I. Introduction
In February 1914, a nineteen-year-old Korean woman, Shinn Kang-ae, arrived at the San Francisco port three weeks after leaving her homeland.Footnote 1 Her husband, Shinn Han, a man she had never met, and Rev. David Dae Wei Lee from the San Francisco Korean Methodist Church were waiting to greet her. Shinn Kang-ae was a “picture bride,” matched to be Han’s wife through a photo exchange. In the ensuing months in San Francisco, she would settle into her new life with her husband and church community, recalling how she had gotten there. She remembered the days in Korea when she sang hymns and studied the Bible with American women missionaries. Her country had lost its sovereignty to a growing Japanese empire. Avoiding the Japanese officials’ night watch, Shinn would walk through the dimming evening lights to the missionaries’ houses – not too far from her home – while her parents nervously awaited her safe return. During these private and intimate gatherings, the missionaries often fascinated girls like Shinn with stories of America, sharing photographs of a “wonderful land of freedom,” a freedom that could finally feel like theirs.Footnote 2 For Shinn Kang-ae, these meetings were worth the risk of “harsh punitive measures,” from frightening interrogations by the Japanese soldiers to physical assaults. America existed in her mind as a land of education and equality, as the American missionaries had told her, that would offer far more than she could have imagined.Footnote 3
During the initial phase of Korean immigration to the United States, from January 1903 to August 1905, most Korean immigrants consisted of single males, seeking employment while forming a family in their newly adopted home.Footnote 4 As they began searching for a future wife in Korea with the help of matchmakers and friends, more than 1,000 Korean women, as picture brides, made the journey to the US, entering through either Honolulu or San Francisco (Figure 1).Footnote 5 Their passage was paid for by the Korean male laborers in Hawai‘i or on the mainland; their marriage arrangements were made without the two parties having met in person, relying on the exchange of photographs – hence, the US newspapers’ referral to the women as “photograph brides,” later known as “picture brides (sajin sinpu).” Despite the immigration restrictions Koreans began to face in the summer of 1905, this arrangement was legally sanctioned. The 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement between the United States and Japan had authorized the Japanese government to curtail immigration of its citizens, but it partially allowed wives and children of current US residents to join them. As a result, Korean immigrants, considered Japanese citizens under Korea’s colonized status by 1910, were able to bring their brides to America until the Immigration Act of 1924, which extended “national origins” quotas to restrict immigration from Asian countries while exempting immigrants from US colonies such as the Philippines.
Yoon Yong Ho (groom) and Kim Do Yen (bride).
Source: USC Korean Heritage and Digital Libraries, Korean American Digital Archive Collection.
Figure 1. Long description
A black-and-white photograph of a Korean groom and bride standing side by side and facing the camera. The groom, on the left, wears a dark suit with a white dress shirt and dark dress shoes. A floral boutonniere is pinned to his left lapel, and he holds a pair of white gloves in his left hand. The bride, on the right, wears a white, three-layered lace wedding dress with a high neckline and a veil adorned with white flowers. She holds a bouquet of small flowers with draping vines.
Although the immigration of picture brides may, on the surface, seem to have been initiated by the needs of Korean male laborers in America, the emergence of picture brides can also be traced back to the presence of American women missionaries in Korea. During the late nineteenth century, many White American women missionaries settled in Korea, providing medical treatment while seeking to fulfill their greater purpose of “saving” their “heathen sisters,” those “low, narrow, shut-in, and enslaved women,” as one missionary put it.Footnote 6 The missionaries believed that, for those living under the supposed “demonic distortion” of Korean “heathendom,” the women’s education was an urgent need, helping them read the Bible and attain “enlightenment” through the gospel.Footnote 7
At the time, these American women missionaries cast themselves as essential global actors, traveling abroad to pursue aims distinct from their domestic duties. These missionaries might have understood their global engagement as an extension of their role as mothers, this time attending to foreign “heathens” as their children; this was one way in which the emerging progressive ideal of the American woman, called the “New Woman,” could spur them to challenge their limited roles in a male-dominated sphere.Footnote 8 While continuing their efforts to expand their role as mothers to the global sphere, the missionaries in their advocacy work with Korean women largely did not seek to advance Korean women’s rights beyond training them as pious mothers at the local level. By highlighting the more antiquated Victorian ideal of a “True Woman” to Korean women – the dominant idea prior to the “New Woman” that limited women’s roles to their immediate domestic environment – these missionaries encouraged Korean women to prioritize their duties to their husbands and children, transforming heathen Korean homes into Christian ones.Footnote 9 As Emily Conroy-Krutz explains, for women missionaries, “becoming civilized was creating a domestic role for women.”Footnote 10 Assuming authority at the expense of Korean women’s rights, the American women missionaries resisted establishing a shared understanding of an ideal state of womanhood.
Some Korean women, in response, became devout church supporters and guardians of Christian homes, while others reshaped and cultivated their own notions of womanhood, pursuing yŏkwŏn (women’s rights) beyond those projected onto them by outsiders. These latter Korean women shaped the contours of the ideal woman in their own distinct way, prioritizing educational and sociopolitical rights as inmin (people of the country) and contributing to the attainment of national sovereignty. Their new gender consciousness laid the groundwork for the emergence and proliferation of the widely recognized Korean concept of Sin Yŏsŏng or Sin Yŏja , which also translates to “New Woman,” by the 1920s.Footnote 11
This article argues that Korean women sought their own sense of ideal womanhood against one that was imposed on them by both American missionaries and larger Korean and American society. As proponents of this more politically and educationally inflected yŏkwŏn in the 1910s, some Korean women translated their evolving sense of womanhood into practice through picture marriage immigration to the United States, despite the practice being perceived as backward and immoral both in Korea and America.
