Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea, by Hyaeweol Choi.

Abstract

Hyaeweol Choi’s works on gender relations in modern Korea have highlighted the significant role of Protestant missions in giving rise to modern Korean womanhood. Her recent publication, Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea, continues this contribution to the field. She highlights the experiences of Korean women in colonial Korea, primarily focusing on elites educated in mission schools. She also charts a topography of their transnational encounters with modernity, facilitated by the global network of Protestant mission and educational institutions. Choi argues that Korean woman intellectuals explored the world beyond the traditional boundaries imposed on them and navigated the ideas of selfhood, nation, and modernity.Taking on the challenging task of restoring women’s voices, Choi thoughtfully uses the concept of “Protestant modernity” as a heuristic tool to highlight women’s agency in shaping modernity. Protestant modernity in her book focuses on the material progress offered by Protestantism, such as “opportunities for education, employment, leadership, and even lifestyle” (15). Choi successfully shows that Protestant modernity competed against Japanese colonial modernity in Korea, complicating the nexus of the colonizer and colonized and eventually creating room for native agents to learn, resist, and interpret their version of modernity beyond the binary.The monograph consists of four chapters. The first two chapters analyze the transnational formation of modern Korean gender norms and practices on the Korean peninsula, and the other two chapters look at these issues across borders. Chapter 1 traces the genealogy of the critical gender ideology “wise mother, good wife.” Choi points out that it emerged from the transcultural interactions among Confucian women’s virtue, Japanese colonial gender ideology, and Protestant missionaries’ Victorian notion of domesticity. By unpacking the dynamics, she argues that this product was not an amalgamated mixture but a Korean “localized gender ideology with significant imprint of other societies and cultures” (41).Chapter 2 explores the materiality of gender ideology, reflected in the idea of the “modern house and home.” She highlights the concept as it was introduced, modeled, and performed by Japanese powers, Western missionaries, and foreign-educated Korean women in home exhibitions, the missionary home, and home economics educational programs. Here, Choi masterfully captures the transition of the domestic space from the intimate sphere to “the most dynamic sites for uncovering the confluence of the local, the national, and the global” (108).Chapter 3 follows elite Korean women’s transnational journey abroad. The global Protestant network offered opportunities for these women to travel to China, the United States, Australia, and countries in Europe. In their travel overseas, these women crossed domestic borders, breaking traditional norms imposed on women. Choi aptly points out the ongoing tension between traditional and modern, and national and colonial, in which Korean women constantly negotiated their self-identity as colonized self, Korean, and woman.Chapter 4 continues by tracing these women’s return to Korea from their studies or travels abroad in the 1920s and 1930s. Upon their homecoming, many Korean women intellectuals committed themselves to rural revitalization movements. Highlighting the work of Protestant women such as Hwang Aedŏk, Kim Hwallan, and Pak Indŏk, Choi shows that the rural reform campaigns were shaped by their travel experiences, supported by mission organizations, and overlapped by the Japanese colonial rural reform projects.Choi’s meticulous research shines throughout the book. To reconstruct Korean women’s experiences of modernity, she collects and analyzes their letters, journals, public speeches, school records, newspaper interviews, and magazine articles. Her detailed investigation presents this collection of pioneering Korean Protestant women in fashioning modern gender relations in various fields such as education and social movements.While she consistently centers her work on Korean women as critical agents in shaping modernity, her focus on the material practices of Protestantism leaves out the religious aspects of these women’s experiences in the global Protestant network. Nevertheless, Choi’s book remains a valuable addition to the literature on women and Protestantism in modern Korea, raising many more questions for further research. I recommend this book as a necessary read to students and scholars interested in Protestant mission and modern colonial history, especially those interested in the agency of women and Protestant converts in this dynamic.