p. 12 | KOREAN WOMEN

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 19, 1895

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 21, No. 37.

KOREAN WOMEN.

Korean women of the upper classes live a life of seclusion; they do nothing at all; they are totally uneducated, and they are allowed to see no one but their husbands, parents, and a very few female friends. A woman belonging to the upper classes never appears before strangers, and she never goes in the street exposed to view. How monotonous their existence becomes is known only to themselves, as they have not yet learned to complain. The horny-handed daughters of the soil are more to be envied, for they, at least, enjoy more liberty, although they are nothing better than human machines. Chastity in Korea seems only to be required of wives, and with them it must be absolute.

Though the Korean women lay a great stress, as points of beauty, upon a small foot or hand, and regard them to an absurd extent as an index of good breeding, still they do not torture their feet into hideous deformities like their Chinese sisters, who could not hope to obtain the position of first or even second wife of a Chinaman of gentle birth unless they possessed those terrible terminations, more like sheep’s trotters than human feet. Nor do the Korean mandarins encourage their nails to grow into bird-like talons to show their lifelong immunity from work, though one can not but notice the exquisite care which is bestowed on the hands of both sexes. The ordinary well-cared-for hand of an English gentleman would look coarse and shapeless beside the pink and almond-shaped nails and soft, tapering, white fingers, of a Korean mandarin. When one lives among the Koreans, and knows the terrible bondage under which the women labor, one breathes a sigh on their wretched behalf.

Besides her household duties and the bearing of children—which is her raison d’être—the Korean wife combines the duties of gardener, stable boy, and field laborer, and she must always be mindful that she has to wait personally upon her husband. It is not to be wondered at, then, that their youthful ugliness soon becomes a haglike hideousness. The male laborer, on the contrary, has a very good time. If he is fortunate enough to own a small patch of land, he need only help his beast of burden (wife) during the harvest season; the land is so fertile, and his demands on the luxuries of life are so moderate, that the rest of the year he may spend in idleness and smoke.

There is no grace or elegance in the female dress, which in some respects resembles that of the Chinese. It consists of a loose pair of rough trousers reaching to the ankle, tied round the waist with a thick cord; on the top of this is worn a short petticoat reaching to the knees; and fitted to the shoulder is a yoke or shoulder cape, to which are attached long, loose sleeves; thus the whole of the body from the waist to the chest is exposed to view. This costume is the ordinary dress of the working woman; the coarse material is woven out of the fiber of the tall millet stem, which sometimes grows to be eight or ten feet high; or more often the entire costume is composed of a strong shirting, “made in Manchester.” —Pall Mall Gazette.