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BOOK REVIEWS153 Korea since 1945, efforts that received much impetus in 1975 through the U.N.sponsored International Women's Year. Although the IWY helped to crystalize a public interest in women's issues, an interest that has been growing since the early 1970s, women's issues are usually overshadowed in Korea by many other issues that compete for national attention. Internally, the movement is factionalized into three types: the patriarchal traditionalists, the liberal feminists, and the radical emancipationists. As might be expected, the public has shown the greatest receptivity to the liberal feminists and the greatest hostility to the adherents of radical emancipation. Although the status of women in Korea has been improving generally, it remains fundamentally the same, the author asserts. For example, although the constitution bars sexual discrimination, the laws of inheritance completely ignore this prohibition. In economic production, particularly in labor, extreme discrimination and exploitation of women continue unchecked and sometimes are encouraged actively by the government, as in the case of prostitution for foreign tourists. The author warns that given the historical practices of sexual discrimination against women still current in Korea, future efforts to liberate them must involve the working-class women and be integrated with other movements to liberate the oppressed, both male and female. The last chapter, "Sexuality, Womanhood, and Humanization from SocioPsychophysiological Perspectives: Selected Bibliography" (pp. 283-301) was prepared by Dong Soo Kim and is admittedly drawn from works in the American context, probably because there does not yet exist in Korean a significant body of work on women's issues. However, the author provides two Korean sources for material in Korean. Speaking now of the book as a whole, it certainly succeeds resoundingly in its purpose of revealing the oppression suffered by Korean women in the past and at present, both at home and abroad, although it is not without some serious faults. For instance, one wishes that the book were indexed, and its expressed Christian bias may irritate some readers. It is an important book in the cause of Korean women's liberation. Youngsook Kim Harvey Chaminade University of Honolulu Letters in Exile: The Life and Times of Yun Ch'i-ho. Edited by Hyungchan Kim. Oxford, Georgia: The Oxford Historical Shrine Society, 1980. v, 163 pp. History is often rather unkind to its contemporaries, and it sometimes fails to appreciate those who are ahead of their time. Yun Ch'i-ho may have been such a man. He was one of the giants who left his stamp on modern Korea. But because 154BOOK REVIEWS of strange twists of history, he remains discredited in the eyes of many nationalist Koreans of the present generation. His role as a foremost reformer in the transition from traditional to modern Korea has so far escaped the attention of any serious study. Justly or unjustly, in the eyes of many Koreans he still bears the stigma of having been a Japanese collaborator. Be that as it may, we historians cannot ignore Yun Ch'i-ho; his life was all too closely intertwined with the fate of modern Korea. In his public career, which lasted from the 1880s until 1945, Yun symbolized his time and his country better than anyone, and he personally shared agonies and frustrations of Korea's modern history. Even a skeletal outline of his life and career will demonstrate his importance to the history of modern Korea. Yun Ch'i-ho was born in 1864 as a son of Yun Ung-yöl, who had risen to prominence through the military ranks. In 1881, when he was only sixteen, Yun went to Japan to study. He made special efforts there to learn English, until Lucius Foote, the first United States minister to Korea, chose him as his interpreter. When he returned to Korea with the American envoy in May 1883, Yun was probably the first Korean ever to have a reasonable command of the English language. But his return to his country was short-lived. Although not directly involved with the abortive coup of 1884, Yun was compelled to leave Korea because of his close association with Kim Ok-kyun and other coup leaders. In January of 1885 Yun...

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