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Women Pre-Scripted: Forging Modern Roles Through Korean Print
216 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 30, 2025
4/5
“In this decades-long process, the ‘woman’ functioned like a blank canvas on which to draw images, pen ideas, and articulate standpoints on modernization. This medium was first appropriated as a means of pushing for Enlightenment after the opening of Korea's ports in 1876. Next, the ‘woman’ became like a mannequin, clothed in Western-style dresses, makeup, and manners. In both cases she was a monolith, a categorical medium for preaching universal gender(ed) protocols, sen-sibilities, and ideas. Such was the prescriptive view, whose perspective of social issues and their solutions was categorical. As women writers including Na Hye-sok, Kim Won-ju, Im Ok-in, and Paek Sin-ae have shown, however, women using their own voices did not tend toward a monolithic view: each one faced her own task of interpreting and adapting ‘modern,’ ‘Western,’ and ‘New’ in her everyday life, inside and outside ‘home.’ The attempts to write on and for women and to prescribe values and conduct for women used a strategic and active form of writing that revealed limits to those attempts at constraint. In exploring the complex topography of early Korean modernity Women Pre-scripted-the discourse, the book-is thus also a call to focus further research beyond the prescriptions that limited how, and sometimes whether, women's own voices were heard.”
A fascinating and nuanced introduction to late 19th and early 20th century print through the lens of gender and class! This book taught me a lot about Hangeul and Korean mixed script and expanded my understanding of literacy, reading, and the production and consumption of print media. I’m excited to read more Korean women writers from this era who defied the prescribed/circumscribed gender roles Ji-Eun Lee discusses. I’m also curious to read more scholarship on how these early Korean women’s magazines influenced women’s magazines in the 1940s onwards.
“In this decades-long process, the ‘woman’ functioned like a blank canvas on which to draw images, pen ideas, and articulate standpoints on modernization. This medium was first appropriated as a means of pushing for Enlightenment after the opening of Korea's ports in 1876. Next, the ‘woman’ became like a mannequin, clothed in Western-style dresses, makeup, and manners. In both cases she was a monolith, a categorical medium for preaching universal gender(ed) protocols, sen-sibilities, and ideas. Such was the prescriptive view, whose perspective of social issues and their solutions was categorical. As women writers including Na Hye-sok, Kim Won-ju, Im Ok-in, and Paek Sin-ae have shown, however, women using their own voices did not tend toward a monolithic view: each one faced her own task of interpreting and adapting ‘modern,’ ‘Western,’ and ‘New’ in her everyday life, inside and outside ‘home.’ The attempts to write on and for women and to prescribe values and conduct for women used a strategic and active form of writing that revealed limits to those attempts at constraint. In exploring the complex topography of early Korean modernity Women Pre-scripted-the discourse, the book-is thus also a call to focus further research beyond the prescriptions that limited how, and sometimes whether, women's own voices were heard.”
A fascinating and nuanced introduction to late 19th and early 20th century print through the lens of gender and class! This book taught me a lot about Hangeul and Korean mixed script and expanded my understanding of literacy, reading, and the production and consumption of print media. I’m excited to read more Korean women writers from this era who defied the prescribed/circumscribed gender roles Ji-Eun Lee discusses. I’m also curious to read more scholarship on how these early Korean women’s magazines influenced women’s magazines in the 1940s onwards.
Displaying 1 of 1 review