Page xxvi →Page 1 →Introduction Frey’s Work for Female Education at Ewha in Historical Context

Lulu Frey was born on March 9, 1868, to John Frey (1831–1900) and Emma Kelsey Frey (1839–1913) in Sidney, Ohio. Emma Frey was a Presbyterian and John a Methodist. Lulu became a Methodist during her high school years after attending a revival held in her father’s church. The family was never financially well-off and moved from Ohio to North Carolina before returning to settle in the town of Bellefontaine, Ohio, where the father operated a hardware store among other occupations. Frey kept accounts for her father and tried her hand at professional dressmaking to earn her way through college once she had made the decision to become a missionary.³ After her father’s demise in 1900, Frey worked frantically to help her mother and younger sister Georgia keep their family home and pay off funeral expenses and debt. Many of her letters after that date offer various financial plans to keep the family afloat without a male breadwinner. Ideas include dividing the house to accommodate renters and encouraging the young Georgia to quickly find employment as a teacher. Frey is frustrated by her mother’s reticence about financial troubles, urging her repeatedly to share details of her finances and offering practical solutions to finance various expenditures. The letters from this period have very little to do Page 4 →with her missionary work and show us the very human anxieties of a dutiful daughter worried about the material welfare of her womenfolk back home.

In a letter explaining her calling to become a missionary, Frey reports the moment in her senior year of high school when she borrowed an issue of The Heathen Woman’s Friend, the publication arm of WFMS, from a neighbor, and happened on a contribution from Lucy Rider Meyer, the founder of the Chicago Training School and leader of the Deaconess movement, on the topic of “Why should I not go?”: “Before I had finished reading every excuse I could offer had been answered by Mrs. Meyer and I sat there with the paper in my hands and my heart beating so fast, a moment or so & then bursting into tears I asked the Lord to make me will if it were his will. I had never thought of being a missionary before, it came just as suddenly as I have described it” (Letter to Miss Conklin, September 9, 1905).⁴ This story is more fully recounted by her colleagues Marie E. Church and R. L. Thomas: “The copy for which she asked had been used on the ironing board where the beeswax had made prominent a call to the foreign mission field. Her eyes caught by the spots of beeswax, she read and re-read the sentence they emphasized: ‘Why do you not go?’ She never got away from that ‘beeswax call’—a very genuine and emphatic one to her. ‘Why did she not go?’” (Church and Thomas, 151). Frey’s tolle lege moment is both mundane and life changing, inflected by everyday concerns of the religiously fervent American housewife such as ironing and organizing for foreign missions, the largest grassroots movement of Protestant American women in the late nineteenth century according to Dana L. Robert in her comprehensive survey, American Women in Mission (Robert, 188).

The earliest female missionaries had been married women such as the friends Ann Hesseltine Judson and Harriet Atwood Newell, who actively chose missionary husbands and set sail together to India with their new husbands in 1812. The description of the hardships of native women from early missionaries motivated women to create their own boards to help sisters oppressed in “heathen” cultures. But the true moment for the consolidation of their efforts arose after the graphic description, by the missionary wife, Clementina Butler, of injustices suffered by women in India. Butler gave a series of talks, including to a group of women at the Methodist Tremont Street Church in Boston, in 1869. She emphasized the need for single female missionaries who could devote themselves fully to native women unlike the missionary wives often overwhelmed by the domestic needs of their individual families. The first of these female organizations, the Congregationalist Women’s Board, was founded in Page 5 →1868, and was followed by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) of the Methodist Episcopal Church, North, in 1869. WFMS was the largest of the women’s boards and by far the most successful. Its founders insisted on independence from the general board, refusing the status of mere auxiliary, to retain full control of their own finances. While women sought to unite their efforts, interdenominational societies were discouraged by male church leaders who feared losing money and congregants to other denominations. Women had already learned to mobilize during the Civil War when “the death of the largest number of men in American history created an entire generation of single women—women who had benefited from the antebellum women’s educational movement but who were now doomed to spinsterhood” (Robert, 129–30). Circumstances had created an unprecedented vacuum in which marriage was no longer the inevitable goal for young women of eligible age. As Patricia R. Hill notes in The World Their Household, “Foreign missions gripped the imaginations and enlisted the support of hundreds of thousands of middle-class churchwomen in the late nineteenth century” (Hill, 3). Hill reports that the number of women enlisted as members across some 40 separate denominational female missionary societies exceeded three million (Hill, 3). Female missionary societies exclusively funded unmarried women or widows who would live with other single missionaries to create schools, hospitals, and other facilities to improve the lives of their “benighted” sisters. Education would always be at the forefront of their mission as women were not allowed to preach. The pragmatic emphasis was on educating the sisterhood as much as on conversion, although conversion remained the bedrock of all missionary endeavors.

Young women started entering the ranks of missionaries in even greater numbers with the rapid success of the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) founded by Dwight L. Moody in 1885. The young missionaries the SVM sent out were driven by the fervent belief that the return of the Messiah could be hastened by the efforts of young men and women to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. In The Gospel of Gentility, Jane Hunter argues that their youthful idealism also drew on turn-of-the-century nationalism and optimism as reflected in their rousing slogan: “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation.” SVM was responsible for as many as half of all missionary volunteers of the early twentieth century (Hunter, 47). The title of Grace Wilder’s motivational pamphlet “Shall I Go?” widely distributed at SVM meetings in the late 1880s, around the same time that Frey responded to Lucy Rider Meyer’s challenge, “Why should I not go?” reveals how this reverberating question was Page 6 →framed for many young men and women of the time. By 1890, single women “constituted sixty percent of the American mission force” (Robert, 130). Precluded from ministerial training, the urgent need to train such women was fulfilled by new institutions such as the Chicago Training School for City, Home and Foreign Missions founded in 1885 by Lucy Rider Meyer, the woman whose piece in Heathen Woman’s Friend brought on Frey’s moment of personal calling. Isabella Thoburn, one of the earliest missionaries sent out by WFMS to India in 1869, and founder of Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow (1886), was a teacher at the Chicago school when Frey was a student.

