Finding Korean Women's Voices in Legal Archives

Despite the growing consciousness of women's changing position in modern Korean society, much of gender relations remains under the shadow of the Confucian legacy that dominated Korea's final dynasty, the Chosŏn (1392–1910), up to the Japanese annexation in 1910. Although the Confucian transformation of Chosŏn society was uneven and gradual, studies have shown its extensive impact on ideological, political, and institutional developments, as well as on socio-familial changes.¹ The cultural, social, and legal patterns of Chosŏn women's lives were influenced and shaped by the Confucianizing process, resulting in a deep-rooted image of repressed women as their status in both family and society was weakened due to the steady penetration of Confucian patriarchy and patrililneality.

A few studies in the field of Korean history have recently challenged this conventional outlook on Chosŏn women, claiming that heavy reliance on official documents and writings by the privileged upper class may not be sufficient to validate the broader representation of ordinary Chosŏn women's lives. While there has been scholarly consensus about the necessity of extending research on Chosŏn women into the realm of the non-elite population,² however, the dearth of sources on illiterate, ordinary people has limited scholars to probing the roles and discourse of elite women, overlooking the lives of their non-elite counterparts in the far larger population.³ It is therefore not surprising to encounter difficulty in discerning voices from women of the past, especially those socially marginalized non-elites, both in teaching and studying Korean history.

To circumvent this double-folded methodological challenge—namely, the Confucian-victimized and elite/male-centered perspectives on Chosŏn women—I use Korean legal sources in my classes. Specifically, I am turning to nineteenth-century legal testimonies and inquest reports as a way of approaching the lives of Chosŏn women and offering students a more tangible picture of "how they actually lived."⁴ Most of the primary sources used by historians of Chosŏn Korea are official histories or other writings by male elites, whereas these legal reports are a unique repository of the voices of people from all walks of life. Consisting of a detailed postmortem exam as well as trial records, each legal case carries amazingly vivid testimony in colloquial form, just as modern courtroom transcriptions do, transmitting the vivacity of intact statements. In general, a report begins with an account of dispatching officials to the scene of death, followed by a detailed record of the autopsy process and its outcome. The report continues with the testimonies of all the principals and witnesses involved in the death—testimonies that were given in pubic and recorded in a conversational style so that the reader feels like a member of the audience, listening. The report ends with a postscript by the magistrate in charge, consisting of a review of the incident, analysis of the motivations behind it, enumeration of the punishments appropriate to the crime, and moral exhortation.

The specific case I have presented in my undergraduate course, "Introduction to Historical Interpretation: Women and Gender in East Asia to 1945," is the 1866 legal record of a homicide caused by a wife's adultery with a neighboring widower.⁵ Students immediately link this nineteenth-century murder case to the popular CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) TV series, and find it extremely rich in its continuous negotiations over human interests. They are amazed by the meticulous postmortem report, which begins with a description of the place the body was found and a detailed examination of the corpse, from hair to toenails, to determine the true cause of the death. They are also fascinated by the voices of ordinary people (in this case the jealous husband, unfaithful wife, and shameless widower) who have until now been mostly invisible in the scenes of Korean history.

Close reading of the stories inadvertently preserved in the lines of such legal testimonies enables students to discover sexual and familial practices that existed outside of archetypal Confucian marriage patterns, especially among women of the lower strata of the population. As students...