During the Koryh dynasty (918—1392) women enjoyed a great deal of freedom and had extensive rights. They shared inheritance equally with their brothers, moved about freely, and could divorce or remarry without stigma (Kwdn 1995: 50). These conventions changed dramatically when the new Choscin dynasty (1392—1910) adopted and implemented neo-Confucian tenets as the ruling ideology. There are gendered implications in that neo-Confucian philosophy adapted the Daoist ideas of the duality of yin and yang as the basis for order in the universe and society. Yin and yang became associated with the feminine and the masculine respectively. According to this cosmological order, women should be subordinated to men, and the physical space and social roles for women and men were distinctly separated by assigning women to the domestic arena and men to the public domain. In this vein, Martina Deuchler suggests that this dynastic change ‘transformed the Korean social scene. At the core of this transformation was the domestic realm, represented by women’ (Deuchler 1992: 232).
The most central change in the domestic arena was the implementation of the patrilineal system under which a woman was incorporated into the lineage of her husband’s family upon marriage. The patrilineal system also differentiated a primary wife from secondary wives by giving the primary wife an elevated status within her husband’s family lineage and relegating the secondary wives to degraded status. This inequality brought about complicated domestic dynamics because the survival and prosperity of children depended on the status of their mothers (Deuchler 2003: 143). In this patrilineal system, a woman’s first and foremost duty was to preserve the purity of family tradition and to continue the family line by giving birth to sons. The good standing of a family depended on the purity of the woman and this ideology led to the long-lasting imposition of chastity on women, especially those of the ruling class (yangban).
Patriliny was systematically enforced through the inculcation of a code of conduct for virtuous women. Such key texts as Samgang haengsilto (Guidelines for Three Social Principles: Faithful Minister, Filial Son and Chaste Woman), Naehun (Instructions for Women) or YOsaso (Four Books for Women) played a significant role in disseminating Confucian-prescribed moral principles for women. These texts were largely based on Chinese stories illustrating exemplary behaviour on the part of women. Selected stories or entire texts were translated into Korean in order to make them available to women (Sol sun 2008; Sohye 2011; Yi 2003). These works especially promoted an ideology of chastity for women as something that had to be maintained at all costs. Some women chose suicide rather than face the social stigma of having been defiled by rape, especially during the invasions of Korea by the Japanese general Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536—98) from 1592 to 1598 and the two Manchu invasions that took place between 1627 and 1636. This ultimate sacrifice made by these women was lauded and memorialised as a reflection of ideal virtue, and monuments were erected to them. It is important to note that the discourse of remembrance for these women firmly centred on the reputation of their husbands’ families rather than the reputation of the women themselves (Chfing 2010: 35—67). A woman’s bodily purity and faithfulness to her husband were integral to the reputation of a family, and those requirements have had a lasting impact on gender ethics far into the modern era in Korea.
These patrilineal rules and accompanying practices were not, however, immediately adopted by broad segments of Korean society. In fact, it took rather a long time for them to become dominant in society. Even people from the upper class, who were instructed to adopt neo — Confucian precepts and rituals, continued to follow the Koryfi-era customs. For example, the genealogy book of one prominent family published in 1476, almost one hundred years after the establishment of the Choshn dynasty, shows that sons-in-law were meticulously recorded, an indication that the marriages of daughters were seen as significant for consolidating or enhancing the political power of a family (Lee and Park 2008: 123—38). In her analysis of family registers in a district called Tansong-hybn, Jung Ji-Young demonstrates that even in the seventeenth century widows could be recorded as heads of the family; it was only in the eighteenth century that sons almost always became the head of the family upon the death of their fathers (Jung 2011: 110—18). In the early Chosfin period, people continued to practise the Koryfi-era marriage custom of a groom moving into the home of his bride’s family upon marriage (Deuchler 1992: 239; Kwbn 1995). In another example, the custom of early marriage (chohon) had been widely practised, especially when the Koryfi dynasty was under Mongol rule (late thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries) as a way to prevent daughters from being conscripted into marriages with Mongolians and sent to Yuan (1279—1368). The practice was discouraged by the ruling class, but the annals of the Chosfin Dynasty indicate that early marriage continued to be practised.
If we consider the full range of social classes, not all women felt the same impact from the patrilineal order. The Chosfin era had four major social classes: the ruling class (yangban) at the top of the class hierarchy, the middle class (chungin), who took up low-rank government offices or technical professions in medicine and translation, the commoner class (sangmin), who were peasants, merchants or artisans, and the outcasts who were slaves, entertainers and butchers. Women who were outcasts or commoners were subjected to far fewer expectations about their compliance with the Confucian practices than were women of the ruling class. Rather than enduring abuse from a spouse or in-laws, some women defied social pressures to marry by either remaining single or abandoning their families. Some of these women became Buddhist nuns, a trend that was apparently so pervasive that Confucian scholars found it to be alarming. Such a phenomenon was understood as ‘disturbing the harmonious energy’ because these women should have been in marital relationships (Jung 2006: 3).
Despite the prescription of neo-Confucian principles that began in the late fourteenth century, there is evidence of deviations from those practices for nearly three hundred years after their official introduction. Widespread compliance with Confucian gender ethics did not really occur until the eighteenth century. Once Confucian-prescribed gender ethics were established, however, they became so accepted and prevalent that such tenets as chastity (imposed on women only), the domestic realm as a woman’s proper space, and son preference were taken for granted. These practices remained strong until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when social reformers began to scrutinise and challenge these gender norms as part of modern nation-building.