The motto of “Woman’s Work for Woman” (also the title of the missionary publication of the women’s board of the Presbyterian Church, founded in 1872) captures the spirit of the new missiology that motivated the newly formed women’s mission boards and differed in emphasis from earlier male-centered missiology. Rufus Anderson, an early leader in missionary planning, promoted the influential “three-self” mission theory of “self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating churches” with evangelism rather than education the key driver for mission work. Native women were to be educated only to the extent that they could be good wives to native clergy and contribute to the work of evangelization (Robert, 89). Anderson’s “three-self” missiology lies behind the emphasis on the rapid growth of self-sufficient local churches prioritized by the Nevius method, discussed further below, developed by later missionaries in China and eagerly adopted by Presbyterian missionaries in Korea. The women’s boards were motivated by the need to evangelize the “heathen,” but equally invested in “civilizing” their heathen sisters by enlightening them through Western and Christian ideas, hence liberating them from the perceived ignominy and violence imposed upon them by their native culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, female “American evangelicals had adopted a theology of missions that attached a special significance to the conversion of ‘heathen’ mothers as the most efficient means of Christianizing heathen lands” (Hill, 5). All of this was of course culturally loaded, and ideas of Western superiority necessarily colored a large part of their thinking. Nonetheless the work of abolitionism in which many Protestant women, especially of the North, had participated, provided fertile ground for thinking about women of other races as sisters in God. The title of The Heathen Woman’s Friend, established in the same year as WFMS in 1869, was changed in 1896 to Woman’s Missionary Friend. The unproblematic usage of the term “heathen” had already become unacceptable by the end of the nineteenth century.

Page 7 →Mary Lyon, founder of the all-female Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837 (collegiate charter 1888), was a leading inspiration for the women’s boards as she had stressed the importance of female education even as she maintained a close allegiance to the primary cause of evangelization. The community of like-minded women living together outside the bounds of traditional domesticity allowed a reorganization of the “natural” rhythms of female life that had remained tied to cycles of marriage and childbirth, while organized labor and industrialization had led men to transition to industrialization. According to Helen Horowitz, Lyon “broke into a woman’s life—governed by tradition and natural rhythms, ruled by the heart and the demands of the flesh—to transform it into a life that could be planned” (Horowitz, 12). The experience of living and learning with other women transformed the horizon of women’s expectations. In the school’s first twenty years, “82.5 percent of its graduates taught school ... What set them apart from women in their era was that they normally delayed marriage for five years, marrying at median age twenty-six rather than twenty-one” (Horowitz, 27). By 1859, 60 Mount Holyoke graduates had become foreign missionaries. Meanwhile “daughter” seminaries were sprouting across the entire nation. The low living costs of such institutions were made possible by organized household work: “While it took one woman, full-time, to care for a single household, a hundred young women, properly organized, accomplished all daily tasks in a single hour” (Horowitz, 18). Close to a fifth of Mount Holyoke graduates never married, and from their ranks arose many of the early unmarried female missionaries up to the middle of the century who “founded and staffed female seminaries, ‘little Mount Holyokes,’ around the world from South Africa to Japan to Turkey” (Robert, 109).

Strong teachers would form the base for single female missionaries sent out by the women’s boards, along with medically trained doctors, to reach out to the women literally isolated within separate female boundaries their entire lives, hence giving birth to the term zenana missions. Zenana comes from the Hindu word for women’s separate quarters. The liberal enlightenment ideology of progress as measured by the status accorded to women in a society became the rallying cry behind the large-scale movement of young female evangelicals to go and “raise” their sisters in heathen lands. The primary teaching of Christian precepts went side by side with teaching literacy, hygiene, and the sanctity of the woman-centered domestic sphere. Christianity would best be advanced by Christian homes overseen by newly enlightened native sisters. This was a moment in which evangelical Christianity, especially as promoted by female Page 8 →missionaries, merged with ideals of modernity through a faith in enlightenment potently attractive to cultures that felt left behind in the global progress achieved through modernization.

Korea at the end of the nineteenth century was the last of the Asian countries to open its doors to the influx of resident missionaries whom American mission boards deployed. The Joseon regime, based on a dynasty established in 1392 and lasting until Japanese annexation in 1910, was particularly wary of Western religious influences felt to disrupt the hierarchical order of a deeply Confucian society. Catholicism was said to have spread in the peninsula after the return and proselytizing of a young man, Yi Seong-hun, who had been baptized by priests in Beijing in 1783 (Paik, 32). The popular appeal of a religion that promoted new ideas of equality before a single God quickly gained traction, leading to a massive and brutal persecution in the 19th century. The new religion that proclaimed exclusive allegiance to a singular God as king went against the tradition of ancestor rites “that buttressed the power of the state and the ruling elites” (Cha, 16). When the Korean Catholics, anxious about their church without priests, consulted with Bishop Alexandre de Govea in Beijing about the administration of Catholic rites, they were advised that they could not ordain priests among themselves nor administer the sacrament. Baptism was the only rite permitted. The most devastating instruction, however, was the prohibition of the worship of ancestors as “inconsistent with the doctrine of the church.” As noted by the early historian of the Korean Protestant Church, L. George Paik, “The result of Govea’s prohibition of ancestral worship was disastrous. That cult is the state religion. Its neglect meant the abandonment of everything that a Korean held most sacred in the duty which he owed to his family, society, and state. But zealous Christian converts tore down their ancestral tablets and set them on fire. The consequence was the inauguration of systematic persecution” (Paik, 33). Historians have suggested that up to 10,000 lay believers were executed for their belief. Henceforth Western ideas were especially to be shunned because of their association with the Christian religion.⁵

The arrival of the first officially sanctioned Protestant resident missionaries in 1884 and 1885 marked a turbulent political time when contact with Western ideals and learning brought on movements for reform by intellectuals who felt that Joseon was the only country being left behind in the great historical push toward modernization and enlightenment. Strong-armed into the Treaty of Page 9 →Gangwha (1876) by the Japanese, who had earlier been forced to open trade and diplomatic relations with the West, Korea had to decide how far to open itself to Western influence embraced by some as progress while feared by others as an existential threat to the Confucian system in place. The Gapsin Coup (1884) marked an important watershed moment as liberal reformers of the Enlightenment Party (Gaehwapa) attempted a violent coup to gain control over the king. During the briefly successful attack on the capital, a nephew of the king was severely injured. The successful treatment of Min Yeong-ik by Dr. Horace N. Allen (1858–1932), a Presbyterian missionary to China who had joined the US legation that very year, waiting for a time when missionary work could be openly carried out, served to demonstrate firsthand the advantages of Western medicine and learning. Allen successfully petitioned the king to open a Western medical facility. The establishment of Gwanghyewon (later Jejungwon) in 1885 marked the first official endorsement of a Western institution in Korea. The king was willing to accept assistance from “a benevolent society of America” (as cited in Cha, 18) that would bring Western learning and medicine without overt proselytizing. The first missionaries whom the northern Presbyterian and Methodist Churches deployed arrived in 1885. They were not allowed to openly engage in the work of evangelization and hence allowed to serve only under the official guise of medical and educational work.

