Organizer and Chair: Theodore Jun Yoo, University of Hawaii
Discussant: Barbara J. Brooks, City University of New York, City College
This panel examines how Korean women
from different socio-economic backgrounds experienced the tumultuous period
of Japanese colonialism. The emergence of the “new woman”, professional housewife, working woman, and factory
girl was intricately connected to rapid industrialization, an explosion of urban
culture and values, and technological innovation. What distinguished Korean
women’s experiences, however, was their dual confrontation with modernity
and colonial power, which was often concealed, disguised, and manipulated
within newly demarcated spaces. The papers examine the interplay between
Korean women and the intrusive colonial apparatus that sought to impose a certain
kind of modernity on their ideas, relationships, social behavior, and bodies.
As women increasingly crossed the thresholds of the home and entered new public
spaces, they challenged traditional gender roles, bringing questions of modern
womanhood to the forefront of public discourse.
Hyaeweol Choi, Arizona State University
Girl students (yohaksaeng) took center stage in the discourse on modern womanhood
in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Korea. They symbolized modernity, representing
a new era, culture, and society. The public was especially fascinated by
a small group of women who ventured into Japan, China, Europe, and the U.S.
for advanced study; at the same time, these young women caused great anxiety
about the new and the modern. The paper explores the dynamic flow of ideas
and images of girl students that constituted an important part of gender
politics at the intersection of modernity, nationalism, and colonialism.
Given that the print media was one of the driving forces in constructing new
womanhood, the paper first probes the representational strategies the media
used in portraying girl students and the ways in which those strategies interplayed
with Koreans’ desire for
the modern and nationalistic goals under the Japanese colonial rule. Second,
it focuses on some of the examples of women who went overseas for advanced degrees
and examines the multifaceted meaning studying overseas had for these women
in their effort to create a new modern womanhood. Exploring the divergent lives
they led in public and in private, the paper discusses the ways in which women’s
experience of studying overseas was actively employed and appropriated in
shaping gender and national politics.
Janice Kim, York University
In colonial Korea (1910-1945), industrialization offered new forms of work
but did not drastically transform the extent of women’s duties. While
the family remained a productive unit, the structural changes and transformations
of labor brought on by industrialization and commercialization necessitated
the familial adoption of the wage system. Modernization did not initiate women’s
work but merely differentiated between paid and unpaid forms of labor, arguably
diminishing the value of domestic labor altogether. To portray how modern economic
development influenced women in early twentieth-century Korea, I examine women’s
work in the contexts of family economies, meaning the domestic modes of production
organized around households. A woman’s role in household production depended
on her marital status and life stage; women’s work also differed for mothers
and daughters. Aside from their unpaid domestic duties, married women took on
jobs flexible enough for simultaneous childcare, such as household industrial
labor, agricultural wage work, urban service work, and employment in small-
to medium-scale food processing and rubber factories which hired part-time and
seasonal workers. Many unmarried women remained in domestic service but more
entered factories, as emerging light industrialists favored the employment of
younger, more “docile” women. This development coincides with the
last issues of inquiry: the emergence and expansion of female wage labor in
the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, I interpret why these women entered into wage
work, their rationales and motivations, all of which strongly suggests that
women’s contributions to political economies were moved by familial ties.
Jennifer Jung-Kim, Occidental College
In the early 20th century, café waitresses (K: yogup, J: jokyu) did more
than just wait on tables. Instead, they epitomized the commodification of sexuality.
\ Looking like glamorous movie stars, they circulated among tables, poured alcohol,
served food, laughed and flirted with customers, and sang popular songs to lure
customers and maintain their patronage. Cafés and café waitresses
had been introduced to Korea through Japan. According to Miriam Silverberg,
there were some 112,000 jokyu in Japan by 1936. Most were in their late teens
or early 20s, and had become jokyu out of financial need. Silverberg says jokyu
built a strong sense of community and spoke roughly among themselves in a gender-inverting
act of self-empowerment. While there were fewer yogup in Korea, they also tried
to gain agency through guilds and other collective actions. One notable effort
was the magazine Yo song (Woman’s Voice, 1934), with eloquent articles
written by yogup demanding respect. One writer pointed out that café waitresses
were modern workers, just like store clerks and office clerks. She called
on yogup to rethink their profession and empower themselves. Yogup may have
been sexualized and exoticized, but they were not just passive victims. Examining
Yo song and other magazine and newspaper articles of the time, this paper
will see how yogup were constructed as a part of the new urban, consumer
culture and how they sought to reconstruct themselves as modern working women.
Theodore Jun Yoo, University of Hawaii, Manoa
My paper examines an emerging consumer culture, especially in the areas of
fashion, manners, and sociability, which began to reshape gender relations
in colonial Korea. It seeks to understand the rapidly changing metropolis
built around visual spectacles (modern buildings, public conveyances, banks,
department stores, and cafes), new people (the “crowd,” consumers,
and urban workers), and movement (shopping, strolling, gazing, and the circulation
of commodities). As these ilsang ui konggan (everyday spaces) proliferated,
they not only blurred the boundaries between public and private spaces; they
transformed mundane acts like shopping into a sensuous, thrilling, and exciting
experience, dramatically altering the everyday fabric of social relations
between people and things. More specifically, I will focus on the inner dynamics
of the department store and its promotion of fashion and consumption, both
largely gendered as the exclusive domains of women, and a concern among social
commentators who called for social control and the rationalization of spending.
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