Organizer and Chair: Donald N. Clark, Trinity University
Discussant: Laurel Kendall, American Museum of Natural History
Christianity has been a major influence in modern Korean history, particularly in the twentieth century under Japanese rule and more recently, during South Korea’s rapid urbanization and economic development. This panel addresses the influence of Christianity before liberation from Japan, when it appealed to certain emerging communities as an alternative to traditional ideologies and Japanese imperialism. It considers the transmission of Christianity to Korean women through missionary education and contacts between foreigners and Koreans. Hyaeweol Choi discusses Christian ideas as formative influence on new ideals of womanhood, paying special attention to the modern education. Sheila Jager discusses the way Christian ideas helped change Korean women’s ideas of their relation to the community and state. Donald Clark’s paper offers cases of the different types of relationships that developed between foreign and Korean women Christians, both Protestant and Catholic.
Hyaeweol Choi, Smith College
The relationship between Korean women and American women missionaries at the turn of the century provides insight into the shift in ideas about womanhood in Korea. This paper concentrates on the period 1876–1910 and addresses questions including the following: (1) The motivations of American women who volunteered for missionary service in Korea and their place in the context of U.S.-based foreign missions; (2) the modes of contact between foreign missionary women and Korean women and the activities through which they sought to influence Koreans; and (3) the impact of missionary women on Koreans through evangelism, medicine, and education. The paper emphasizes the dynamic and complex interaction between Korean and American women.
Ironically, the American women missionaries in Korea at the turn of the century were not progressive but conservative. They believed that the domestic arena was the most important sphere for women. However, when they came to Korea, they found themselves more liberated than Korean women, who had been secluded in the inner chambers of their homes. Also, they were often in positions of power and authority as teachers, doctors, and employers, thereby providing Korean women with examples of women as professionals. On the other hand, this revolutionary influence was tempered somewhat by the missionaries’ limited understanding of the Korean language and culture and their primary focus on evangelism above all. Though their priorities often betrayed condescending attitudes toward Korean culture and religious tradition, the missionaries and their Korean Christian associates took advantage of their contact to lay the foundation of new and distinct womanhoods, reflecting the era and its social conditions.
Sheila Miyoshi Jager, University of Chicago
My paper investigates the relationship between nationalism, gender and the missionary discourse in early twentieth century Korea. More specifically, I am interested in examining the complex gender codes involved in nation-building, first as they came to be articulated in Western evolutionary and religious paradigms about "civilization" and "progress," and how these same Western narratives were absorbed and "translated" by early Korean colonial writers in their quest to give meaning to their nation’s modernity. As was frequently the case in post-colonial nationalism, the obligation to educate and "emancipate" women was conceived as an imperative to produce biologically and culturally superior citizens. I focus on the specific role that Western missionary discourse played in the invention of this new idea of "woman" in Korea.
I begin my analysis by focusing on the way in which Western religious and scientific notions about Women as a natural and ontological category distinct from Man, transformed traditional Korean Confucian images about womanhood in family life into a political "sign" of colonial oppression (and potential liberation). I examine how this new gender coding of sexual difference introduced by American missionary discourse, became linked to other sites of political opposition (state vs. society; past vs. present; modernity vs. tradition; savagery vs. civilization). Moreover, by making the connection between the nation and popular Confucian literary and moralizing fiction—as well as the idealized gender models inscribed within it—I show how modern "revisions" of these traditional master-narratives, inspired in large part by American missionary discourse, became the discursive foundation upon which Koreans narrated the story of their (colonized) nation.
Donald N. Clark, Trinity University
This paper presents several short studies of relationships that developed between Western women missionaries and Korean Christian women in the Japanese colonial period. The "teacher/student" mode is presented in a discussion of missionaries at Ewha and their students; the mentor/understudy pairing is examined in the relationship between Alice Appenzeller and her successor Kim Whallan (Helen Kim) at Ewha; and the collegial peer relationship is discussed through the relationship between American and Korean Maryknoll nuns in P’yongyang. An additional case is the mother-daughter relationship between first- and second-generation missionary women seeing Korea in different decades, one (the mother) as a married woman doctor, and the other (the daughter) as an unmarried "biblewoman," a particular type of "women’s worker" that was essential to the spreading of Christianity in Korea.
Though all members of these pairs shared objectives—that is, the propagation of the gospel and the conversion of Korean women as an essential group for church growth—they did not always share outlooks or depths of knowledge about Korea and they did not agree on the rate of "devolution." For example, in the Appenzeller/Kim case, Kim tried to assume the presidency of Ewha well before Appenzeller was ready to see the school pass to Korean administration. On the other hand, in P’yongyang, the Maryknoll Sr. Agneta Chang, herself a Korean, became the mainstay of Catholic work because of her unique position as a broker between the American Maryknoll nuns and their Korean communities. The variables were often those of personality. However, they also involved the painful process that marked another essential goal of missionary work: the devolution of "control" to local Koreans and the phasing-out of foreign workers.