Mary F. Scranton (1832–1909), who arrived in Korea in 1885 was the first missionary sent out by WFMS to the country that had just begun to open itself to the Western world, besieged on all sides by neighbors that were vying for greater influence. She came alongside her son, Dr. William B. Scranton (1856–1922), who had been sent out by the general Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church. A widow and an older woman in her 50s, Scranton quickly bought land, built a Korean-style house, and established the first girls’ school in the Jeongdong District of Seoul in 1886. Much suspicion was harbored against foreigners, and it was out of the question for girls of upper-class families to be sent to an institution operated by a Westerner. Rumors abounded of child abuse, the drinking of children’s blood, and the intention to send Korean children abroad. The king’s official endorsement of the school marked by the granting of the name Ewha Haktang, or “Pear Blossom School,” was a welcome mark of legitimization that permitted the school to take in more students. The very first to come was a concubine of an official who wished to learn English to translate for the queen. She was too ill to remain long in the school, and so the first official student of Ewha was a child from a very poor Page 10 →family sent to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Even so her mother, frightened by rumors of Western atrocities, sought to retrieve her child and only relented to have her stay with Scranton under the written promise that she would never be sent to America. The third student was picked up with her very ill mother near the walls of the city.⁶

Upper-class Korean women were not allowed outside the home under a strict imposition of what was termed the inside-outside rule of Confucian gender ideology. This setting confirmed Western missionaries’ expectations of Asian brutality against women. Corea, the Hermit Nation, published by W. E. Griffis in New York in 1882, reinforced the image of the nation as particularly harsh in its treatment of women. Griffis wrote:

A Corean woman has no moral existence. She is an instrument of pleasure or of labor; but never man’s companion or equal. She has no name. In childhood she receives indeed a surname by which she is known in the family, and by near friends, but at the age of puberty, none but her father Page 11 →and mother employ this appellative. To all others she is “the sister” of such a one, or “the daughter” of so-and-so.... After her marriage her name is buried (Griffis, 244).

Scranton had only been able to come to Korea because a rich donor in Ravenna, Ohio, Mrs. L. B. Baldwin, who had probably read Griffis’s account, donated a special sum for a mission to be opened up by WFMS in the hermit kingdom, a place not many people had even heard about (Ewha Baengnyeonsa, 3). While Korean women themselves may have mostly experienced seclusion within inner quarters as a form of protection and care, Westerners were patronizing and eager to rescue Korean women from their perceived privation from any sense of common humanity. Hyaeweol Choi neatly summarizes the Confucian organization of gendered spheres: “This philosophically sanctioned distinction between men and women stipulated the proper domain of genders—the public/outer space for men and the private/inner space for women. The idea of the distinction between men and women led to a daily practice of the ‘inside-outside rule.’ It meant that women should not see or talk with men who were not family members and should stay in the inner chambers” (Choi, 2009, 48).

Thus the situation Westerners found in Korea was a perfect match for what had first prompted the call for women missionaries who could reach women and through them transform an entire society. In this most public effort to secure the sacred domestic sphere in which the woman serves as enlightened and benevolent center, we see the paradoxical intersection between the Victorian ideal of the powerful moral and civilizing influence of the domestic woman as guardian of the sacred sanctity of the home and the idea that private women were the key to transforming the fabric of the culture as a whole. In the West, greater intermingling of men and women in civil society had led to widespread consensus that women’s greater sensibility and gentleness promoted a shift to a more refined or even civilized society as purported by more progressive thinkers of the Enlightenment.⁷ This did not mean of course that women were engaged in the public sphere of political engagement and service, but as Habermas has noted, led to a bourgeois public sphere of familiar and literary discourse that thrived based on the contribution of women to the formation of the domestic sphere in which the private individual who could contribute to public discourse was fostered and nourished.⁸ The Enlightenment Party men in Korea championed women’s rights to education and more civil treatment by their husbands. But even the most progressive supported “improvements” only to the extent that women remained in their proper sphere as the people who Page 12 →kept to the inside and raised citizens for the nation. The tenuous boundaries between Christianization, Westernization, and modernization could never be fully drawn or enforced, however, either by the missionaries themselves or the girls they taught.

When Mary Scranton and the single women who came to assist her in building her school and carrying out the medical and religious work of transforming Korean women’s lives founded Ewha, a female community based on religious and cultural ideals was created that went beyond any previous known model for female living arrangements. Curiously because it was operated and inhabited exclusively by unmarried women, it became a “public” institution of sorts that could house women on the inside. Despite the early resistance and fear the school soon became a magnet for girls whose parents, either due to poverty or a desire to advance in the world, were eager to send their young daughters. From its modest beginning with one student in 1886, the school became overcrowded in its first decade, leading to the completion of a new Western-style building called Main Hall on the Jeong-dong campus in 1900–1901. Cast-iron schoolroom desks were imported from the United States as the “ladies” picked up shovels to show the workers how they wished to have their building and grounds executed to plans they drew up themselves. Frey’s letters from this period provide valuable information on just how the business was managed.

