Korean Women in Politics
Korean Women in Politics
Korean Women in Politics
1/2, 1993
law, and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic, civic or cultural life on account of sex,
religion or social status (Korea Overseas Information Service, 1980,
p. 10).
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of the yin/yang complementarity1 (i.e., the harmonious combination of yin and
yangthe feminine passive and the masculine active principles, respectively)
fortified by the traditional Confucian ideology of male superiority. The concept
of sexual equality, in fact, is fundamentally alien to the Confucian worldview,
which regards society as an ordered inequality (Bodde, 1953, p. 48). The
Korean language with its several levels of honorifics not only reflects but also
helps to reinforce the inequalities in social status based on gender, age, and
social positions. Under the circumstances, one may refer to Korean society as a
patriarchal democracy.
Given the coexistence of these contradictory ideologies concerning gender
relations in Korean society, how do people deal with the tensions created by the
two opposing ideologies of sexual equality and of male superiority rooted in the
cosmology of harmonious yin/yang complementarity? A corollary of this
question is the issue of sociocultural change. How do men and women change
their behavioral patterns toward each other, and how do we study such change?
As Raymond Firth (1954) suggested, one way to study such change is to
distinguish social structure [which may be conceived as a set of ideal principles
and norms of behavior (cf. Leach, 1953)] from social organization and
investigate the processes of sociocultural change by focusing on social
organization of concrete actions and behaviors. Social organization in this paper
refers to the processes of ordering of action and of relations in reference to
given social ends, in terms of adjustments resulting from the exercise of choices
of members of the society (Firth, 1954, p. 10). As Firth (1954) pointed out, the
concepts of social structure and social organization are complementary, so that
organizational results may become part of the structural scheme, and structural
principles must be worked out in organizational arrangements.
Defining politics as the activities of elected and appointed officials (in
contrast to grassroots activities, which have received much attention in feminist
studies of recent years),2 I analyze the experiences of middle-class women within
Korean political institutions. Anne Stevens (1986) wrote that one may look at
womens place within political and governmental institutions from two
opposing perspectives: how little they have achieved or how much they have
achieved in a hostile world. My concern here is not so much about the
assessment of womens achievement in the political arena per se, as about the
insights into the processes of social change in the gender-role system in a
patriarchal democracy. Politics has been a male occupation even in matrilineal
societies (Schneider & Gough, 1961). Looked at