To support this argument, this article employs the framework of “heathen” to Korean women’s stories, moving beyond a top-down, missionary-centered analysis of the racialization of “heathens.” It builds on existing scholarly efforts to complicate the characterization of American women missionaries as simply “pioneers” who spurred Korean women’s modern ideas of gender and rights.Footnote 12 While existing scholarship has illuminated the complicated ties among Confucian gender roles, understandings of the West and Christianity, and women’s growing desires, this article foregrounds race and religion as the lens through which to revisit the encounter between American women missionaries and Korean women. By doing so, we can see how religious superiority commingled with racial superiority, both reified in missionary work. According to Kathryn Gin Lum, the religious idea of the heathen, as an “elastic category that could stretch to incorporate people from all over the world,” played a pivotal role in shaping the American conception of race as it reinforces the binary between the “saved Christian” and “the rest of the damned.”Footnote 13 Those deemed as heathens were understood to suffer from physical and spiritual inferiority, incapable of uplifting themselves; their elevation could only be achieved through the work of their counterpoints: the Christians. The category of heathen, therefore, highlights White Christian efforts to keep “the rest of the damned” lower in the racial hierarchy.Footnote 14 Expanding on this religio-racial construct of “heathen,” this article further examines how gender and motherhood were integral to its deployment, offering a more layered understanding of American Protestant imperialism.Footnote 15
In addition, this article contributes to transpacific studies by tracing the connections and exchanges of ideas and practices through its exploration of discursive gender consciousness and theological understandings. Scholars of Korean women’s history have contextualized the motivations of picture brides beyond their economic needs and aspirations, delving into the experiences afforded by their immigration: new sociocultural activities and community relationships, as well as new shades of oppression.Footnote 16 Few of these studies, however, have discussed the role of religion in the evolving ideas of women’s rights. By centering Korean women’s theological engagement with discursive ideas of gender, this article demonstrates how their religious interpretations of gender informed their participation in picture marriage migration.
This article draws on Korean women’s writings that first appeared in late nineteenth-century print media in Korea. The first women’s magazine in Korea, Yŏjachinam (Guide for Women; 1908–1909), is the primary print source utilized in this article, but I also draw from newspapers such as Tongnip Sinmun (The Independent; 1896–1899), the first Korean language newspaper with an English language edition in Korea; Sinhan Minbo (The New Korea; 1909–1974), the transnational newspaper, written for the Korean diaspora; and Kukminbo (The Korean National Herald; 1907–1968), the local Korean American newspaper in Honolulu. Given the limited textual records of Korean women in this period, my examination also includes a careful engagement with twenty-eight Korean picture brides’ oral interviews, conducted by Sonia Shinn Sunoo in Korean between 1975 and 1977 and translated into English for transcripts.Footnote 17 I treat each picture bride’s account and story as a historical document and use these documents to establish a communal and representative narrative. Melissa May Borja underscores the role of oral history in allowing scholars to perceive the world “through the religious lens of their narrators,” facilitating “a fuller comprehension” of their perspectives.Footnote 18 Giving weight to the “different credibility” of Korean women’s oral accounts, this examination highlights the picture brides’ initiative in pursuing a more expansive conception of womanhood and their immigration to America.Footnote 19
II. Rights for “Heathen” Sisters
On September 1, 1898, two Korean women, Kim Sosa and Lee Sosa – Sosa (召史), referring to the general term for “women” – wrote a manifesto titled “ Yŏkwŏn T’ongmun (Declaration of Women’s Rights)”.Footnote 20 Although the writers of the declaration were listed with no identifiable forenames, the Korean newspaper Hwangsung Sinmun covered its contents in a self-described “Special Report (別報: Byulbo ).”Footnote 21 Asserting that men and women carried no inherent differences, the writers of the manifesto demanded women’s equal access to education, labor, and participation in politics. The writers expressed frustration that women were still holding onto old ways “like idiots, just sit[ting] and be[ing] fed by what men earned” and “staying in the deep inner chambers just to be restrained for life by others.”Footnote 22 With more exposure to the world, they argued, women could achieve the necessary sociopolitical consciousness to grasp the country’s “state of affairs” ( sesang hyŏngp’yŏn ) and take on jobs other than domestic chores. Women’s participation in sociopolitical and economic activities would solidify a foundation for them to live independently. Korea should follow the example of other countries, the authors maintained, and support women’s education by establishing girls’ schools within the country.
These public demands for women’s equal rights elicited substantial support from hundreds of Korean women. Although upper-class widows in Bukchon, Seoul, mainly led this call for reform, many women across social classes advocated for improving women’s status and education. Published in the Korean script, han’gŭl , instead of the Chinese script, Kim’s and Lee’s manifesto appeared to reach and reassure Korean women who had earlier developed their reading culture with han’gŭl .Footnote 23 The Korean women’s open statement and request resulted in the formation of the first Korean women’s organization, Ch’anyang-hoe (Ch’anyang Association), four days after the newspaper published the manifesto.
Ch’anyang-hoe’s efforts were initially aimed at establishing a government-sponsored girls’ school ( Kwanlip yŏhakyo ). Seeking to reframe women from good wives and mothers (賢母良妻: hyŏnmoyangch’ŏ ) to “loyal and patriotic political agents (忠義之心: ch’ungŭichisim ),” its members publicly appealed to the government to support a girls’ school that would forge women as “newly civilized citizens ( shinmin ; 新民).”Footnote 24 King Kojong, the monarch of the Chosŏn dynasty, initially responded positively,Footnote 25 but his support soon stalled.Footnote 26 As a result, the Ch’anyang-hoe members funded the project themselves and established the Sunsŏng Girls’ School with thirty female students. Although the school suffered financial struggles without the government’s stable support and its records shortly thereafter vanished, Sunsŏng Girls’ School marked the first private school for young Korean girls founded primarily on Korean women’s contributions.