Many feared that the girls who had been taught the Bible and the English language would become culturally unfit to live “Korean” lives. The Presbyterians who officially adopted the Nevius method⁹ prioritized the quick establishment of a native church, focused on education of women only to the extent that they could serve as help meet, wives to Christian ministers and believers who would build a self-sufficient Korean church. The Methodists believed in a more wide-ranging cultural and “civilizing” mission and hence were more lenient about teaching English, a lure to perceived “rice Christians” or natives, who many Westerners felt only came to improve their status through the acquisition of an all-powerful new language of international learning and commerce. The work of female missionaries with Korean girls was especially complicated, because their emphasis on female education for greater usefulness to the world could never be divorced from the larger project of proselytization. Women trained by the missionaries would become the best wives for men of the self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating native churches. But the affirmation of the ideal of the Christian home instilled a new conceptualization of the domestic sphere. Missionaries supported indigenous customs and Page 13 →language, yet the imposition of new standards of timeliness, cleanliness, and efficiency alongside ideas of female worth and even equality before God meant that native Christians, and Christian women in particular, were nonetheless transformed subjects.¹⁰

Dr. Scranton, reporting on his mother’s work, reiterated what many female missionaries insisted, that missionary education of Korean girls would make them “better Koreans”: “We take pleasure in making Koreans better Koreans only. We want Korea to be proud of Korean things, and more, that it is a perfect Korea through Christ and His teachings. In the short time we have been at work here we see that we are slowly doing what is in our hearts to do and are allowing Korea Korean possibilities” (Gospel in All Lands, August 1888, 373). The second principal of Ewha, Louise Rothweiler, who arrived soon after Scranton in 1887, noted that “whatever may be the private opinion of any one concerning woman’s sphere and proper occupation we must, for the present at least, act under the supposition that in Korea domestic life is her sphere and destiny” (The Korean Repository, March 1892, 90). The domestic sphere, however, was precisely what was being transformed through the work of female missionaries. The claim to educating Korean women to be better Korean women was a clever strategy that worked both for the missionaries and their students. The insistence on the proper sphere for women being the home was to be reiterated by all early missionary teachers including Frey, who founded the college division. Domestic management and hygiene were presented as scientific fields of knowledge that would allow the Korean household to become an engine of modernity. This official protocol served to secure Ewha’s early reputation for producing the best wives for newly modernized men who sought a more “human” and equal intercourse with their wives, New Women (sinyeoseong), capable of propelling their families to the forefront of a modernized Korea built on bourgeois institutions and private property. Under this very proper and legitimate cover, a female community not based on traditional and severely binding ties of kinship was allowed to flourish.

Frey’s’ first letter home is addressed to her father and headed “Steamer China, Pacific Ocean, September 27, 1893.” Only 25 years old and traveling abroad an ocean liner for the first time in her life, the young woman from Ohio seems both overwhelmed and excited about the scope of her new adventure. She notes, “There are about 200 Japanese steerage passengers who got in at Honolulu and as many if not more China-men on the other end of the boat.” Frey is Page 14 →a first-class passenger, one of “some 75 or 100 (including children)” separated from those traveling steerage of a different race who have not acquired English despite four years in Hawaii. This is her first contact with Asians, and she demonstrates a keen interest but also some discomfort expressed by the repeated use of the epithet “queer.” Asked by Japanese students who are returning as missionaries to their homeland to preach to the Japanese workers going home after four years’ poorly paid contract labor, she writes: “I did not dare refuse yet I promised with some fear and trembling. One of the young men interpreted for me and so I preached my first sermon (?) to a heathen audience.... It seems a queer (my emphasis) way to talk to people but the young men seem to think more can be accomplished through the foreigner’s speaking than through their own words” (September 27, 1893). Frey describes “an old Japanese Buddahist (sic) priest” on board: “Such a queer looking creature with a shaven head and a long black robe.” When asked to preach a second time to the Japanese in steerage, she writes: “It’s very queer to talk to so many odd-looking people all sitting on the floor looking up into your face. I hope I shall become as interested in the Korean people as I am in these Japanese—.” Frey’s inability to describe this initial encounter with the heathen other, other than through the repeated use of the term “queer,” is telling.

Awkwardness also stems from the fact that she preaches her “first sermon (?).” The question mark in parentheses is her own as female preaching was still extraordinary in her time. There were no women ordained in the Presbyterian Church or the Methodist Episcopal Church. The first woman ordained in the Congregationalist Church was Antoinette Louisa Brown, a graduate of Oberlin, in 1853, with the second recorded ordination in 1863 of Universalist Olympia Brown (m. Willis¹¹). In her study of the public activism of deeply religious women, Women Called to Witness, Nancy Hardesty writes: “Both Browns were active workers for temperance and woman’s rights throughout their lives” (Hardesty, 97). Women speaking in public at Christian meetings remained controversial until the end of the century. In Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1838), the early Christian feminist Sarah Grimke proclaimed that “it is manifest that if women were permitted to be ministers of the gospel, as they unquestionably were in the primitive ages of the Christian church, it would interfere materially with the present organized system of spiritual power and ecclesiastical authority, which is now vested solely in the hands of men” (as cited in Hardesty, 99). Frey’s letters consistently reveal a hesitancy to speak in public, let alone preach. She was hardly an active voice Page 15 →in the movement to increase female leadership in church or nation like the Grimke sisters (Sarah and Angelina Grimke Weld) or the renowned temperance activist Frances Willard. But women like Frey came of age amid strongly fervent female Christians who became leaders within the church through movements such as abolition, temperance, and global missionary outreach in what has been called the “benevolence empire” of philanthropy funded by female organization and effort.¹²

Patricia Hill notes that as an interdenominational endeavor, “the organization of women’s foreign missionary societies ... emerges as the largest of the great nineteenth-century women’s movements and as perhaps the largest nineteenth-century religious movement in America” (Hill, 23). Frey’s letters reveal a growing awareness of the importance of female solidarity and respect for the women’s board not equally extended to the general board run by men, which she views as less than competent. In her letter to her father on January 24, 1898, she describes the difficulties arising from the lack of funding for the long-planned new school building and the urgency of sending back “to the home land a true idea of our situation”: “I feel that the board have only to know our need really to do something for us. I speak of the Woman’s board. You know the men’s board is in debt and cannot do their part because of that. We have hoped from year to year that the Parent Board would do something for our new church, but as yet have been able to do nothing.” In the same letter, she bemoans the fact that male church leaders are more interested in taking trips to the “Holy land” than looking after the urgent mission of evangelizing the world:

By the way what do you think of the missionary debt? Is it the fault of the Christians at large? I am inclined to think that the ministers themselves can rightfully take a large share in it, for unless they have improved in preaching missions since I left America, they do not keep the people well informed. I believe if people were to know the plans & results of mission work in all these countries they would go deeper into their pockets. I fear the ministers themselves are not well informed—how else have the members (except those of the W.F.M.S.) a chance to know of the work? I believe that if our preachers made fewer trips to the Holy land and instead visited the mission stations of the church the benefit would reach a much larger number of people.—Well what a dissertation I have made—(January 24, 1898).

