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This study examines how the concept of "Korean woman" underwent a radical transformation in Korea's public discourse during the years of Japanese colonialism. Theodore Jun Yoo shows that as women moved out of traditional spheres to occupy new positions outside the home, they encountered the pervasive control of the colonial state, which sought to impose modernity on them. While some Korean women conformed to the dictates of colonial hegemony, others took deliberate pains to distinguish between what was "modern" (e.g., Western outfits) and thus legitimate, and what was "Japanese," and thus illegitimate. Yoo argues that what made the experience of these women unique was the dual confrontation with modernity itself and with Japan as a colonial power.

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Korea, public health priorities in maternal and infant welfare privileged the new nation’s reproductive health and women’s responsibility for care work to produce novel organization of services in hospitals and practices in the home. The first monograph on this topic, Imperatives of Care places women and gender at the center of modern medical transformations in Korea. It outlines the professionalization of medicine, nursing, and midwifery, tracing their evolution from new legal and institutional infrastructures in public health and education, and investigates women’s experiences as health practitioners and patients, medical activities directed at women’s bodies, and the related knowledge and goods produced for and consumed by women. Sonja M. Kim draws on archival sources, some not previously explored, to foreground the ways individual women met challenges posed by uneven developments in medicine, intervened in practices aimed at them, andseized the evolving options that became available to promote their personal, familial, and professional interests. She demonstrates how medicine produced, and in turn was produced by, gendered expectations caught between the Korean reformist agenda, the American Protestant missionary enterprise, and Japanese imperialism.

The twelve chapters in this volume seek to overcome the nationalist paradigm of Japanese repression and exploitation versus Korean resistance that has dominated the study of Korea’s colonial period (1910–1945) by adopting a more inclusive, pluralistic approach that stresses the complex relations among colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. By addressing such diverse subjects as the colonial legal system, radio, telecommunications, the rural economy, and industrialization and the formation of industrial labor, one group of essays analyzes how various aspects of modernity emerged in the colonial context and how they were mobilized by the Japanese for colonial domination, with often unexpected results. A second group examines the development of various forms of identity from nation to gender to class, particularly how aspects of colonial modernity facilitated their formation through negotiation, contestation, and redefinition.

Women in the Sky examines Korean women factory workers' century-long activism, from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on gender politics both in the labor movement and in the larger society. It highlights several key moments in colonial and postcolonial Korean history when factory women commanded the attention of the wider public, including the early-1930s rubber shoe workers' general strike in Pyongyang, the early-1950s textile workers' struggle in South Korea, the 1970s democratic union movement led by female factory workers, and women workers' activism against neoliberal restructuring in recent decades. Hwasook Nam asks why women workers in South Korea have been relegated to the periphery in activist and mainstream narratives despite a century of persistent militant struggle and indisputable contributions to the labor movement and successful democracy movement. Women in the Sky opens and closes with stories of high-altitude sit-ins—a phenomenon unique to South Korea—beginning with the rubber shoe worker Kang Churyong's sit-in in 1931 and ending with numerous others in today's South Korean labor movement, including that of Kim Jin-Sook. In Women in the Sky, Nam seeks to understand and rectify the vast gap between the crucial roles women industrial workers played in the process of Korea's modernization and their relative invisibility as key players in social and historical narratives. By using gender and class as analytical categories, Nam presents a comprehensive study and rethinking of the twentieth-century nation-building history of Korea through the lens of female industrial worker activism.

In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women—a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors— from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women’s human rights movement—that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.

Yoon Sun Yang argues that the first literary iterations of the Korean individual were female figures in late nineteenth century domestic novels. This study disrupts the canonical account of a non-gendered, linear progress toward modern Korean selfhood and examines translation's impact on Korea's construction of modern gender roles.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Rules of the House offers a dynamic revisionist account of the Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945) by examining the roles of women in the civil courts. Challenging the dominant view that women were victimized by the Japanese family laws and its patriarchal biases, Sungyun Lim argues that Korean women had to struggle equally against Korean patriarchal interests. Moreover, women were not passive victims; instead, they proactively struggled to expand their rights by participating in the Japanese colonial legal system. In turn, the Japanese doctrine of promoting progressive legal rights would prove advantageous to them. Following female plaintiffs and their civil disputes from the precolonial Choson dynasty through colonial times and into postcolonial reforms, this book presents a new and groundbreaking story about Korean women’s legal struggles, revealing their surprising collaborative relationship with the colonial state.

Presenting the voices of a unique group within contemporary Japanese society—Zainichi women—this book provides a fresh insight into their experiences of oppression and marginalization that over time have led to liberation and empowerment. Often viewed as unimportant and inconsequential, these women’s stories and activism are now proving to be an integral part of both the Zainichi Korean community and Japanese society. Featuring in-depth interviews from 1994 to the present, three generations of Zainichi Korean women—those who migrated from colonial Korea before or during WWII and the Asia-Pacific War and their Japan-born descendants—share their version of history, revealing their lives as members of an ethnic minority. Discovering voices within constricting patriarchal traditions, the women in this book are now able to tell their history. Ethnography, interviews, and the women’s personal and creative writings offer an in-depth look into their intergenerational dynamics and provide a new way of exploring the hidden inner world of migrant women and the different ways displacement affects subsequent generations. This book goes beyond existing Anglophone and Japanese literatures, to explore the lives of the Zainichi Korean women. As such, it will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese and Korean history, culture and society, as well as ethnicity and Women’s Studies.

Linking economic and social historical research methods with special reference to the evolution of the industrial labor force, To Live to Work offers an account of the popular expansion of gender, labor, and political consciousnesses among working women in colonial Korea. While Korea's rapid industrial development throughout the twentieth century is one focus of this work, equal emphasis is given to interpreting the social and cultural consequences of modernization, such as the growth of cities and the rise of male and female labor forces. Special attention is given to the partitions in the labor market along the lines of gender, age, class, and nationality.