Gender is a very powerful category and one that many different people have used in order to explain culture and society. The role of women in society had for the longest time been constricted to the private sphere, the home, taking care of the children and being the primary Linchpin that could take care of the family and be the emotional and often moral center of the family. Women in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have gained more rights and have fought for equality with men. When Korean families immigrated to the United States in the middle of the twentieth century the shock between the traditional patriarchal Korean society and the new American society was very important. The Confucian values instilled in Korean women is very deeply ingrained so much so that a recent study found that 82% of Korean women agreed with the statement that, “women should have only a family oriented life, devoted to bringing up the children and looking after the husband,” as opposed to only 19% of U.S women (Pyke and Johnson 38). This proves that patriarchy is still very much a part of Korean culture and society and something which is hard to deal with even today. Korean society for better or worse is patriarchal with solid gender roles and that is something which we must deal with no matter our political leanings. Gender inequality is a major issue and something which must dealt and this paper shows the history of how women in both the United States and Korea dealt with the problem of patriarchy and have been able to make some positive changes in their lives.
Any discussion of gender in a broad Asian-American sense and in the more specific Korean sense mush first give a background of why women occupy the place that they do in their societies. This is largely because of the power of Confucian thought in constructing gender roles in East Asian societies. Confucian thought is very prevalent in East Asian cultures and it is marked by certain values which include “Interpersonal harmony, relational hierarchy, and traditional conversation” (Zhang al 3These Confucian values are prevalent throughout East Asian societies but they are not distributed equally in all of these societies and each of them has developed their own form of Confucian thought. Korea’s particular expression of Confucianism is highly inflected by gender and gender relations.
The issue of gender in the East Asian context is very much influenced by the prevalence of Confucian thought as the primary building blocks of society and social relations. This makes studying these issues particularly complex in the Korean context. Korean history as it developed can be “described as an extreme form of patriarchy, especially during the Yi dynasty. Women had no public positions and were forced to be passive and obedient to men, who were structurally central” (Cho 187). During the Yi dynasty Confucian values were spread by the new rulers as a way of legitimizing their rule they accomplished this by getting rid of the powerful Buddhist elite and chose in rule Korea as primarily Confucian state The values preached by Confucianism especially in the Korean context worked to create a highly structured patriarchal society where women became subordinate to men in the public sphere but Haejong Cho argues that a new ideology was developed in Korea, something she calls “mother power.” Cho argues that “mother power may be the most secure source of power for women under the patriarchal system. (Cho 200) This fact alone elevated the power of the women as something made them vitally important in the home even if they were constricted by highly oppressive Confucian patriarchal state. These were the building blocks of Korean society in Korea but this was soon to change with the coming of immigration to the United States.
Korean society and Korean family structure as we saw above were highly defined by the Confucian tradition of the people that came to the United States. These Korean families were highly structured and functioned through patriarchy. Immigration was sure to create social dislocation though the process of integration and assimilation into their host societies. This is particularly true because Korean-American communities made their way to the United States after the Korean War right before the rise of the Second Wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Second Wave feminism was a political movement which was birthed from the 1960s as a response to ever increasing politicization of a new generation of young people. Second Wave feminists has as their primary goal gaining equality with men outside of only political matters, that is to say, that they wanted to be recognized as full people who have all of the rights as men in society including in the family, the workplace and sexually. This movement was called the women’s liberation movement and it aimed at creating a more equitable society where women were treated the same as men in all of matters. This was the product of the larger political and culture scene of the 1960s in the West which questioned so much of the traditional wisdom of the establishment.
This is largely representative of the majority of immigration since the 1960s many of whom came from Asia and Latin America where there was “a stronger patriarchal system and a more traditional gender division of labor than in the United States. One of the ways in which immigration changed dynamics within the family was through increased participation in the labor force (Min 302). This was the case with Korean families but interestingly enough this has done very little to actually change the structure of Korean-American families. Min argues that, Koreans are one of the few immigrant groups who experience a high level of discrepancy between women’s in creased economic role and persistence of traditional gender role attitudes. While most Korean immigrant wives are active in their economic role, the structure of the Korean immigrant community has hindered Korean immigrants, particularly men, from modifying the patriarchal ideology that they brought with them from Korea (303). Patriarchy is a fundamental building block of Korean society and it is an ideology which has persisted even the disruption of immigration and the necessary changes which came with the creation of new practices associated with entering a very different American society. Immigrants very rarely quickly integrate or assimilate themselves after immigration and usually live in immigrant enclave. Immigrant communities or enclaves are a way for immigrants to organize themselves socially in an unfamiliar and often very different culture. These enclaves create relationship and social networks which maintain the traditional social and cultural value of the immigrant community and temper their assimilation with the dominant culture. The importance of the family and the family structure for Korean immigrants also played a large role in them not assimilating and maintaining patriarchy. There is something to be said for tradition as a way of coping with change and that is exactly the role which the family played in Korean immigrant communities in the United States. The role of women in the Korean and Korean-American family is inescapable and it is highly circumscribed by the ever powerful combination of Confucianism and patriarchy which has limited women to the public sphere even if they have a very important and incredibly powerful role in that sphere. Patriarchy in this context is equated with tradition and the history of a place and it is something which immigrant communities broadly have to deal with in one context or another. The strength of patriarchy in these communities is something which can’t be denied and it led to an active intervention against these practices through the institution of a more robust form of feminism.