Page 16 →Although she undercuts her indignation with the deprecatory “Well what a dissertation I have made,” a slightly older Frey with five years of experience in the field is clearly critical of male leaders and preachers and what she views as their incompetence and lack of dedication to the missionary cause.

Frey arrives in Korea after a short intermission in Japan and describes the arduous trip from Jemulpo (Chemulpo in Frey’s letters), the port city on the western coast of the peninsula, to the “Pear Blossom School”—Ewa in contemporary romanization. Frey finds the house run by Mrs. Scranton, a New Englander, to be surprisingly well-equipped and comfortable. The bath fixtures are superior to those at home, in particular the majolica tub, filled by servants bearing pails of hot water on slats with ropes down the shoulders. She faithfully reports in her first letter from Seoul (October 18, 1893) the details of her new home: “We have a very beautiful parlor—a great many of the things are Mrs. Scranton’s and a very pleasant dining room. We have a good cook and good servants generally, considering. Our meals are excellent and served so nicely. I feel as if I was at a dinner party most of the time. Mrs. Scranton is an Easterner and must have everything done right. We can get most everything that is necessary for food. I find everything much nicer than I anticipated.” Ironically her new home complete with servants is in many ways much superior to her modest home back in Ohio. When she reports on the stock of food kept by the school, the list is a true cornucopia of abundance:

We get stores from California at the beginning of each season. In the summer we have our own garden & fruit. During the winter we have canned tomatoes, pears, corn and asparagus, Ham, dried beef, salmon & sausage which we get from California. Then, we are able to get fish, chickens, pheasants and beef any time. I often think of you when I go into the store room to give the cook the day’s rations. We keep butter, sugar, flour, corn meal, germ meal, oatmeal, beans, canned meats, vegetables and fruits in large quantities. Of course it is expensive but is the only way to live out here (January 9, 1896).

She clearly enjoys the security of plenty and the luxury of stocking up not available to her mother back at home. She follows what she lists above with the comment, “You always wished you had a stock of things to depend on.”

Frey appreciates the elegance of her new home, and she is gratified to move in the upper echelons of society, mingling with diplomats and other foreign missionaries in the Jeongdong area of Seoul. Frey is gratified that the missionaries are accorded the same status as the diplomats:

Page 17 →The foreigners of the place have a library & a tennis court. It is the only place among the eastern countries, they say, where the political people mingle with the missionaries. The Union who own the library building and grounds are composed of missionaries, the ministers from the different countries, and their wives and other foreigners of good standing. I think the workers here look so much more healthy than in Japan & I think it is due to these social privileges. Miss Paine is invited to Tiffin at the Russian Legation Saturday. The dinner parties are quite frequent they say (October 18, 1893).

She becomes a member of the Seoul Union where she plays tennis and drinks tea. In contrast the streets of the city are bemoaned for their unspeakable filth: “There is no sewage and all the filth of any description is in the way. All that is pretty down town is the blue sky over head and you cannot look at that for fear of stepping into something dreadful under foot. I am not exaggerating for I could not make it worse than it is.” The contrast between home and street cannot be greater. When she returns from her first vacation in Japan to a warridden Seoul in the fall of 1894, she is shocked to see that the elegant soirees in the diplomatic quarter have not disappeared: “Our house was dark but we could hear the music from the Library building where the Seoul Union was having an evening entertainment assisted by the English and American soldiers. I said as we came through the big city gate so safely and heard the singing, “Is this the danger we have stayed in Japan for two months to avoid?” (September 24, 1894). The social life of the self-perceived Western elite is delightful to the young woman from Ohio who frets about fashion and what to wear throughout her letters even as she soldiers on in learning the new language and managing the schoolwork.

As a missionary she was making much more than a female teacher would back home, and she is able to send a tidy sum every year to be put into a savings and loans account, even while financing annual summer holidays for her mother and sister. She asks her mother to keep her savings a secret, demonstrating self-consciousness about being viewed as mercenary, writing “Let me urge you again to keep the fact that I’m putting money in the loan or sending you money a secret. I’m in a somewhat different position from the school teachers at home” (postscript to letter of March 4, 1896). Meanwhile her letters mention the frequent financial difficulties her parents experienced. She confesses, “I am so grieved that you and father should have financial anxieties all the time, but I’m very thankful that I am not a burden on you at least. I can Page 18 →help you by not adding to that you already have. I do enjoy my work and the independence which it gives me” (December 28, 1895). Requests for dresses, patterns for new shirts and skirts, sample swatches, hats, and gloves make for staple letter-writing subject matter in Frey’s letters. When in Japan for her first summer vacation in 1894, she purchases silks to send home for dresses to be made for her mother and sister though she regrets that such expenses and her own unexpected first trip abroad prevent her from sending them ready money for a summer trip:

I feel very badly that you have been cheated out of your summer outing because I did not send you the money, I thought now you would rather have these pretty silks and the money will come later. If I had not come to Japan I would have sent you money before this so you & Georgia could have gone. I did not mean to be selfish and as I’ve said before would not have gone if all had not urged it so strongly. I feel it is best however, for I feel quite another person (September 5, 1894).

Such a passage reveals how torn she feels about spending money even on a vacation taken mainly for health reasons. The lure of pretty and exotic things is however so strong that reporting on her shopping takes up quite a significant portion of her letters from Japan, and her delight and excitement are palpable. A little tortoiseshell jinrikisha (i.e., traditional passenger cart or “rickshaw” pulled by a person) ornament purchased for her sister makes numerous appearances as Frey fears it may not reach home safely. Silver spoons, dishes, and bowls, and fur slippers along with the silks purchased in Japan all indicate the pleasure she takes in such luxuries.

