Hyaeweol Choi has relentlessly devoted her academic career to exploring the topography of modernity and gender relations in Korea under Japanese colonial rule during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, paying special attention to the roles and influences of Protestant missionaries from the United States. This book, too, probes the activities of American (female) protestant missionaries and their “women's work for women” (p. 13), as well as the activities of the Japanese colonial authorities and foreign-educated Korean women who contended, negotiated, and integrated with one another to shape modern womanhood and domesticity in early twentieth-century Korea.
A notable feature of Gender Politics at Home and Abroad, compared with Choi's previous research, is its engagement with transnational and transpacific perspectives. Broadening her attention to global Christian networks and their contributions to modern domesticity in colonial Korea and to creating Korean's future female leaders, Choi traces how foreign-educated Korean women shaped and reshaped their subjectivity and activities at home and overseas. Choi adopts the concept of “Protestant modernity” as an overarching analytic apparatus to accentuate the prominent and transnational Protestant influence in the gender relations of colonial Korea. That is, as she convincingly clarifies, because Korea was uniquely under the rule of a non-Western colonizer, the religious (American Protestant) institution from the West was believed to have more cultural hegemony than the original and authentic form of modernity.
The book's four chapters interrogate diverse interactions, competitions, and exchanges of influence regarding hegemony related to the gendered modernity, with a focus on gender ideologies, domestic material culture, and women's activities in the public sphere. The chapters focus on both agential individuals, such as Protestant missionaries, American educators, and Korean female elites, and institutions, such as Christian global networks, American universities, and Japanese colonial authority.
Chapter 1 traces the transcultural genealogy of the discourse of “wise mother, good wife,” a prevailing ideal of womanhood created at the convergence of Confucian notions of womanly virtue (pudŏk), Japanese Meiji gender ideology (ryōsai kenbo), and American Protestant missionaries’ Victorian notions of domesticity. In this chapter, Choi also examines the resilience of patriarchy carved into the “modern” discourse of “wise mother, good wife.” She exposes the gender norms buried deeply in traditional Korean, Japanese colonial, and Protestant patriarchies, which commonly emphasize separate gender spheres, purity, and domesticity.
Chapter 2 interrogates the formation of the ideal of “the modern home.” It considers material domestic culture in contentions among national, colonial, and missionary projects to reform the conception and materiality of Korean domesticity by changing architectural features of and lifestyles in the home, as well as adapting scientific household management based on a Western model. This chapter highlights how transpacific Protestant and educational networks nurtured Korean women leaders for the scientification and indigenization of domesticity by teaching knowledge of home economics, with foreign-educated women assisting to establish “home economies” as an academic discipline in women's higher education in Korea.
Chapter 3 examines elite Korean women's transnational experiences outside colonized Korea for study or travel and how these experiences influenced their identities, self-consciousness, and visions for social through encounters with various foreign people, cultures, customs, and lifestyles. The chapter delves into how Protestant missionaries and the global Christian network in Korea and overseas supported and sponsored opportunities for Korean Christian women to gain exposure to foreign experiences.
Chapter 4 interrogates foreign-educated Korean women's proactive engagement in and commitment to the rural revitalization movement, and tasks for rural women and children, on their return to Korea. Choi demonstrates how the Protestant global network was involved with women reformers in Korea and their activities for the rural revitalization movement in the 1920s and 1930s, right before Japan's initiation of assimilation policies that aimed to annihilate Korean roots and identity.
While Korean studies scholars acknowledge the pivotal roles of the Protestant missionaries in colonial Korea, scholarship has tended to focus on the contentious formation of modern Korean womanhood between the Japanese colonial desire to create a docile colonized population and the Korean nationalists’ desire for social reforms. In that respect, this book is a rare endeavor to investigate a much less probed topic in the field of Korean studies. Skillfully shifting the research focus between woman missionaries, Japanese colonizers, and Korean female reformers, Choi closely observes diverse strands in the creation of Korean women's agency, tracing her subjects’ intellectual journeys inside and outside colonial Korea. As Choi articulates, this book is a sequel to her earlier book, Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (p. 25),Footnote 1 which explores the construction of modern womanhood of Korea with close ties to Christianity. Although this most recent book's major figures largely overlap with those in her previous book, reading both books side-by-side would enrich readers’ knowledge of the complicated mechanisms and dynamics for the gender relations of modern Korea between American missionaries, the Japanese colonizers, and Korean colonized.
In this elegantly written book, Choi scrutinizes recent scholarship, encompassing postcolonial feminism, women's history, postcolonial studies, Korean studies, religious studies, and discourse analysis. She inspects a wide range of primary sources, including daily newspapers, magazines, archives of Christian networks, photographs, and cartoons, to illustrate the diverse agents’ voices, desires, and aims. Because this book largely focuses on foreign-educated Korean women, less-educated, poor, rural women's voices and interactions with educated elite women are missing. However, it was understandably Choi's strategy to overcome source limitations by adopting the concept of “exceptional typical,” a methodological tactic of microhistory that weaves historical facts by taking unusual cases as a prospect, or viewpoint, onto the broader structure (p. 34).
This book will undoubtedly be a valuable textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses. It is also highly recommended for anyone interested in gender relations at the intersection of colonialism, nationalism, and Christian enterprise in modern Korea, particularly those who wish to conduct transnational and comparative research on Protestant missions and gender relations in the East.