Korean women’s initiatives in women’s education stood in contrast to the approach imposed by American women missionaries. Thirteen years prior to these events, in 1886, the first girls’ school in Korea, Ewha Haktang (梨花學堂), had been established by Mary Scranton, a missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. At the start, Scranton had simply held classes at her house, with the only student a girl whose poor mother was unable to take care of her. When Ewha Hakdang acquired a separate building, more female students joined.Footnote 27 Despite its similarity in form with other schools established by missionaries, Ewha Haktang distinguished itself through its educational aims. Its teaching mainly focused on Bible study and language education in Korean, Chinese, and English; its curriculum included Christian practices such as prayers.Footnote 28 Paeche Haktang (培材學堂), a boys’ school, was founded by Methodist missionary Henry G. Appenzeller in the same year, but it featured a college curriculum and had a much different goal: to help male students pursue careers and advancement in the government.Footnote 29
This difference in the schools’ aims can be explained by what underlay the specific interests of Scranton and other women missionaries in women’s education. Beginning with Scranton’s arrival in 1885, American women missionaries, predominantly Methodists and Presbyterians, saw a significant opportunity for influence through education.Footnote 30 From the missionaries’ perspective, “heathen” Korean women were a gateway through which American women could fulfill their divine mission to bring “salvation” to the “heathen world.” Believing “Satan needed not to have troubled himself about Adam after he had captured Eve,” they argued that evangelizing women would be the most effective way to retake heathen men and the rest of the world by “imitat[ing] [Satan’s] tactics.”Footnote 31 Their divinely assigned gender also offered the American missionaries a point of connection by which they could “save” Korean women. The missionary women held the idea that as “the elevation of a race shall come from the race itself,” their work for heathen women constituted a “principle in God’s economy.”Footnote 32 They were content in the knowledge that non-Christian women’s hearts craved to “hear Christ declared by women’s lips,” and were encouraged to take charge of these non-Christian women’s salvation, given their own “natural” ability to carry others’ sorrow and needs as women.Footnote 33 The redemption of Korea, the American women missionaries believed, lay in their hands by first paving the path for Korean women’s salvation through the promotion of women’s education.Footnote 34
For American women missionaries, providing education in this manner would serve a dual purpose, mitigating the risks of their missionary work while avoiding any potential threat to the dominant male power in Korea. At the beginning of their work, women missionaries had faced opposition from the Korean government as well as the wider public. Although no official record indicated that the Korean government formally lifted the ban on Christianity, many Koreans associated American Protestant missionaries with French Catholic missionaries, who were considered a Western threat to the social order and suppressed by the Korean government. However, as the Korean government reconsidered American missionaries as a medium to bring Western “civilized” and “progressive” technology into Korea, its treatment of the missionaries became less hostile.Footnote 35
In need of local support, the missionaries framed their education of Korean women in a way more likely to induce support from Korean male intellectuals who sought national reform against Confucianism and attempted to promote a Western notion of civilization through Christianity.Footnote 36 Intellectuals such as So Chae-p’il and Yun Ch’i-ho promoted reforms to male-centered gender relations and advocated for women’s equal rights to education around the same period when missionaries settled in Korea. Enlightened Korean women, they believed, could more fully share in the responsibility of building a strong and civilized nation.
This view, however, still bound women to domestic and familial duties as mothers and wives. In an editorial in Tongnip Sinmun, a newspaper edited by So Chae-p’il and Yun Ch’i-ho that promoted the idea of national “progress,” the anonymous author underscored how education could strengthen women’s capacity to raise their sons and to better serve their husbands, ultimately leading to familial and national prosperity.Footnote 37 In the subsequent year, Tongnip Sinmun built on these ideas with an editorial titled “Three Foolish Things.”Footnote 38 While denouncing Korean normalized practices such as secluding and silencing women at home as antiquated and uncivilized, the author of “Three Foolish Things” also highlighted the physical weakness and linguistic inadequacy of women. Despite the necessity for men to “give” women equal rights, if women appreciated men’s treatment of women, the author opined, they should refrain from defying their husbands’ will and maintain their proper place. Similar to what American women missionaries envisioned through women’s education, the preferred concept of womanhood for these male intellectuals entailed women continuing their role as caregivers, which demanded their sacrifice and accommodation to their families. The alignment of ideas between some Korean men in positions of authority and the women missionaries only facilitated the missionaries’ efforts to accomplish their goals.