Feminism and feminist history or more appropriately the history of different feminisms or feminist movements is something which is intricately connected with certain power structures and processes of identity formation. Second Wave feminism in particular has a problem in its creations of what Becky Thompson calls “hegemonic feminism” which is characterized by its white leadership and has marginalized “the activism and world views of women of color, focuses mainly on the United States, and treats sexism as the ultimate oppression (Thompson 337). This lens is something which other women had to contend with in creating their own feminisms. Throughout the 1970s several women and prominent feminist thinkers formulated ideas which would lead to the creation of “multiracial feminism” (Thompson 337-38). These ideas emphasized the need for people of the color-led feminist organization that was exclusively for women. Although this phenomenon encapsulated and entire host of non-white groups it is particularly important as a way of explaining how the rise of feminism impacted many different immigrants and non-while groups including Asian-Americans. There has been very little research done on Korean and Korean-American feminism but these is enough material on the broader Asian American community in the United States which leads to same general points.
The development of Asian-American feminism since the 1960s has been a very complex process which parallels many of the problems which other non-white groups had regarding the primarily white Second Wave feminist movement. Asian-American women, in fact, “as a group has neither been included in the predominantly white middle-class feminist movement nor have they begun collectively to identity with it” (Chow 284-285). Another major problem for Asian-American feminist was simply a demographic one. Their small number, as well as the ethnic diversity of different Asian American groups, make it very hard for them to successfully organize in order to fight the problems inherent with the organization. Furthermore, the efforts of Asian-American are criticized by their communities for their possible ill effects including the “weakening of the male ego,” “setback for the Asian-American cause, “and the loss of their ethnic identity (Chow 288). These arguments against the Asian-American feminist organization are largely posited as conservative stands against change and they should be engaged as such. This rhetoric ignores reality and the importance of women’s rights to a society especially for minorities living in the United States. In Korean itself more and more women middle aged women “women oppose and resist strict traditional roles.” These women are “willing and prepared to participate in political, social, and economic activities and other public sectors. They dream of equality, power, and social identity, and they desire to live an autonomous life with human dignity” (Sun and Cho 4). Women working outside of the home are a very important indicator of how much relations between men and women changed after immigration, where many Korean-American women work outside of the home as opposed to in Korean (Soon and Moon 75). The purpose of feminism is attaining equality for women this is a particularly hard task in Korean and Korean-American societies because of the importance of Confucianism and patriarchy. These practices are very important to Korean and Korean-American societies and undoing them has been very difficult.
One method which can be used to deal with the problem of gender inequality and to bring up questions about society and culture is through the use of art and entertainment. These media are very powerful ways to critique systems which are thought of as oppressive. One of the most powerful media for doing so is through literature. One example of a Korean-American female writer who has used literature as method of denouncing is Kim Ronyoung in her novel Clay Walls. Ronyoung’s main character Haesu is used to “dramatize the oppression of women within traditional Korean patriarchal society” (Warhal-Down and Hemdl p.355). The novel serves a powerful critique to patriarchy in Korean society and that is exactly its value as way of dealing with a problem as deep as the one of gender relations in Korean society and the powerful question of resistance to these structures which have kept Korean women down for so long. Another method for dealing with these societal problems and a decidedly post-modern one is through the use of stand-up comedy. Margaret Cho is a second generation Korean-American woman who has been used to stand-up as a platform to deal with many social problems including homophobia, gender stereotypes, racism and body image issues (Krefting 220). Cho has a very important place as a counterhegemonic voice and as a symbol of the progress which Korean women have made in the United States since the 1960s.
Gender roles are very important in Korean culture that is largely because of Korea’s historical legacy as a strict patriarchal Confucian society. These societal norms are so deeply expressed in a Korean-American culture that even the immigrant experience and the coming of Second Wave feminism has done very little to change this construct. Korean and Korean-American women have to live with the reality of patriarchy and the subordination of women. There has been some positive change in this field in recent years and women have attained more equality both in Korea and the United Sates. Although Korean society has certain expectations for its women it does not mean they must conform to this and there has been a current of feminism which has been able to deal with this dissatisfaction and create so equal society where women are treated with the same dignity as men.
Works Cited
Cho, Haejoang, “Male Dominance and Mother Power: The Two Side of Confucian Patriarchy in Korea” in Top of Form DeVos, George A, and Walter H. Slote. Confucianism and the Family. Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York Press, 1998. Print.
Chow, Esther Ngan-Ling. "The development of feminist consciousness among Asian American women." Gender & Society 1.3 (1987): 284-299.
Krefting, Rebecca. All joking aside: American humor and its discontents. JHU Press, 2014.
Min, Pyong Gap. "Changes in Korean immigrants' gender role and social status, and their marital conflicts." Sociological Forum. Vol. 16. No. 2. Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers, 2001.
Pyke, Karen D., and Denise L. Johnson. "Asian American women and racialized femininities “Doing” gender across cultural worlds." Gender & Society 17.1 (2003): 33-53.
Thompson, Becky. "Multiracial feminism: Recasting the chronology of second wave feminism." Feminist Studies 28.2 (2002): 337-360.
Song, Young I, and Ailee Moon. Korean American Women: From Tradition to Modern Feminism. Westport, Conn. [u.a.: Praeger, 1998. Print.
Sun, Qi, and Sung Ran Cho. "From A Confucian Tradition To The Postmodern World: Korean MiddleAged Women's Traditional Roles And Modern Expectations In A Globalized Society. (Undetermined)." International Forum Of Teaching & Studies 4.2 (2008): 559.Education Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 27 July 2016.
Warhol-Down, Robyn, and Diane Price Herndl, eds. Feminisms redux: an anthology of literary theory and criticism. Rutgers University Press, 2009.
Zhang, Yan Bing, et al. "Harmony, hierarchy and conservatism: A cross-cultural comparison of Confucian values in China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan." Communication Research Reports 22.2 (2005): 107-115.
