해방기 여성독본과 여성해방의 거리

Abstract

Lee Man-kyu, an educator and nationalist during the Japanese colonial period, was belatedly spotlighted in South Korea due to his defection to North Korea during the liberation period. Part of Lee Man-kyu’s educational aspects can be examined in two women’s readers he wrote, Home Reader (1941; 1946) and Women’s lesson in Family of New Era(1946) were published during the liberation period and used as books for women’s education. As can be seen from the title, these two books emphasize naming women as beings in the home and fulfilling their responsibilities as wise wives and mothers. Lee Man-kyu’s view of women is modern in that it imagines a husband-wife-centered family order, while it emphasizes expanded families such as parents, brothers, and sisters. This can also be confirmed by the fact that Lee Man-kyu accepted modern ideas as a Christian, but was conservative in love or marriage. This hybridity is evident when compared to the socialist Choi Hwa-sung’s Joseon Women’s Reader(1948), which was published at a similar time. Choi Hwa-sung emphasizes the need to transform the social system and achieve women’s liberation through the socialist revolution, placing the liberation of Joseon on the same track as women’s liberation. She presented knowledge related to women’s movement history around the world as a reader of women during the liberation period. While Lee Man-kyu assumed women as non-working subjects, Choi Hwa-sung emphasizes women as social beings in a way that women’s right to education also exists for the right to work. Despite the commonalities between the two Christian socialists in North Korea, the position on the theory of women’s liberation is completely changed by gender and generation differences.