1910년에서 1930년까지 미국과 한국에서의 “베이비 쇼(Baby Show)”에 관한 소고 = A Short History of “Baby Shows” in the United States and Korea, 1910s~1930s

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In 1915, the Division of Child Hygiene was established, and that same year, the US Children’s Bureau launched its first national campaign for the improvement of childcare, the “Better Baby” campaign. Parallel interest in children’s health and well-being manifested in Japanese-occupied Korea in the mid-1910s. Foreign Christian missionaries, the majority of whom were Americans, initiated a Better Baby movement in colonial Korea and promoted “baby show” until coercively expelled by the Japanese colonial government in the late 1930s to 1940.
This article examines the parallel histories of these contests, or baby shows, in early twentieth century United States and colonial Korea. The historiography of the baby show in each region has developed asymmetrically. Understanding of the American side of the story has deepened with the accumulation of various analyses encompassing the political, cultural, scientific, and social dimensions of the rise in state and popular interest in children’s health. Meanwhile, except for recognition by a few Korean scholars, the case in colonial Korea has been largely neglected. The purpose of this article is to close the chasm between these disparate historiographies.
Furthermore, this work concerns both the connected origin and the divergent growth and demise of the baby show in the two geographies. Focusing on the conceptual connection between the remote locales, this article suggests to see the possibility of Christian missionaries as an important medium of secular progressive ideals and modern science (including eugenics) from the United States. In addition, it argues for the necessity of exploring the history of baby show with the frame of the rise of new imperialism and increasing imperial interest in children’s health and motherhood, which was a world-wide phenomenon since late 19th century. Also, gender perspective, which many American scholars proved its importance to examine this part of history, has not been adopted into the study of Korean cases.