Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

Women today are struggling with all their passion and all their strength day and night for the creation of a new history of a democratic country. Today in the streets, men, women, the old, the young, everyone stops to listen to the women. ———Nam Hyǒn-sǒ, “Women of a New Country,” January 1947 In Korea from ancient times, the master of the home was thought to refer to the husband … we now realize that the master of the home must be the woman, that is, the wife or mother. ———Chang Chǒng-suk, “The New Home and Housewife,” October 1947 All social revolutions in modern history, from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the Cuban one of 1959, have attempted to address the status of women as a critical element of social change. 1 North Korea was no different. With Japan's defeat in World War II, Korea was liberated from its thirty-five-year colonial rule, and as in many postcolonial nations after the war, revolution was in the air. 2 When the Cold War came early to the peninsula, Korea took two divergent paths. Divided at the 38th parallel into separate occupation zones, with the United States in the south and the USSR in the north, social reforms were carried out swiftly in the north, aided and abetted by the Soviets, while in the south, the American occupiers saw most Korean political movements as too radical and suppressed them. In what follows, I focus on the formative years of early North Korean history, the five-year period between the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the start of the Korean War in 1950. I show how North Korea from the outset attempted to meld the old and the new through the figure of the revolutionary mother as a uniquely feminine revolutionary subjectivity. This sets the North Korean case apart from other historical examples of social revolutions and their handling of “the woman question.”