The State, Family and ‘Womanhood’ in Colonial Korea: ‘Public’ Women and the Contradictions of the Total Mobilisation Programme

Abstract

This chapter explores the changing conceptions of the family and ‘womanhood’ during late colonial Korea, especially after 1937 when the Second Sino-Japanese War had escalated to bring about ‘total mobilisation’ as a mode of social management. The Japanese colonial government was faced with the task of making Korean women serve Japan’s imperialist projects, including the conduct of an undeclared war in China (1937–45) and eventually the Pacific War (1941–45). The mainstream historiography generally concludes that the Korean women in this period became doubly bound by the obligations to the patriarchal system and to the colonial state, their collective political voice dwindling to virtual nothingness. Both nationalist and Marxist-socialist perspectives, when taken up by Korean historians, have largely chosen to define ‘progress’ for Korean women in terms of ‘fighting alongside’ the men against colonial oppression and discounted other types of activism on the part of the women as outcomes of being passively mobilised by the Japanese rulers or morally condemnable acts of collaboration with the enemy.1 A typical assessment is that the colonial state ‘endowed women’s role in their homes with public meaning captured in the slogan “women in the rear, protecting the home (as opposed to men at the front, advancing the cause of the nation)”.