This study focused on the complex and multi-layered aspects of the modern and modern transition periods of the life and history of East Asian women. Through this, it was intended to overcome the single-track perception of history, which has served as ...
This study focused on the complex and multi-layered aspects of the modern and modern transition periods of the life and history of East Asian women. Through this, it was intended to overcome the single-track perception of history, which has served as a major paradigm in women's history, and to provide a framework to explain the life and history of East Asian women in a more multi-layered dimension. In addition, the history of women, which has been approached from a national historical perspective, was attempted to be newly identified through a comparative historical method in the context of East Asia. This is to understand in depth the commonalities and differences of how the structure that has framed the lives of East Asian women has been formed and changed, and how women have responded to it. This study, which is consistent with the trend of academia, where comparative history research is being activated beyond the closed perspective of national history, will contribute to the development of comparative history research in East Asia in the future. The research results conducted by three researchers are as follows. The research manager approached the participation and role of women in the East Asian popular movement and popular religion in the modern transition period in a comparative historical way. As a result, the most important thing is that in the case of Joseon, women's participation and activities were weaker than those of China and Japan in both the popular movement and the popular religion. Women's activities in the popular movement or the popular movement in the late Joseon Dynasty are rarely revealed. The same was true of popular religion. There was also a folk religion in which women such as shamans played a leading role. But there wasn't much influence or number of believers. Popular revolts began to occur very frequently in the mid-19th century, but women's activities are rarely revealed. Donghak, founded in 1860, advocated equality between men and women, but it was not a popular religion in which women took the initiative. The role of women in the Donghak Peasant Movement is almost invisible. China and Japan are in contrast. In China, many women participated in the "White Lotus Rebellion," the Taiping Rebellion, and the Boxer Rebellion, which broke out in the late 18th and early 20th centuries. Depending on the region, women also became leaders of the rebellion. A large number of women participated in the war by forming a separate women's unit. In addition, there are cases in which not a few women played a key role in bandit groups and pirate activities. Women's collective participation was also made in Japanese popular religion and popular movement. In the late 18th century, women began to participate in the popular movement. After the early 19th century, there were many cases in which women, such as Nyoraikyo, Tenrikyo, and Oomotokyo, initiated religion as doctrines
Researcher 2 examined the process of changing family law and the legal status of women in East Asia during the modern transition period. A comparative review of the provisions of the divorce law of colonial Korea, the imperial Japan, and soviet China, revealed that the divorce law of colonial Korea was the most conservative and restricted women's rights. This is because the influence of imperial Japan's conservative legal policy and colonial discrimination, which tried to imitate Western modernity but tried to protect Japanese values in the family, were reflected. In the end, the family law in Colonial Korea was hierarchical centered on HoJu, and individual rights recognized in Japan were denied under the guise of respecting Korea's "customs." The family law revision movement after liberation was a process of decolonization of family law. In other words, it was a process in which the basic principle of the constitution of the family law of ‘respect for customs’ formed during the colonial period was replaced by human rights, democracy, and gender equality.
Researcher 2 attempted a more positive interpretation of women in history by examining the self-perceptions of Japanese women during each of these periods: the premodern era, the modern transition period, and the late 19th century. Tadano Makuzu, a female intellectual in premodern Japan, was able to enter the ‘public sphere’ that women of her time were not allowed to enter by forming a self-perception as an intellectual. Niijima Yae, who lived at the transition period of the Meiji Restoration at the end of the Edo period, awakened as a political subject and actively engaged in political activities, but the modern period she faced was the beginning of discrimination and oppression, thus overturning the dichotomous interpretation of premodern and modern periods in previous women's history research. Finally, Shimizu Shikkin, a female reporter at the end of the 19th century, created a crack in the logic of ‘good wife and wise mother,’ a female norm necessary to maintain the family-state system centered on Emperor Meiji, and raised a question about gender norms toward women in Japanese society during the establishment of the modern state.