This book presents a nuanced study of middle-class women's involvement in evangelical Protestant churches in contemporary South Korea. In particular, it probes how middle-class housewives come to embrace their church's conservative gender ideology, paradoxically in the process of trying to alleviate their suffering from domestic troubles caused by rigid gender hierarchy in their marriages and family lives. The study is based on sixteen months of field work in two typical churches in Seoul—one Presbyterian and one Methodist—during the period between 1996 and 1999. The inquiry is compelling because there has been hardly a monograph on this subject despite two significant sociological facts: (1) theologically and culturally conservative Protestantism grew explosively in Korea during the 1960s and 1970s, the decades of rapid industrialization and urbanization; (2) adult women have been a numerical majority of evangelical Christianity in Korea, representing between 60 percent and 75 percent of the Protestant population. While the...

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