A History of Korea (72 page)

KOREAN FEMALES IN THE NEW AGE

The most dramatic impact of the urbanization, industrialization, and increased availability of education in the 1920s might have been experienced by women. These changes affected mostly those females in the cities, but extended to the rural areas as well. In both environments, Korean females as a whole found room to explore new life paths and claim a greater role in determining their own lives. It marked the beginning of an unfolding of female subjectivity that, through its development in fits and starts the rest of the twentieth century, would leave a major imprint on how Koreans came to view gender roles in the modern era.

The most distinctive type of woman in the 1920s went by the terms “new woman” or “modern girl,” a phenomenon visible in contemporary Japan and China as well. Concentrated in Seoul, these females shared a background of having been educated in the major cities (though often they had moved from the countryside), a strong consumerist orientation, and family connections to the new social elite, often through marriage to urban professionals. The New Woman appeared frequently in the contemporary literature, often portrayed in contrast—and not always flatteringly—to the more traditional women who still constituted the overwhelming majority, as an allegory on the choices and dilemmas presented by the rapidly changing world. They also appeared in articles, notices, and advertisements in the burgeoning publishing sector targeting their bourgeois lifestyles. These publications included women’s magazines that dished out advice on everything from fashion to hygiene. Most of the readers were either students or graduates of the growing number of girls’ secondary schools in the urban centers, and some could point to an experience of schooling abroad, especially in Japan, as the source of their worldly perspectives and tastes.

The urban, educated women not only appeared as emblems and consumers of the publishing world, but also as producers. Female authors, translators, essayists, and critics contributed to the construction of a distinctively modern Korean literary culture, the most formative period for which was the 1920s. New magazines and literary journals, such as
New Woman
(
Sin Y
s
ng
), catered
to women’s interests and provided a forum for female writers. Na Hyes
k, though known better for her paintings and essays, also expressed her ideals of female emancipation through poetry and short stories, the earliest of which was published in 1918. Renowned female contemporaries included Kim Iry
p, who also founded in 1920 Korea’s first women’s journal, Kim My
ngsun, whose novels explored the depths of female subjectivity, and later in the 1930s, Kang Ky
ngae, a realist storyteller whose works depicted the plight of Korea’s underclass.

Korean women also made their mark in the realm of the arts. City dwellers eventually came to know of Yun Simd
k, for example, the great singer whose concerts became lavish spectacles, and of Ch’oe S
ngh
i, the dancer who mesmerized audiences throughout the world before working as a propagandist for Japan’s war effort in the 1940s. Na Hyes
k was the third figure in this famed Korean triumvirate of female artists of the colonial period. Having demonstrated her precociousness as a school girl from a well-to-do Seoul family, she went to Japan in her late teens to enroll in a girls’ art school. She returned to her homeland just in time to get caught up in the 1919 March First Movement, which derailed her career path as an artist, however briefly. After getting married under the condition—unheard of at the time—that she be allowed to continue her artistic career, Na developed her talents further by displaying her works in various exhibitions, including the solo exhibition of her own works in 1921. Motherhood and a brief move to Manchuria to follow her husband, who had become a diplomat in the Japanese empire, curbed her artistic activities somewhat. By the late 1920s, however, Na was on the move again, this time on a whirlwind tour through Europe with her husband, where in Paris she trained further in oil painting techniques. In Paris she also became involved in a scandalous affair with a well-known Korean nationalist figure, and within a year after her return to Korea in 1929, her husband divorced her, and she lost custody of her children. Although she experienced a few successes as a professional painter thereafter, her artistic career eventually suffered from a lack of public interest, and she lived out her life in obscurity, much of it in Buddhist temples, until her death in 1946.