Frey good-humoredly notes in a letter to her mother that her father complains her letters are not fit for publication because they deal so frequently with requests for clothes: “Father says my letters are so filled up with hats and dresses that they are readable to no one but you, and so I’ve intended them to be, however I’ll try to improve. I must thank you anyway for the nice little telescope you put my hat in. I was somewhat disappointed in the hat. It is very pretty straw but I do not like the color or the trimming” (February 4, 1898). She feigns chagrin only to return directly to the subject matter of a hat safely delivered. Clothes and styles remain an enduring preoccupation for Frey who enjoys her subscription to the Delineator, a popular nineteenth-century American magazine dealing with fashions and patterns.

The penchant for middle-class refinement is also evident in purchases of furniture and rugs, decent china and cutlery, and curtains and wallpaper Page 19 →ordered from Joseph’s Cash Store in San Francisco, which specialized in outfitting Westerners living in Asia. Missionaries were sometimes criticized for the level of comfort they maintained in their homes. The preoccupation with keeping a proper home, however, reveals more than an arriviste mentality. The proper outfitting of the home was essential to maintaining the all-important aura of “home sweet home.” Hyaeweol Choi (2020) discusses how the trappings of elegance of the missionary homes so substantially superior to traditional thatched Korean dwellings fueled the desire of Koreans by providing an almost mythical image of the home as paradise. Jane Hunter too homes in on the importance of the decencies of “civilized life” to the missionaries, which tied “the idea of civilization, which was at the heart of the missionary enterprise, with the stuff of the late Victorian woman’s sphere” (129).

When her parents face the prospect of having to sell their home to move into a much smaller property they had inhabited in harder times, Frey earnestly begs her mother never to return to such a poor environment in deploring terms: “You do not, surely, intend to go back into that little inconvenient house again now that Georgia is growing into womanhood. No hall, no closets, no bathroom, little bedrooms and a little kitchen in the middle of the house. The suggestion makes me sick” (March 18, 1896). The imperative of a decent home is paramount. As much as Frey is proud to be American, often proudly referring to the stature of “Uncle Sam” abroad, her own modest background stands in marked contrast to the comforts of missionary life in her foreign home. Salary that comes in like clockwork every quarter, servants that perform all the difficult physical labor, and the ability to enjoy the social benefits of the “high-class” foreigners in Seoul are all factors that contribute to making her daily life not quite so grim. The annual conferences of the general board as well as the separate conferences of the WFMS provide ample opportunity for social gatherings, and so despite the dire poverty of the surroundings, Frey is able to enjoy all the privileges of home in Korea.

Frey’s experience with her Korean girl students is marked from the first with a feeling that they are just the same as students back at home. She writes to her sister Georgia, still a young girl, “I wonder what you would think if you could see our girls in school. I think you would find them just as bright as you are” (November 7, 1893). She suggests that the Korean girls may be superior in some ways as she playfully teases her younger sister: “When they pray they don’t talk as you girls do in Sunday school for they bow clear to the floor, face Page 20 →down and never peep around to see what other people are doing. I believe American children might learn a few lessons from these little heathen children, don’t you?” She is also quite a disciplinarian, punishing girls for taking unauthorized breaks by washing their faces with snow and even whipping a child who refuses to answer when called upon (December 17, 1894). But overall she is impressed by the students’ desire to learn and emulate their teachers. Frey writes to the boy students she taught at Sunday school back home that “these people look a little different from us but their souls are just like yours & mine, and if we all love Jesus and serve him here on earth when we go to heaven we will all be alike for ‘we shall be like Him’” (February 20, 1894). She is touched by how her students save to offer up their mere pennies for the building of the first church. Clara, a student who dies from cholera has saved up money by making thimbles and sending them to be sold in America by children like Georgia. Children too were actively enlisted as part of the benevolence empire of Christian women.

Frey is also busy learning the Korean language in preparation for the series of exams held for missionaries who need to become proficient in the language both to evangelize and to educate. Her time is taken up not only with teaching and studying, but overseeing the making, washing, and mending of the students’ clothes and nursing them when they are sick or hurt. Especially in the early years the care of the sick and the frequent death of students from cholera wears out her spirit even as she is afflicted by the death of her own sister Nettie in July 1895. She writes of her weariness and nervous exhaustion: “It is this sickness and dying which wears on me. You know I’ve never been used to much and it makes me frightfully nervous. The day Pongui died of cholera & was buried so quickly at night I lay awake all night simply waiting for day light. I can’t sleep after such care” (September 23, 1895). Frey also personally suffers from bouts of malaria as she tends to the students. Even beset by such difficulties she is quick to reassure her family that she is quite content with her work, claiming she is never really homesick enough to want to return home.

Despite the tumultuousness of the times, school enrollment begins to rapidly increase. The idea for a new Western-style building is first mentioned in a letter written on September 3, 1895:

We have asked the Ladies at home to send us four new workers and money to build two new houses. We want to build a new foreign house for ourselves and use our school building for school purposes alone. We are in straits for dormitories. We plan to use the front of our house which Page 21 →we have now for the school rooms & make the old school rooms into bed rooms. We can accommodate fifty now. We think with a few alterations the building can be made to accommodate 150 or more.

A school photograph from 1895 shows 43 students alongside Frey and her colleague Josephine O. Paine, who was serving as principal. She mentions in her letter of March 10, 1896, that the school now numbers 50 students and their building overwhelmed: “As for our place here, we have fifty girls and find it quite crowded but something must be done for the carpenter condemned our house a few days ago.” The process of receiving the funding and undertaking actual construction is arduous and the new building, Main Hall, is only fully completed in 1901.

Writing in spring 1901, Frey conveys the hectic nature of all her duties as Main Hall finally approaches completion:

We are awfully busy I wish you could see us now. I counted fifty men at work on the place yesterday. Carpenters, painters, masons, stone cutters, Page 22 →men digging & carrying dirt & making walls. We are grading now. We are so anxious to get the grass seed in soon. Think of watching all this work & even having to take shovel & hoe to make them understand how we want it. Well a good time is coming, surely (April 10, 1901).