Above all, the American women missionaries’ sense of religious and racial superiority propelled them to promote an education focused on the familial and auxiliary roles of Korean women. Numerous American women from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries were guided by evolving concepts of ideal womanhood, shifting from the more restrictive Victorian concept of the “True Woman” to the more open and borderless concept of the American “New Woman.” The Civil War had required women to fulfill practical roles in the spaces men had previously occupied, and in the decades that followed, the “New Woman” ideal took on more expansive forms within women’s education.Footnote 39 American women’s education was not limited to enabling women to perform domestic duties and rear children. Instead, women’s education could now help them engage with their educated male partners, and, more significantly, become socially and financially independent, obtaining skills that could lead to employment and higher incomes. The previously pious and virtuous qualities of the “True Woman” were no longer described as ideal in newspapers and magazines. Although women’s social freedom was still bound to traditional spheres for women, centered on occupations such as housekeeping or nursing, the “New Woman” label held more progressive qualities for the time, “‘emancipating’ women from the social expectations and conventions forced upon them by tradition.”Footnote 40 The “New Woman” promoted self-sufficiency and career vocations, prioritizing women’s emotional fulfillment outside the marriage system as they pushed for economic independence and political power in public spheres.Footnote 41
American women’s shifting gender consciousness extended to the religious sphere, where many, including women missionaries, served beyond their previously limited capacities.Footnote 42 In the face of challenges by the Korean government’s hostility toward missionary activities, citing concerns of Western incursion, a note from a “female Miss. Intelligencer” in the Christian missionary monthly newspaper The Heathen Woman’s Friend encouraged and assured American women missionaries in Korea that “the call[s] to be a missionary should come from within, not from without … that she can go anywhere, and go through anything, and that she can do anything to which [God] calls her.”Footnote 43 Their interpretation of God’s call was coupled with the women’s desire to further their roles and authority beyond the domestic sphere, which led many American women missionaries to look abroad and express to major Mission Boards a desire to serve in greater leadership roles. In schools, hospitals, and other workplaces in America, higher-ranking positions were still not always available to women. Overseas, American women missionaries saw greater possibilities to shape their own professional trajectory.
While asserting their expanded roles and adapting the ideals of the “New Woman,” the American women missionaries advocated a more conservative interpretation of ideal womanhood for Korean women, one that positioned women’s education primarily as a vehicle for pious Christian motherhood. In her missionary report, for instance, a “Mrs. Horace G. Underwood” suggested that missionary work should prioritize empowering Korean women to bring about behavioral changes in their husbands, as that was believed to “[make] all the difference between daylight and darkness in the home,” and to discourage concubinage for “no more jealousy, heartbreak, and quarreling; no more women of uncertain and precarious standing.”Footnote 44 Mentioned later in the same report is the need to elevate Korean women’s education, dignity, and social significance, but such goals are narrowly defined, consisting of such activities as Korean women reading their names “among the names of all Christians,” attending Bible classes as members, and teaching fellow heathen women. This approach was not exclusive to the missionaries’ work with Korean women but reflected their broader strategy with women in the so-called “heathen world,” one grounded in the missionaries’ gender ideology.
Southern Methodist missionary Ellasue Wagner reaffirmed this perspective toward Korean women during her remarks on the thirty-sixth anniversary of Holston Girls’ School in 1940. Wagner reflected on the progress made by Korean women and restated that “the ideal woman of Korea to-day is, as it should be, the ideal wife and mother. We believe that there is no higher destiny than this.”Footnote 45 American women missionaries across denominations seemed unable to reconcile the “heathen” status of Korean women – as those excluded from divine favor – with their own burgeoning rights under the “New Woman” label. Different vessels in quality, they argued, would not hold the same value. The more backward ideals of the “True Woman” were more appropriate for the backward heathen women – and in any case, even a backward “True Woman” was more advanced than a heathen woman.
III. Korean Women’s Gender Consciousness and Reframing of Womanhood
Some Korean women reflected the conservative ideas of gender that the American women missionaries incorporated into their teachings. A group of Korean women also began to assign themselves the role of Bible women ( chŏndo puin or puin kwonsŏ ).Footnote 46 Unordained, these Korean evangelist women visited village to village to share the gospel. Bible women played a crucial role in expanding missionary work because most upper-class ( yangban ) Korean women were secluded in the anpang (內房), the room farthest from the door, which was for the hostess of the house, with minimal contact with the outside world.Footnote 47 Although education for Korean women was still aimed at creating ideal Christian homes, it did, in part, help expand their roles outside their homes and catapult them into the public sphere. Not only did the Bible women visit households to sell Bibles and tell stories from them, but they also “[taught] young girls in schools” and “[held] Bible classes, of a week or ten days’ duration, in the little Christian villages,” which marked a sizable shift in women’s roles. However, these Bible women were restricted from “serv[ing] in so public a way” because of their motherly obligations.Footnote 48 Church community work still bounded the Bible women, which we can see as an extension of women’s roles within the home. The monthly magazine Kajŏng Chapchi (Home Journal; 1907–1908) further underscored the significance of family and women’s roles in cultivating a prosperous family and introduced ways in which women could maintain their hygiene, manage pregnancy, and develop their cooking skills.
Other Korean women, however, as outlined in the 1898 “ Yŏkwŏn T’ongmun ” manifesto, continued to participate in discursive practices of gender consciousness by incorporating their own theological interpretations. In the 1908 volume of Yŏjachinam, the first Korean women’s educational periodical published by Yŏjabohakwon (Women’s Educational Institution), contributor Kim Il-eun grounded her “Theory ( haksŏl )” on Christian doctrine. Men and women, according to Kim, were created equal and distributed evenly in the building of a nation by God, and thus, it was evident that women possessed capabilities no less than those of men. Despite this inherent equality, however, women consistently demonstrated their obedience to men by performing tasks such as making clothes and food. They lacked education, which inevitably caused inequality and neglect by men. “Once we, women, possess equivalent knowledge and learning as men,” Kim asserted, “men will never treat women as before.”Footnote 49 For Kim, even though God bestowed equal ability and rights to men and women from the beginning of divine creation, women positioned themselves within the domestic sphere, which prevented them from independence. The unequal rights of women were the consequence of choices women had made – privileging domestic skills over acquiring knowledge – and if women changed their ways, the world would follow suit.
