Women Educating Women: Class, Feminism, and Formal Education in the Proletarian Writing of Hirabayashi Taiko and Kang Kyŏng-ae

The concept of a modern literature in Japan and Korea, much like the concept of modernity itself, was an inherently gendered one. And nowhere was the gendered nature of emergent modernity more explicit than in portrayals of women in prose fiction. Canonical novels such as Yi Kwang-su’s Mujŏng (The heartless, 1917) and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Chijin no ai (A fool’s love, 1924) were clear examples of the manner in which this new guise of womanhood was received as a corollary to the creation of a modern nation-state. In Mujŏng, for example, Sheila Miyoshi Jager suggests that the protagonist Hyŏng-sik’s “obsession with the state of Yŏng-chae’s body and its ambiguous purity is a central focus of the novel and plays a central role in Hyŏng-sik’s struggles with his (and the nation’s) identity.”¹ But while works by well-known male writers have already been the subject of countless detailed studies, we have yet to elucidate fully how women writers, as women who were themselves subject to the gendered ideologies of modernity, may have comprehended their own positions in the turbulent periods of transition that characterize the first half of the twentieth century in East Asia.

The discussion that follows looks at how proletarian women writers in both Japan and Korea became disenchanted with preexisting identities for women, denoted by labels such as “New Woman” (atarashii onna; shin yŏsŏng), “modern girl” (modan gāru; modŏn kŏl), “good wife, wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo; hyŏnmo yangch’ŏ) and “schoolgirl” (jogakusei; yŏhaksaeng). While on the one hand these archetypes symbolized women’s liberation, on the other they were inextricable from the politically charged discourses of modernity, education, and family that often saw women as tools to be used to advance national goals. In their work, proletarian women writers sought to educate other women both practically and ideologically, not merely by prompting them to question what lay beneath formal education for women, but also by representing a large group of women who had been absent from writing culture. By putting the lives of proletarian women into their texts, proletarian women writers set out to educate both proletarian women and women from the privileged classes by exposing the realities of life and the difficulties of feminist struggle for those women in Japan and Korea who found themselves at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Moreover, despite a wealth of scholarship on East Asia, research on leftist women writers is conspicuously absent. There have been few book-length studies of women’s leftist writing, and no comparative work. Yet comparative research on this historical period is important both as a means of uncovering the often silent history of shared struggle between proletarian women writers in Japan and Korea, and also as a means of destabilizing narratives that reinforce a polarized view of the region’s history. In this sense, the issues discussed here resonate with Vera Mackie’s statement that scholars of East Asia should begin to look at transnational “flows of influence and adaptation . . . and the structured economic and political relationships of inequality which link these places and shape the destinies of the men and women who reside there.”²

By focusing on the work of two proletarian women writers, the Japanese writer Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–72) and the Korean writer Kang Kyŏng-ae (1906–44), this article aims to give a new perspective on how women in both nations grappled with the same issues in their work, in particular how these writers negotiated a transition of sorts from the earlier feminism of the New Woman to the radical feminism of the proletarian woman. But while leftist women writers questioned women’s identities as national subjects amidst competing patriarchal ideologies, we should also be mindful of the implicit complication of these writers as a product of the nation-state themselves.

Modernizing Women

Throughout the 1910s and 1920s in East Asia, notions of “womanhood,” or of “femininity,” were...