Grading, gardening, building even while continuing to teach, tend to the sick, bury the dead, and marry off those who approach the ripe age of 15 or 16: Such was the life of the early missionaries. School supplies and Western desks are imported. The new Western building, Main Hall (see figure 5), is decorated in Victorian style with curtains, wallpaper, and furniture imported along with the desks and the school supplies. The impact of the lived experience of the students in such a new physical environment cannot be underestimated.

The female missionaries deployed by WFMS were much more ambitious for their students than their Presbyterian counterparts, and so though the Presbyterians were more successful as the years passed in church planting and even education of Korean boys and men, the Methodist female missionaries in Korea maintained an unsurpassed record of achievement in the field of female education. There is no parallel Presbyterian female school that can be compared with the scope and scale of Ewha in the history of female education in Korea. Presbyterians wholeheartedly adopted the Nevius method, which put primary emphasis on the rapid planting of native churches and discouraged teaching English. Methodists were more lenient because they believed that the medium of English itself would foster a Christian civilization. Dr. William Scranton, son of the founder of Ewha, went as far as to argue that “every school should at this time put their greatest stress on the teaching of English, and this study should be fostered and even forced in order to bring the Korean people the more rapidly out from darkness into light, out from ignorance to keep abreast with the rest of the world, and out from every form of bondage into freedom and equality with the rest of humanity.”¹³ The admixture of Western superiority and genuine enthusiasm for universal freedom and equality contribute to the heady if ironic cocktail of the Methodist experiment. Further complicating the importance of English is the growing emphasis on Japanese culture and language as Japan strengthens its hold on Korea as a colony of the Japanese empire. American missionaries in Korea were not viewed with suspicion by the natives because they never posed the threat of colonizer.

When the girls did graduate when they were of age to get married, usually at 15 or 16, the female missionaries sought to get them Christian husbands as more and more early graduates of the school became teachers in local day Page 23 →schools the missionaries opened up around the nation. Frey writes after visiting the new day school opened by the WFMS “ladies” in Jemulpo:

I went into town two mornings to get our girl started in the day school here. We married one of our Ewa girls to a young Chemulpo man and the ladies are going to use her for their day school teacher. She was a little girl when I first came to Korea. It was so amusing to watch her teach & discipline her pupils so much like we do that I told Miss Paine she & I were doing it by proxy. We imitate our old teachers and now our girls imitate us. So the world moves on from generation to generation (September 4, 1903).

Ten years after her first arrival in Korea, she is encouraged to see her students follow in her own footsteps in Korean girls’ education. When the Russo-Japanese War breaks out in February 1904, she writes: “We have decided not to send the children home for fear the parents would marry them off to anyone in these exciting times and all our labor would be lost on them” (February 12, 1904). Delaying marriage would increasingly rise to the fore on their educational agenda.

By 1904, the school was taking students who could pay for their own clothes and bedding, which had previously been supplied by the school. Self-sufficiency and self-sacrifice were part and parcel of the model of female education at female seminaries in America like Mount Holyoke. Self-sufficiency became much more important in the context of heightened Japanese colonial domination. Many remarked on 1905 as a turning point when Korea was forced to sign the Protectorate Treaty with Japan after Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. Josephine Paine, the third principal of Ewha, wrote upon returning from furlough in December 1905: “The great longing of the people now is for an education ... Koreans have suddenly awakened to the fact that they must have education and now is the time when Christian education can be pushed as never before.”¹⁴ The national fervor for education was great, but schools for girls were not of primary concern to the Korean government. Between 1886 and 1905, around 17 girls’ schools were established, “all but two of which were mission schools. The Korean government devoted its attention exclusively to modern education for boys and men despite all of its rhetoric about the importance of modern education” (Choi, 2009, 92). There was, however, explosive growth in female education after 1905 when not only modernization, but national independence from Japan’s growing colonial oppression became more overtly associated with female education. The king’s consort, Lady Eom, established Jinmyeong Girls’ School in 1906 with the aid Page 24 →of Mary Scranton. An Ewha graduate, Yeo Meryae (m. Hwang), served as first principal. A strong working alliance was thus built between missionaries and Korean female leaders who were convinced that strong nationalistic women could serve as the bedrock of a strong, modernized, and independent Korean nation.

Frey took on the role of principal of Ewha Haktang in 1907. She oversaw the systematic rearrangement of the Ewha curriculum by launching primary school, middle school, and high school divisions within the school. The middle school at Ewha had been established in 1904, and all girls who graduated in 1908 in the first class were allowed to enter the high school program. An advertisement in a local newspaper for the curriculum offered at Ewha for the 1908 school year is intriguingly comprehensive:

Primary: National language, Chinese language, composition, arithmetic, drawing, geography, elementary gymnastics, English

Middle: Bible, Chinese language, moral training, geography, Korean history, arithmetic, English, physiology, hygiene, zoology, botany, drawing, cooking, bookkeeping, elementary gymnastics

High: Bible, Chinese language, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, astronomy, physiology, psychology, educational studies, biology, chemistry, English, world geography, advanced physiology, economy, world history (modern, medieval, England, America)

Elective: Optional music¹⁵

Frey writes to her sister on November 2, 1908: “Tell Homer I am trying to teach a class in Physics. I take the girls over to the boys’ school (Paichai Hakdang) once a week for experiments because Ewa does not own any apparatus. Some day I hope we will have.” Georgia’s husband, Homer LeSourd, was the physics teacher at Milton Academy, a prestigious boarding school just outside of Boston.

An entrance fee was charged starting in 1907 and tuition in 1908. By 1910, enrollment had reached 177. If mission schools were a success, it was at least in part because there was so much demand on the part of Korean students for new learning, and female students were as eager as male students to receive a “modern” education. Frey launched the college program in 1910 to accommodate the first graduates of the high school. It is no small coincidence that 1910 marked the year Korea was annexed and officially became a Japanese colony. It was fortuitous that Frey acted so quickly as there was a grace period for already accredited schools before having to institute the teaching of the Japanese Page 25 →language and discontinue the teaching of the Bible after the Japanese began to govern the system of education in Korea more ruthlessly.

