“Heathen” Feminism: American Missionaries, Korean Women’s Gender Consciousness, and Marriage Immigration in the Early Twentieth Century

This article explores the discursive gender consciousness of Korean women in relation to the label of “heathen” and the concepts of the “True” and “New Woman” in the early twentieth century. Engaging with Korean women’s theological writings that appeared in late nineteenth-century print media in Korea as well as with Korean picture brides’ oral interviews, this article argues that Korean women both reinforced and reshaped the prescribed models of domestic bounded womanhood that American women missionaries promoted to them. Spurred by their own religious reinterpretation of gender equality and women’s rights, some Korean women utilized the immigration system of picture marriage to achieve their goals for education and political empowerment in the United States. Although a majority of Americans and Koreans considered the picture marriage system undesirable and backward – a “heathen” practice – both in the United States and Korea, Korean women’s use of this system can be seen as a progressive challenge to Western notions of the ideal woman. This article, therefore, reframes existing historical and scholarly constructions of the “heathen” woman vis-à-vis the “True” and the “New Woman” within a transpacific context.