-state building period一concerning the similarity and différence], Korean National
Movement History’ 44 (Association of Korean National Movement History, 2005), 95
11b. This view prompts consideration of the Korean situation, which kept to the tradi
tional role of a woman as a mother within the family.

54. "Hakpuhyông kkiri ûi yôhaksaeng munje chwadamhoe [A round table about

schoolgirls among parents of students], Sinyosong (June 1931). Chôn Mi-kyong seizes the
reconstruction of scientific mothering, paying attention to the wise mother," which society
put more emphasis on, rather than to the "good wife." Chon Mi-kyong, "Ch on'gubaek
isamsimnyondae hyonmo yangch o e kwanhan yôn'gu一hyônmo yangch o ui tu olgul,
toeôyaman hanun hyonmo, toegosip un yangch o [Discourse on the wise mother and
good wife" in the 1920-1930s一Women's ambivalence about the roles of wise mother
and good wife], Hanguk kajongkwallihak [Korean home management], 22, no. 3 (2004):
75-93.

55. Shin Yông-ch'ôl, "Hyônhae tangmyonhan Chosôn yosong ui samdaenan

[Three problems the current New Women face], Sinyôsông (Nov. 1931): 16-17.
56. Yi Ch'un-kang, "Mihon namnyôdul i paranûn namp yon, paranun anhae [A
desirable husband and wife for single men and women], Sinyosong (May 1924); Cho
Che-ho, "Anhae ui to" [The way of the wife], Sinyosong (Sept. 1933).
57. "Ch'onggak chwadamhoe" [A round table of bachelors], Sinyosong (Feb. 1933);
"Modôn namnyô ûi kyôlhon isang" [An ideal of marriage among modern young people],
Pyôlgôn ygon (1930): 5.

58. Pak Hui-do, "Chosôn ui sinyôsông i chil tokt'ukhan ch'aegim kwa uimu" [The
peculiar responsibilities and obligations of Korean New Women], Sin'gwang (Jan. 1931):
22-23.

59. The "wise mother and good wife" in 1930s Korea is deeply related to colonialism
and class issues, but needs to be examined more closely in future work.

60. The socialist intellectual groups redefined the true New Woman as a new Kind

42 Korean Studies VOLUME 37 12013

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of enthusiastic woman from the proletariat class with a strong class consciousness. They
insisted that New Woman should create new conditions to thereby resist all unreasonable
situations in opposition to the Old-Fashioned Woman, who submitted to the exploitation
of her sex by man, and the bourgeois ethics, after criticizing the arguments of women's
rights based on the ideas of liberty and equality led by the bourgeois class {Chosôn ilbo,
Jan. 4，1926).
61.Ch'oi In-hwa, "Kugajông puin i pon yôhaksaeng" [A schoolgirl seen from the
eyes of an Old-Fashioned Woman], Sinyôsông (April 1926): 42-43.
62. Particularly, on a war footing after the mid-1930s, New Women working in the
public sphere were confronted with historical dilemmas in the colonial context. When
some of the leading New Women were mobilized to the political sphere, the conflicts
and tensions between nation(alism) and gender or between equality and the difference of
the sexes in the mainstream of the women's movement were dismantled by Japanese im
perialism. Colonial officials utilized the weak points of New Women in the colony, such as

the lack of gender equality in reality or a woman's desire to be a "subject" of Imperial

Japan. The collaboration of some celebrated New Women with the imperial government
cannot be explained by a single reason, but shows how the essentialization of gender could
conspire with the dominant power system beyond national borders. Sim Chin-kyông,
"Yosong chakka ch mil sosôl yôn'gu." The issue of the pro-Japanese collaboration of
New Women deserves a separate discussion.
63. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 64.

Jiyoung Suh "New Woman" and Modernity in Colonial Korea 43

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