Early in the Chosun or Yi dynasty, which governed Korea from 1392 until the Japanese annexation in 1910, the emperors incorporated a group of skilled women, called kisang, into a political institution used by the palace to control members of the elite and of the state bureaucracy. The political sex-life of the kisang engendered dependency and loyalty among the scholar-bureaucrats and initiated a system of remuneration which helped perpetuate the dominance of the ruling class. Over the centuries, political positions were often expressed through one's attitude towards these courtesans. The usurper-king Yunsangun (1491-1506) provides the most notorious example of support. He fortified his rule by increasing the number of kisang to over ten thousand in the capital alone. His abuse of sexual power extended his control over the army and nearly bankrupted the state treasury. Periodically, meretricious and hypocritical moral campaigns were launched against the kisang and the allocations necessary to support them. Nevertheless, both the institution and the dynasty survived into the early twentieth century. During the five hundred years of Chosun rule, ideologues supported the hierarchy and ethical system of Confucianism. This system was based upon a conception of the family and the clan which valued wives only in their roles as bearers of sons. The son was the point on the time line upon which present, past, and future time depended. Virtuous women, however, were very isolated. The higher their social rank, the greater their seclusion. The faculties and skills of Korean women were arrested, limited as they were to physical labor, sewing, dancing, and practical household tasks. Women stayed home and were forbidden direct contact with any male who was not a family member. If her spouse was not at home, the lady of the house had to address visiting males indirectly and in the third person. Female dissatisfaction was unthinkable; insubordination impossible. Social structures intensified this female isolation since they mandated that wives resign themselves to their husbands' secondary wives and mistresses. Jealousy was grounds for divorce. The cardinal virtue of selflessness made the concept of individual female self-identity impossible. No life existed for her outside the family or clan. The kisang, however, played an almost antithetical role to that officially prescribed for women. A kisang was inducted from the lower classes between the ages of eight and ten. Purchased from her family and schooled in a career which disqualified her from marriage and raising a family, she was, in compensation, allowed a certain amount of economic and social independence denied respectable women. A kisang might find herself allocated to the royal palace or elsewhere in the capital; perhaps she was assigned to the provinces or to the border-guard military posts of the kingdom. But with her special freedoms came other forms of dependence and difficulty, such as forced relocation. Thus Imniwol laments: Here in exile, behind ocean walls, only a dream is allowed to exist. My request is that this passage of dream will not have left any traces. Kungnyo expresses her frustration at this forced acquiescence: Who caught you, fish, to free you into my garden pond? Which clear northern sea did you leave for these small waters? Once here, with no way to flee, you and I are the same. Upon their forced retirement, the kisang were sent to the outlands as a sexual benefaction for the troops. Although not officially codified into statute, this displacement supported them into their old age. A kisang was in some ways a social outcast; yet, unlike the respectable women of her time, she was educated and articulate. She was not prohibited from looking at or addressing men directly. Trained in eloquence, she might even discuss politics. …