Theological understandings of gender equality – women and men as equal in the eyes of God – at times appeared in writings of Korean Christian males in their support for women’s rights. Mun Kyŏngho penned an essay in the Protestant Christian periodical, Sinhak Wŏlbo (Monthly Magazine on Christian Theology; 1900–1909) regarding the custom of keeping women inside the house, the “inside-outside rule ( naeoebŏp ).” Dubbing it deleterious for society, Mun discussed how women had been imprisoned and worked like “slaves.” A woman’s trivial mistake during these chores could lead to harsh punishment – such as a husband beating her half to death or expelling her from the house – and many women ran away or committed suicide by swallowing opium or poison. Interestingly, in contrast to missionaries’ largely negative understanding of pagan customs, Mun argued that “regardless of the level of civilization or the size of their territories, all nations have their own customs, some of which are good and others bad.”Footnote 50 The United States, the “advanced” Western country, also had “evil customs,” and he gave the example of Americans who pressed their rough hands onto newborn babies’ heads in order to shape their heads in such a way that fulfilled an arbitrary standard of beauty.Footnote 51 Deploring the custom of subjecting Korean women to “slave-like” labor, Mun introduced the Christian teaching that “when God created man and woman, he planned for them to live in perfect harmony and love each other as equals.” Ironically, however, Mun’s support for women’s rights concluded that it was Christian men’s love and protection for their wives – “chosen for us by God” – that obligated them to “give” women freedom.Footnote 52 Although Mun had developed his ideas of gender from the same theological concept as Korean women, including Kim Il-eun, he failed to perceive women as independent beings.Footnote 53
The divinely granted equality between women and men as God’s creatures further extended to recognizing both genders as people of the country, otherwise known as inmin (人民). The concept of inmin , which appeared during the Korean Enlightenment period (開化期: 1896–1910) and was articulated in the 1898 “ Yŏkwŏn T’ongmun ” manifesto, entailed political agency and suffrage as well as individual freedom.Footnote 54 This recognition encouraged Korean women to pursue equal freedom and roles for the betterment of national sovereignty. Perhaps the growing recognition of men and women within a national boundary reflected the gradual encroachment of Japanese imperial power on the peninsula after the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1905. Yi Kangja, another female contributor in the 1908 volume of Yŏjachinam , highlights that the state ( kukka ) had a legal obligation to protect women’s freedom in the same way it did for men.Footnote 55 While Yi, similar to other writers, criticized women who chose to serve their husbands instead of achieving their independence, she also pointed out the fundamental problem of the unequal conditions that prompted their choices. The enduring customs had confined women, Yi claimed, to “where they [were] unrelentingly, hopelessly isolated, as though they [were] in thickly wooded mountains or the deepest ocean.”Footnote 56 Women lacked opportunities to learn about society and world affairs not solely by choice, but by the system. If they, as inmin , who comprised half of the population in Korea as political subjects, continued to be deprived of “freedom and individuality,” Yi argued, the state would not be as prosperous and enlightened. For Yi, women “as members of the state” should attain freedom, which would enable them to “bring strength and good fortune to [Korea]” when working alongside men.Footnote 57
Such inclusion of women into inmin for national sovereignty and power was echoed in Park Sara’s writing in the same volume. Park asserted that God intended for women to share equal rights and education with men – that these shared roots among all human beings led to fruitful consequences. Although she devoted much attention to explaining how women’s education would positively impact child-nurturing, she held that women’s education was not merely limited to being good mothers; it was a way to “pursue true human duty, love [their] compatriot, and thus glorify God in heaven as well as continue to strive for national sovereignty and progress on the ground.”Footnote 58
IV. Achieving Yŏkwŏn Through a “Heathen” Marriage Immigration System
The connection between picture brides and Korean women’s evolving gender consciousness may at first seem incongruous given dominant American perceptions of picture brides. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, the picture marriage system of other Eastern countries – in particular, Japanese picture marriages with a large influx of young brides in America – was regarded by many as an illegitimate marriage system. For instance, as reported by The Morning Examiner from Utah, a fifteen-year-old Japanese picture bride’s admission to the United States was denied by Hart H. North of the Immigration Bureau on January 20, 1905. North “refused to recognize the validity of the long-distance marriage,” and Judge Cook decided on the disposition of the fifteen-year-old bride as he concluded that the girl “[was] not a bride.”Footnote 59 Even though the state had recognized all marriages performed under the laws of other countries as valid, it refused to recognize picture marriages as legal. The picture bride system was targeted as a spurious practice, regardless of immigrants’ continual assertions of its validity and the Japanese consul’s strong objections of the frequent deportation of the picture brides.Footnote 60
A Korean picture bride, Lee Ke-Man, who entered through Angel Island immigration station in 1914, shared a similar experience. Lee, along with a “hundred or more Japanese picture brides,” was detained at the immigration station and threatened with immediate deportation because of her “questionable” status as a legitimate bride. Fortunately for Lee, Yoon Byong-koo, the immigration officer in Seattle, arranged release for her “by making a statement to the effect that made [her] ‘Mrs. Lee.’”Footnote 61Another Korean picture bride, Mary Lee, described her interview with the immigration officer, who “[shook] his head in disbelief that [she] was actually going to marry [the] old man.”Footnote 62 The prevailing suspicions around the picture marriage system led to an immigration policy that required an immediate exchange of vows in America, often at the immigration station itself, to ensure a legal basis for their marriage. As Choy Ho-Kyong recollected, such ceremonies were quick, which benefitted only immigration officers in terms of dispelling some doubts: “The authorities would just call the name of the picture brides, the name of the man, and just married them off. Just like that.”Footnote 63
Americans’ rejection of the picture marriage system also spoke to the connections, tenuous as they were, that many Americans made between the suitability of women for marriage and Christian morals and values. In the same The Morning Examiner report, the newspaper pinpointed that this discrimination against the picture marriage system was grounded by “the fear that undesirable women … [might] be smuggled [in America] in large numbers against the interests of public morals.”Footnote 64 Though vague in language, the report seems to tie picture brides to sexual immorality. As the Page Act of 1875 assumed that women from “China, Japan, and any Oriental country” were “lewd and immoral,” Asian women were labeled as “undesirable” immigrants who would bring prostitution to the United States.Footnote 65 The picture marriage system was often compared to the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the federal law that criminalized the transport of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”Footnote 66 Similar to the notion of undesirability encoded in the immigration laws, the Morning Examiner report treated picture brides as immoral and sexualized them as threats to American marriage and the family unit.
