Thursday 17 January
4:00-5:30pm
C.K. Choi Building Conference
Room #120,1855 West Mall
By Professor Hyaeweol Choi (Arizona State University)
A new moral order in
late 19th century Korea began to question if Confucian-prescribed
gender relations would be appropriate for a modern nation-state. The “inside-outside rule” (naewoebŏp) was one of the frequent targets of male intellectuals in
critiquing the traditionally defined domain of women—the private. The
development of print media was an important vehicle for advocating the idea of
gender equality and women’s participation in the public sphere. In parallel
with this discourse of enlightenment-oriented intellectuals on new womanhood,
there was a group of American missionary women who were engaging in
“modernizing” Korean women through educational, medical and evangelical work in
public. To women missionaries, the
world was their “household” to practice the ideal of universal benevolence,
offering them unprecedented opportunities for power and authority that were not
available at home. Betokening the ideal
of Christian-prescribed gender equality, these missionary women have often been
recognized by Koreans as pioneers in introducing modern womanhood. Yet, there
is a lack of understanding of how they perceived and imagined the modern and
how they understood the rapidly changing horizon for women in US society at the
time. In this presentation, I focus on the complex layers of the discourses
initiated by these two paralleled forces, examining the ways in which they
challenge, re-examine or appropriate so-called traditional womanhood—being
either Confucian or Victorian—by evoking ‘new’ womanhood. I pay close attention
to the fluid, conflicting and symbiotic relations between the public and the
private arena in repositioning women for nationalist or Christian ideas.
Professor Hyaeweol Choi did her BA and MA at Yonsei University, Korea, and her Ph.D. at State University of New
York at Buffalo. She is currently an associate professor at Arizona State University. Her recent publications include “A New Moral Order:
Discourse on Gender Equality in Korean Christianity,” in Religions of Korea in Practice, ed. Robert Buswell (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006) and “Christian Modernity in Missionary Discourse from
Korea, 1905-1910,” East Asian History
29 (June 2005).