One woman has something to add to this definition. She defines feminists as people who build a home for raising children.
The woman is ChoHan Hae-jung who is one of the representative feminists of 21st century Korea. Born into a wealthy family in 1948, she lived a "privileged" life attending Yonsei University and going to the University of California in the U.S. for a doctorate degree.
Brought up under liberal parents, she was taught that boys and girls are equals. And partly owing to her parents" support, ChoHan is now a professor at Yonsei.
Unlike feminists commonly viewed as egocentric, bourgeois single women, Professor ChoHan is a married woman deeply concerned about people other than herself.
Professor ChoHan started her November 13 lecture at Ewha by showing a glimpse of her life. Her trip to Ibiza, a small island to the south of Spain where people dance from dusk to dawn, last summer with her daughter was enough to show the free-flowing attitude she has towards life. Her face without a trace of make-up curtained by bangs dyed in green spoke for itself and revealed her characteristics.
The main focus of the lecture was when Professor ChoHan described, in length, marriage as a "child-raising project."
In short, she explained that an ideal human interaction between opposite sexes could be fulfilled by living together. Getting married meant going a step further than just feeling affectionate towards one another. For the sake of the children, marriage should be considered a joint project.
After the two-hour lecture on feminism, many students raised questions on social issues like the rise of plastic surgery for better employment chances among women today, marriage and the conflicts with the mother-in-law, and what can be done about men disapproving of feminism.
What was interesting, yet to be expected, was that most of the audience consisted of female students. However, there were some interested male students who dared to join the discussion on the topic of feminism.
"I am just starting to learn about feminism. My girlfriend persuaded me to attend a course on feminism because we had such frequent arguments about men and women. After listening to the lectures, I realized that there was a lot missing in my life that I had been totally unaware of before," says Park Bum-jun (Dongguk University, 4).
With her witty remark just as it is only natural that there are more women sitting here than men there were hardly any white people participating in the black people"s movements, she closed her lecture after a fervent question-and-answer session.
syc1223@ewha.ac.kr
Ewha Voice
evoice@ewha.ac.kr