If more “desirable” or “proper” women participated in the picture marriage system, however, the majority of White Americans could legitimize the system as morally tolerable. Stories featured in the 1922 New York Times illustrated Greek picture brides as virtuous and romantic, citing “scientific” evidence to support this view. The author portrayed the Greek picture marriage as a case of “love at first sight,” inviting readers to witness the first meetings between brides and their future husbands as they departed the Greek ocean liner King Alexander, which would dispel any doubts about the possibility of such love: “the warmth of the welcome – the resounding kisses and enthusiastic hugs were enough to convince even the most skeptical.”Footnote 67 Citing an interview with Dr. A. Tannenbaum, American editor of an International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapeutics, and Applied Psychology, the author reinforced the idea that picture marriage was a natural and healthy process for self-determined Greek women. Even when addressing the potential for dissatisfaction, Greek picture brides were depicted as having more agency in their life choices compared to their Asian counterparts.Footnote 68 Although Greek picture brides were considered “probationary” Whites, they were nevertheless deemed White enough to be admitted to the country, and their marriages were still represented through ideas of romance that often served as a “status and signifier of whiteness,” as Kathryn Vaggalis explains.Footnote 69
When picture marriages were associated with backwardness, it remained strictly an East Asian custom in the wider American imagination. In a New York Times letter to the editor, guest writer G. K. Hachy, a defender of picture marriage, critically engaged with some of the common attacks on what was perceived as the East Asian practice. Detractors of the picture marriage system, Hachy asserted, framed the system as a “heathen institution” without love and vows that was “menacing the American ideals of marriage” in contrast to American marriage, which remained to many Americans a “Christian institution.”Footnote 70 American missionaries, in fact, had often described marriage customs in non-Christian countries as “pagan,” which was thought to “give a free rein to the licentiousness of men” compared to the “sacredness” of Christian marriage.Footnote 71 In the same vein, American women missionaries in Korea repeatedly expressed their discomfort with the Korean tradition of arranged marriage determined by families or parents, which in the missionaries’ eyes seemed to follow a similar framework as the picture marriage system. Ironically, however, American women missionaries themselves, in the period before the Civil War, also followed an unofficial arranged marriage system set up by the Mission Board, in which an American woman would be able to pursue missionary efforts abroad only by first marrying a male missionary as appointed to her by the Mission Board. This arrangement was meant to not only ensure that the marriage was divinely sanctioned, rather than a sign of “heathenness,” but also to prevent male missionaries from possible relationships with “heathen” women and thus promote the Christian family as a model for converts to emulate.Footnote 72 The insistence on framing any marriage system that fell outside the norms of the Western Christian institution as a threat allowed Americans to create a counterpoint of immorality, from which to measure the superior morality of their “own” institutions.
Furthermore, as Hachy, the writer of the New York Times letter, astutely pointed out, Americans’ denouncement of the picture marriage system was a contradiction in that many of the picture brides coming from Eastern countries were Christians themselves.Footnote 73 For Asian women, converting to Christianity was not enough to remove the label of “heathen.” The contradictory perceptions of White Americans toward picture brides signaled that “heathen” was not only about religious differentiation but deeply entangled with otherization based on race. In the view of many White Americans, the aims of American missionary women to convert Korean women to Christianity were untenable to begin with, as the idea of a Christian Korean – especially one engaging in the picture marriage system – was itself a contradiction. The existence of “heathen” figures, as determined by race (and nationality), became a necessary construct that provided a counterpoint for enlightened Western Christians. As “[White Americans] constructed the heathen world in order to give themselves an avenue for the evangelizing work that marked them as the givers,” according to Kathryn Gin Lum, they also constructed heathen figures in order to exist as American White Christians.Footnote 74
In fact, for Korean immigrants in America as well as Koreans in the homeland, the picture marriage system was similarly contentious. Some Koreans in Korea discouraged picture marriage, considering it a practice that could be part of any established traditions. In an article, “Picture Marriage,” in Uriui Kadyung (Our Home), the only women’s magazine printed in Korean script in 1910s Korea, the anonymous author introduced picture marriage as a compound form of marriage or one that belonged fully to neither Western nor Eastern tradition.Footnote 75 It resembled Eastern practice, according to the article, in that the bride and groom connected through intermediaries who could vouch for their backgrounds and did not see each other until the wedding; it also resembled Western custom, as the bride and groom could at least see each other through photographs. Picture marriage, the article articulates, is a distinct system that emerged from the specific conditions of Hawai‘i, with the growing number of Asian single male laborers. With a grudging acknowledgment, the article distinguishes picture brides from prostitution, describing the marriage system as a regulatory tool to prevent “any women ( amu yŏja )” from entering the island and thus assigning a degree of credibility. It continues to address perceived benefits of picture marriage, arguing that picture brides could help civilize Asian male laborers, deemed as “barbaric” through the White gaze, as they spent their earnings on “gambling and drugs.” Yet, the article concludes that these benefits do not outweigh the harms, because of multiple actors in this system: matchmakers who deceived young women by falsely promising educational opportunities in Hawai‘i; “foolish” women who had an erroneous vision of the island as a paradise; ambitious men who sought young and educated wives without considering their backgrounds; and couples who ignored signs of incompatibility from the moment they met.Footnote 76
