Women Educating Women: Class, Feminism, and Formal Education in the Proletarian Writing of Hirabayashi Taiko and Kang Kyŏng-ae

The concept of a modern literature in Japan and Korea, much like the concept of modernity itself, was an inherently gendered one. And nowhere was the gendered nature of emergent modernity more explicit than in portrayals of women in prose fiction. Canonical novels such as Yi Kwang-su’s Mujŏng (The heartless, 1917) and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Chijin no ai (A fool’s love, 1924) were clear examples of the manner in which this new guise of womanhood was received as a corollary to the creation of a modern nation-state. In Mujŏng, for example, Sheila Miyoshi Jager suggests that the protagonist Hyŏng-sik’s “obsession with the state of Yŏng-chae’s body and its ambiguous purity is a central focus of the novel and plays a central role in Hyŏng-sik’s struggles with his (and the nation’s) identity.”1 But while works by well-known male writers have already been the subject of countless detailed studies, we have yet to elucidate fully how women writers, as women who were themselves subject to the gendered ideologies of modernity, may have comprehended their own positions in the turbulent periods of transition that characterize the first half of the twentieth century in East Asia. The discussion that follows looks at how proletarian women writers in both Japan and Korea became disenchanted with preexisting identities for women, denoted by labels such as “New Woman” (atarashii onna; shin yŏsŏng), “modern girl” (modan gāru;