I tried to cross analyze the experience of women and modernity in South and North Korea during the liberation period a time that was important to make modern Korea. Under Japan colonization women didn`t have any rights in area such as politics, econom...
I tried to cross analyze the experience of women and modernity in South and North Korea during the liberation period a time that was important to make modern Korea. Under Japan colonization women didn`t have any rights in area such as politics, economics, culture. Most women hadn`t received an education so that 90% of the female population consisted of non-educated women. There were many women worked for 16 hours a day under the harsh working conditions that colonial politics and feudalism had produced. After liberation many women expected liberation from the double shackles which had stemmed from Japanese colonialism and traditional Korean feudalism. After liberation, there were people asking for democracy and equality of sexes, both of which had been understood as a doorsill to enter modernity. The military government was a moment for women to be able to take and reconstruct their identity, that had suggested new politics about women. The US military government established the ministry of gender equality in 1946 and the North Korean government enacted new laws along the construction of Soviet socialism, for example the law of the equality of sexes. Globally was common sense that modernity was the opportunity for women to acquire the right of education, political activity and social labor. The independence from Japan had permitted women to acquire these in Korea so that a lot of discourse was generated about education, labor and consumption. But the position of women was complicated due to the influence of Confucian ideas that had been a tradition in Korea. Women were excluded from most of the key issues in society because those had been regarded as subjects for men. Roles in society were assigned depending on people`s sex and the media tried to support this discourse.This thesis studied the discourse in Cheers Freedom(1946),My Hometown(1949), and A Melting Furnace(1950), which were the first movie made about liberation in Sourth and North Korea. These films a double proposed gender performance for women in which most women were supposed to be a wise mother and good wife in their home and a laborer in society. In these movies the heroin represented contradictions that showed the real life of many women. Those women that women who absorbed the changing culture exposed the gap between reality and discourse but they were forced to follow confucian gender traditions.