Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea interrogates the assumption that American Protestant missionaries pioneered modern womanhood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Korea. By exploring what constituted modern womanhood for missionaries, Hyaeweol Choi addresses the gap between the “new public opportunities for women” made possible by missionary interventions, and Korean women's continued “idealized role in the private domain of the family” (p. 2). This gap, Choi argues, was intentional, a result of negotiations with Korean nationalism and gender practices that “reconfigured Confucian gender ideology for the modern era” (p. x). In short, the book examines the genealogies of Korean modern womanhood as intimately tied to Christianity in the context of encroaching Japanese imperialism.
To accomplish this, Choi focuses on three players in gender construction—American Protestant missionaries, Korean male intellectuals, and Korean women. It was in their encounters, Choi asserts, that ideal womanhood became closely associated with the West and with...
