Korean Women: In a Struggle for Humanization (review)

144BOOK REVIEWS enees to the debilitating impact of Korea's domestic factions on state policy, and his brief but important discussion of the British policy of consistently undermining Korean sovereignty by insisting on treating the country as a part of the Chinese domain, will be of interest to both Koreanologists and those with broader interests . Vipan Chandra Wheaton College NOTES 1.Young-Ick Lew, "American Advisers in Korea, 1885-1894: An Evaluation of Their Contribution to Korean Modernization," a paper presented at the Sixth Conference on Korea , "The United States and Korea," November 4-6, 1976, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, p. 1. 2.Ibid. 3.See Lien-sheng Yang, "Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order," in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 33. 4.English Works by C. I. Eugene Kim and Han-Kyo Kim, Hilary Conroy, Yur-Bok Lee, Martina Deuchler, Choe Ching Young, Fred Harvey Harrington, Andrew Malozemoff , Frederick M. Nelson, James B. Palais, and Mary C. Wright have covered various aspects of this rivalry. Swartout, in fact, often quotes them or relies upon them. Korean Women: In a Struggle for Humanization. Edited by Harold Hakwon Sunoo and Dong Soo Kim. Memphis, Tennessee: Association of Korean Christian Scholars in North America, 1978. vi, 301 pp. $6.00. The editors of this volume are dedicated to revealing the discrimination and oppression that the women of Korea suffered throughout the Yi dynasty (1392-1910 a.d.) and continue to experience at present. The editors, who find sexism nonChristian and advocate "Korean women's liberation with historical mandates, and . . . campaign for their rights with moral precision" (p. 3), have brought together the ten chapters in this book as a part of that campaign. The Christian bias of some of the contributors borders on the polemical, but this is also the most unique feature of the book. The specific topics of the chapters are as diverse as the chapters are uneven in quality. However, each chapter seems to have been selected to disclose yet another facet of the dehumanizing sexual discrimination pervasive in Korean culture and society, and to rally support for the liberation of Korean women. The undertaking might have been overambitious, though, for the book suffers from a lack of thematic integration, except at the most general level suggested in its title. It also suffers from differences in analytical perspectives and degrees of sophistication among the contributors. Still, the book is an important one, for it focuses on women from a wide range of circumstances and time periods, both in BOOK REVIEWS145 Korea and America. It is important on another account: it links the liberation movement of Korean women with similar movements in other societies, as well as making available to interested outsiders information on events and trends in the movement among Koreans both at home and abroad. The first chapter, "The Status of Women in Traditional Korean Society" (pp. 1 1-37), by Soon Man Rhim, is perhaps the most strident in tone. It is a litany against the wrongs done to the ordinary women of Korea throughout the Yi dynasty and, with little improvement, at the present. Rhim cites as an example of the double oppression Korean women have suffered in times of national crisis the historical mass humiliation of some two hundred thousand Korean women between the ages of seventeen and twenty who were drafted by the Japanese during World War II to service their soldiers as prostitutes. He cites the Confucian ideology that underlies the structure and values of traditional Korean society as providing the primary motivation for the enslavement and dehumanization of Korean women. The women who survived the ordeal of forced prostitution and battlefield conditions could not go home, for they bore the stigma of prostitution . Singling out the institution of marriage as the most illustrative of the kinds of oppression women of Korea have had to endure, Rhim tallies up a long list of its features to prove his point. They are: parental selection of husbands; class endogamy ; prohibition of remarriage to divorcees and widows; prohibition of marriage to former palace women; legal and social discrimination against concubines and their children; the...