Despite some perceived benefits, Koreans often considered the picture marriage as a familial shame because Korean women individually pursued most picture marriages, rather than through their families or parents, as was the expectation and norm.Footnote 77 When a Korean girl, Gyeman Lee, decided to become a picture bride, therefore, her parents “locked [her] up at home and harshly reprimanded [her] verbally as well as physically,” although such punishment helped with “liberating” her from her guilt for going against her parents’ will.Footnote 78 To avoid familial opposition, many young women pursued the process in secret, exchanging letters with a matchmaker and traveling with other applicants from the village to a big city to take photographs for submission.Footnote 79 Consequently, many picture brides departed without their families’ approval or blessing. As Kim Suk-eun recalled, her parents even warned her that, if the marriage went wrong, she should not contact the family but instead “go drown in the ocean.”Footnote 80
Corresponding to a predominant American view of picture brides in relation to sexual immorality, other Koreans in America considered the picture marriage within the frame of prostitution and human trafficking.Footnote 81 As an article, “Is Hawai‘i heaven or hell?” published in the local Korean immigrant newspaper Kukminbo demonstrates, some Korean immigrants considered the picture marriage system not only an adoption of a Japanese custom but also a strategy that the Japanese used to deceive and force Korean girls into sexual slavery.Footnote 82 Later, supportive views on picture brides appeared as Koreans in America came to see the family unit as increasingly necessary amid growing fears over the possible extinction of Koreans under Japanese colonization; however, these views nevertheless conceded that the picture marriage system had significant drawbacks.Footnote 83
Taking a perspective that centers the picture brides, however, we may see that their choice to immigrate to America via the picture marriage system was not a contradiction. Korean women’s immigration through the picture marriage system was an indicator of their embrace and embodiment of yŏkwŏn : a pathway for Korean women to assert their gender consciousness and ideals. Although opponents of picture marriages framed the practice as regressive, Korean women used picture marriages to extricate themselves from existing systems of oppression – in other words, as acts of “againstness.”Footnote 84
Resisting patriarchal systems embedded in Korean society, many Korean women challenged the prevalent belief that “a girl without ability is virtuous” and pursued opportunities for education.Footnote 85 Those excluded from educational opportunities were fascinated by these newly laid women’s rights, which complicated the sacred realm of motherhood.Footnote 86 For those who could not afford school expenses, the picture marriage system seemed even more attractive, as Koreans believed that “all education [in America] was free.”Footnote 87 A local newspaper in Jinchu, a small city in Kyongsang Province, reported on women in bigger cities such as Pyeong-an, Seoul, Pusan, and Masan who immigrated to Hawai‘i through the picture marriage system. Among schoolgirls, for instance, becoming a picture bride was assumed to be a form of liberation from their previous inferior status while maintaining their responsibility as inmin . Ch’ŏn Yŏn-hŭi, who arrived in Honolulu as a picture bride in 1915, recalled a conversation with her friend, Nam Kyoung Ae. An eighteen-year-old Ch’ŏn and her classmates were told by Nam, who had left her hometown for further education, that those who received a “modern education ( sinsik kyoyuk )” went to Hawai‘i as picture brides.Footnote 88 Hearing from Nam, many students longed to also become picture brides to educate and elevate themselves, although only Ch’ŏn Yŏn-hŭi and Nam Kyoung Ae made it to Hawai‘i.Footnote 89 Yoon Yun-Doy, who wished to become a nursing missionary like the American woman missionary who periodically came to her village to care for those in need, also saw the picture marriage as a means to pursue further education. Even though her high school principal expressed her concerns about her marriage to a Korean laborer in America, suggesting the limits that such a marriage might entail, Yoon believed that becoming a picture bride would enable her to “study nursing and work among the poor.”Footnote 90
The condition of Japanese colonial rule further limited women’s education in Korea. As Kim Suk Eun, a picture bride who arrived in San Francisco in 1913, recollected, Japanese control over the school curriculum led many women to leave school. The Japanese government coerced Korean schools to comply with the Japanese language and use revised textbooks, which the Japanese considered a material benefit of annexation – one of many “blessings of civilization.”Footnote 91 Even for women from wealthy families like Kim, to attend school in Korea while being forced to “learn, use, and speak Japanese” equated to a feeling that “day by day,” there was “no more freedom.”Footnote 92 It is notable that Kim and other picture brides from relatively respectable family backgrounds were also drawn to the picture marriage system. Immigration through picture marriage went beyond class-based and economic motivations as highlighted in previous scholarship; considering the context of Japanese colonial oppression, the picture marriage system offered Korean women a means toward greater intellectual freedom.Footnote 93
Unfortunately, once most picture brides settled in America, they continued to encounter other barriers to their education. Financial circumstances and familial responsibilities took on a different shade; often, the insufficient incomes of their husbands would necessitate Korean women to enter the labor force, representing both an evolution of Korean gender roles and a new imposition on their pursuit of education.Footnote 94 The subsequent occurrences of pregnancies and the responsibilities of childcare further imposed significant constraints on these women. The picture marriage system, in the end, could not exist simply as a tool: it brought Korean immigrant women into new structures to negotiate their gender consciousness.
