Early Western visitors to Korea usually had mixed feelings about Korean women but nearly all agreed that the Korean woman’s lot was a poor one. Isabella Bird Bishop wrote:
“Korean women have always borne the yoke. They accept inferiority as their natural lot; they do not look for affection in marriage …” and, “the peasant woman may be said to have no pleasures. She is nothing but a drudge, till she can transfer some of the drudgery to her daughter-in-law. At thirty she looks fifty, and at forty is frequently toothless. Even the love of personal adornment fades out of her life at a very early age.”
But what did Korean women and men think about their Western guest and their treatment to their own wives?
When Isabella Bird Bishop pointed out to Korean women that Western men did not treat their women in such a manner she was curtly informed by an intelligent Korean woman that “We think that your husbands don’t care for you very much!”
It wasn’t just Korean women who felt that Western male-female relations were askew. One Korean writer pointed out that people joked about the Western men’s subservient role with their spouses.
“They bowed to their wives even on the street … and how they hugged them down from carts just as obscene drunken men might do with gishas …” Through the Korean male’s eyes, his Western counterpart did not respect his wife.
You can read the rest at Jeju Weekly.
And, on a different subject -what did people rub when they had a toothache during the Joseon era? You can find out here.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t know about the past but Korean women nowadays are far more empowered than before. It may not seem like it because they are still expected to do house chores raise kids etc…. But I hear of women just whacking their significant other. Societal pressure forces them to do the chores but other than that they can whack their husbands. I know I sound like “what the heck is this article talking about?”. But it seems that in some ways the public face they should put on is that where women are expected to bear the brunt of childrearing and household chores. Granted I am comparing with their lot of the past which was pretty crappy but today it is a less crappy. Note I still call it crappy. It depends on what you compare it to. If comparing to western women it still suck balls but compared to the best it is better.
On another different subject, in 1903, when the Gillette Company started selling safety razors with disposable blades, they were shocked when hundreds of men complained that the razors didn’t work. It was soon discovered that the stubby disgruntled customers weren’t removing the wrapping from around the blades before they put them into the razor.
The yoke’s on them, I guess.
Robert N: Interesting!
So Ms. Bishop’s Korean lady friend made a funny. People encountering new ideas based it on what they have learned so far often do so. Then, what’s the rest of the story, based on increased exposure?
After a few years of observing each other with their respective spouses and other cultural things, who was more likely to adapt: Ms. Bishop expecting to be ignored by her hubby or Ms. Korean lady warming up the idea of her hubby acknowledging her in public. And a few generations later?
Ms Bird Bishop was most definately ignored by her husband in korea, but he did have a good excuse having been in his grave for a number of years
On the subject of quackery, bloodletting, or bleeding, is now considered an antiquated, useless, and dangerous [sometimes deadly] form of Western medicine. A great deal of blood is drawn from the patient in the hope that it will balance the four humors of the body [black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood] that were thought to control all bodily functions, Surprisingly, people still practiced bloodletting up into the twentieth century, as this ad from the 1905 Sears catalog proves:
Still, it sounds better thatn one of the other old school practices — leeches.
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