이등시민의 반격: 잉글랜드의 의붓딸들과 이대녀

Abstract

This paper discusses the ways in which Virginia Woolf’s discussion of female citizenship in her 1938 polemical essay Three Guineas speaks to women in their twenties, or Idaenyo, abbreviated from Isipdaeyoja, in South Korea. Recently, Korean media have paid attention to the emergence of women in their twenties as meaningful voters that have an impact on the domestic political scene. Even if this attention indicates the nation’s unprecedented gesture to interpellate young women as political subjects, identifying them as a homogeneous group seems erroneous. In Three Guineas, written after women’s suffrage was accomplished, Woolf discloses the limitations on women’s right to vote and touches upon various controversial issues regarding female citizenship: civic rights and duties, belonging and exclusion, political participation and indifference, and national citizenship and global one. Understanding how a nation-state conceives female citizenship, Woolf represents women of the educated class as “step-daughters of England” to underscore their implicitly excluded subject position and proposes a radical vision for their political influence in the form of indifference and their deliberate denial of national citizenship. I argue that both “step-daughters of England” in Three Guineas and young women in South Korea reveal second-class citizens’ self-awareness about their political agency that surpasses national boundaries. Acknowledging the complexities of gender-based conflicts in current Korean society, I conclude that Woolf anticipates the educated women’s dilemma as national subjects and suggests alternative ways of exercising their political agency.