Within these new structures, Korean women continued to carve out their own sense of womanhood through their identification as inmin and in their efforts to advance national sovereignty. Under “harsh” and “unbearable” Japanese oppression, many had experienced restrictions in public, even with prohibitions on walking and talking freely, and others were imprisoned for their political actions.Footnote 95 Many Koreans tried to “sneak out of Korea” and help each other find ways to achieve freedom outside Korea, hoping that their individual freedom, in turn, would lay the groundwork for their national sovereignty.Footnote 96 Under these conditions, prospective picture brides were aware of Korean political organizations in America, consisting of Koreans working for national sovereignty and independence, such as Sinminhŏe (New People’s Association) and Korean National Association (KNA). They were told by matchmakers and some Christian ministers in Korea – who encouraged the picture marriages – that their future husband could be an independence activist.Footnote 97 For the women who were willing to be members of the state as inmin and partake in duties that promoted Korea’s sovereignty as men did, participating in the independence movement outside of Korea through a picture marriage could be the most accessible way to consolidate their identity as state members. Although most members of Sinminhŏe and the KNA were not picture brides, in California and Hawai‘i, some picture brides, along with their husbands, raised funds for independence activists in various places, including Korea, Manchuria, and the United States. “Penny by penny,” they raised funds – some of the picture brides even “did not eat meat once a week and did not use soy sauce,”Footnote 98 and others “went into opium dens” to collect funds.Footnote 99 Much of these works were carried out through Korean churches, which became central spaces for solidifying the cultural groundwork for national liberation.
Further, Korean women organized women’s groups, including Puin Kyoyukhŏe (The Women’s Education Association), Taehan Puinhŏe (The Korean Women’s Association), and Taehan Puin Kuchehŏe (The Korean Ladies Relief Society).Footnote 100 In addition to their cultural preservation efforts, such as supporting American-born children’s education in the Korean language and history, these women’s groups organized various community activities, from women’s education to fundraising for independence movements. Formed in 1909, the Women’s Education Association, for instance, continued what women in Korea had pursued. As claimed in “The Purpose of The Korean Women’s Association ( Puin Kyoyukhŏe Chuijiseo)” in Shinhan Kukbo (The United Korean News: 1909–1911), the purpose of this group upheld what many Korean women discussed in their theological interpretations of gender equality. Highlighting women’s equal status as “children of God” with no differences in their “nature, character, and intelligence ( seongjil chongmyeong )” from men, the mission statement highlights women’s education as the first step toward cultivating national strength and taking up the responsibility of Koreans in Hawai‘i to safeguard their nation’s sovereignty.Footnote 101 Under this belief, the Women’s Education Association fostered home economics and theological education while fundraising for independence activists such as An Chunggŭn.Footnote 102
On March 1, 1919, a series of marches broke out in Korea for national independence, also igniting the actions of Korean women across the Hawaiian Islands.Footnote 103 Wearing traditional Korean dresses and gathered in downtown Honolulu, Korean women marched in tandem with their counterparts across the Pacific. Two weeks later, forty-one of these women met again and established the Korean Ladies’ Relief Society.Footnote 104 The group encouraged women, as fellow compatriots with men, to acknowledge the urgency of the time and to act not “as half a person beneath the perch of a single household” but “to enjoy the rights of human beings granted by God.”Footnote 105 Their first activity was reprinting the Declaration of Korean Independence in color and selling copies, sending a portion of the sales profits to the independence activists’ families.Footnote 106 Their fundraising strategies were varied, from rolling bandages for the Red Cross to making and selling dduk (rice cakes) and mook (jellied soybean slices).Footnote 107 They also repaired old clothes they collected to send back to Korea. “All these women,” picture bride Mary Lee recalled, “joined in for big occasions, and they were mostly picture brides – asserting themselves and their newly found freedom and independence.”Footnote 108
Taking leadership roles and actively interacting with Koreans in the homeland, the picture brides not only maintained their ties to their home country but also helped build up Korea’s national sovereignty from afar. Through this process, these picture brides demonstrated their equal status to men, using the picture marriage system as a pathway toward what they felt to be their greater purpose: working toward the liberation of their nation and their God-given rights.
V. Conclusion
During the late nineteenth century, American women missionaries, supported by their vision of the “New Woman” label, brought their Christianizing and civilizing efforts to Korea. Although their supposed shared gender with Korean women provided an opportunity by which the missionaries could spread the greater freedoms afforded to the “New Woman,” their religious and racializing logic of “heathen” ultimately led them to promote a more traditional sense of womanhood and women’s rights to Korean women. While some Korean women embraced these old ideas, others found such traditional views on women unfulfilling, given their experience in their homeland. Many Korean women, supported by their own expanding forms of gender consciousness, instead sought to immigrate to America as picture brides, with their desire for further education and Korean national sovereignty as guiding factors; this more complex motivation complicates the popular American conception at the time of picture marriage as a “heathen” and “backward” practice.
Understanding Korean women’s engagement with discursive gender consciousness through their theological interpretations in a national and transnational context complicates the dominant narrative and representations of Asian women in the United States. Korean women’s pursuit of the picture bride system as part of the continual embodiment of “againstness” also allows us to see deeper layers behind what has been, in both history and scholarship, a masked process of constructing the “heathen” woman, which contemporary American society continues to sustain. Additional studies that further incorporate oral accounts and memories of picture brides may peel back these layers, illuminating their religious beliefs that drove their physical and intellectual movements. Taken together, by employing a more expansive framework, this article challenges the assumptions behind the ownership of the New Woman label and the Western centrality that is presupposed to undergird the evolution of global feminist movements, pushing for an understanding of Korean picture brides that transcends easy categorization.
Author biography
Chanhee Heo is a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University in St. Louis. Her first monograph in progress, Thy Kin-dom Come: Imagining the First Christian Nation in the East, examines Korean migrants’ evolving ideas of race and religion as they traversed the Pacific from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Kathryn Gin Lum, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Yumi Moon, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of Church History for their valuable feedback on drafts of this article. The research trip I conducted for this article was supported by the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (NEAC).
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