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This article intends to illustrate gender roles as related to modernity in colonial Korea by focusing on the birth of the ''New Woman'' and its historical location. The New Woman appeared as a new female icon all over the world in the early twentieth century and implanted a new female identity produced by the introduction of modern, Western ideas in Korea. However, the embodiment of the New Woman in Korea shows historical variation from the prototype of a more global New Woman. Furthermore, in colonial Korea New Women did not present a singular, fixed collective identity but included diverse layers of female subjectivities. Specifically, with the flow of time, the representation of New Women shows the process of refraction and implosion of ''New Woman'' images, each having different connotations. This article traces the discursive transformation of the ''New Woman'' in mass media (mainly newspapers and magazines) from the 1900s to the 1940s, and its significant associations with the relationship of gender and modernity in colonial Korea. It also elucidates what it meant to be a New Woman historically in Korea.
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The Eye of the "Other" and the Choso?n Woman
The American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) was secretary to the first Korean delegation to the United States when diplomatic ties were established in August of 1883. Lowell left one travel essay on Korea, Choso?n, The Land of the Morning Calm: A Sketch of Korea (1885), and in it described the status of a typical Korean woman.
More properly, we may speak of it [her status] as her want of position; for the principle is, in Korea, hardly more than a negation, and, like negations, generally has been most influential, not in what it denies, but in what the absence of it has permitted to take its place. . . . In other words, the withdrawal of the influence of woman from the social system has not had destructive effect upon that system which might have been anticipated for it; for in Korea woman prac- tically does not exist. Materially, physically, she is a fact; but mentally, morally, socially, she is a cipher.1
The perception of Lowell, who regards Korean women as nearly nothing in mental, moral, and social dimensions,...