Chong Bum Kim

10.18399/acta.2008.11.3.001

Protestantism women education missionaries Ewha

This paper examines the discourse and practice behind Protestant mission schools for Korean women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus is on Ewha, the first and foremost women’s school in Korea. While the mission schools provided new, ground-breaking educational and career opportunities, they also espoused a domestic ideology based on Victorian models of good wives and mothers. Over time, the modern, Western-style education that the students received took on a dynamic of its own that could not be easily contained or controlled through the discourse of domesticity. Many women, in fact, transgressed the gender norms and boundaries, breaking out of the designated private spheres of home and family, and entering the prohibited public spheres of society and politics. The domestic ideal of wife and mother, however, persisted in reaction to the revolutionary potential and power of a modern education, and attempted to circumscribe it. The students and graduates of the mission schools navigated and negotiated the tensions and contradictions of their education in different ways. But they shared the transforming experience of the new knowledge and spirit embodied by the schools, and, unlike previous generations of Korean women, they held the keys to their own futures.