When Frey instituted the college program in 1910, keeping girls from early marriages was one of her leading concerns. Frey’s thoughts on the need for higher education for Korean women differed widely from those of a contemporary Presbyterian and married missionary, Annie Baird. Baird argued that giving Korean girls a higher education in English would create “nothing more than interesting curiosities, like a ring of rose cuttings that I once saw at a Japanese florist’s, which had been grafted into a pine stump and were growing and blooming there” (Baird, 1912, 114). Frey argued on the other hand that everything a missionary herself had learned at college should be offered the Korean woman to prepare her for a life of service: “In coveting for the Korean women lives of rich service, dare we offer them any less preparation than we considered necessary for ourselves?” (Frey, 1914, 308). There is an interesting difference here that can perhaps be interpreted as an extension of the difference between Calvinist and Arminian thinking, Presbyterian and Methodist worldviews, reflected in the way the two women think about “American” as opposed to “Korean” women. Baird clearly cannot imagine Korean women as the intellectual equals of their Western counterparts and the image of rose cuttings on a pine stump offers a grotesque view of a crossbreeding that is as unnatural as it is undesirable. Frey, on the other hand, believes strongly in the parity of Korean and American women in their need for better education to lead lives of usefulness and service. American women are not predestined for more enlightenment.

In a letter to the young Georgia, Frey explains how even as a young girl she could not accept the doctrine of predestination:

My teacher Mrs. Wallace explained the doctrine of predestination to me once by saying—“Every day I tell you you must not whisper in school and I even seat you where you will have the least temptation but I know you will whisper before the day is over.” I could see the point she was making but she didn’t make a Calvinist of me never the less and I’m glad that I don’t believe God brings anyone into the world with the fore ordination that they are to be lost (March 10, 1896).

That the Methodists were so much more successful than the Presbyterians in the specific sector of higher education for Korean women can also be explained in part because WFMS missionaries enjoyed considerably more autonomy than their Presbyterian counterparts. They established their own Korea Conference Page 26 →in 1899 and maintained autonomy from the general board in terms of personnel and finances. Frey moved ahead with the college program despite counterarguments that higher education was unnecessary for Korean girls. Her view was that Korean female leaders and teachers were desperately needed to further woman’s work for woman, making “advanced courses imperative” (Frey, 1914, 308).

In her early years in Korea, Frey voices a genuine respect for Japan and Japanese culture, not least because she views Japan as a brave modern nation that has made great progress toward “civilization.” In her visit in the summer of 1894, she is impressed by the number of hotels, trains, telegraph lines, water works everywhere and numbers of Japanese who are functional in English. She favors Japan over China, especially in the context of the Sino-Japanese War. When her stay is prolonged by the outbreak of war in July, she writes from Nagasaki:

Page 27 →My sympathies are with Japan. No doubt she is looking for increased wealth and honor for herself, but she will do well for Korea. She is progressive. The advancement she has made in the past 40 years has been marvelous and she is not standing still now. I notice and appreciate the electric lights, the water works, railroads, hotels and many of the other signs of advancement toward Western ideas, the more because I have just come from a place where every night the city lies in total darkness, where there is no city system of sewage, much less water works, where railroads and hotels are unheard of things. We hope and expect that if Japan wins, these advantages may be ours in Korea under their new government (September 3, 1894).

This was an attitude common to the missionaries stationed in Korea at the time. Reflecting contemporary usage, Frey often uses the phrase “progressive” to describe her approving respect for Japan.

While Frey’s early letters show her admiration for Japanese culture and Japanese things, “the foully murdered” Queen Min serves as a turning point (October 14, 1895). Early the next year, Frey reports to her father more fully on the turmoil following the murder of the queen: “You remember I wrote you in October of the attack on the palace, the murder of the queen and the imprisonment of the King. The instigators of the scheme were backed up by the Japanese. Since then we have lost much of the admiration we had for the Japanese at the time of the war” (February 13, 1896). The last sentence above is crossed out by another hand, most probably by her father or mother, before it was sent off for publication in a local paper such as the Bellefontaine Republican, which welcomed such news from abroad, especially by a local celebrity. The edit reveals the caution of the parent on a sensitive topic of international interest. Another section from the same letter crossed out by the same hand reads as follows: “The Koreans feel very bitter toward the Japanese and I do not know but they have reason for this hatred. Killing the queen as they did is not a thing likely to be quickly forgotten.”

When the Russians enter into war with Japan over Korea a decade later in 1904, she voices her concern that if Russia were victorious, the missionaries might be expelled in favor of the Orthodox Church, whereas the Japanese have not actively interfered with the work of Western missionaries. The Japanese would become more wary of the missionaries and the role played by missionaries as Japanese occupation continued.¹⁶ There are very few letters from Frey home after the close of the Russo-Japanese War and the signing of the Page 28 →Protectorate Treaty in 1905. The letter of July 23, 1907, briefly reports on the attempt by the Korean emperor, who had given himself that title after emerging from self-imposed exile at the Russian legation in 1897, to appeal Korean sovereignty before the Hague Peace Convention. His emissaries, sent in secret, were disbarred from addressing the convention due to Japan’s claim of assuming sole responsibility for representing Korea after 1905. As retribution for the audacious attempt, Frey cites the three demands made by the Japanese, which include the replacement of the emperor on the throne by his “imbecile” son (July 23, 1907). She writes in September 1907 of the problems the school is having due to Japanese “thieves,” which directly contradicts claims by the Japanese of instituting rule and order:

We are having the most exciting time with thieves and are proving the benefits of having the Japanese in our midst. They are Japanese and altho’ two or more of the foreign houses are entered nightly until the list has grown to about twenty the Japanese police are not able to catch them—they are able but apparently do not want to. Of all of the Masters of the Academy I think the oftenest of the one with whom I discussed the Japanese question. I have wished I had him here to show him a little of what our people are suffering at their hands ... I do not sputter like this out loud for it is policy since we have them to deal with to get along peaceably with them & in many ways I admire them. But they hesitate at nothing to accomplish their end they may have in view. Some think they want to drive us out (September 30, 1907).

Perhaps because she feels the need for greater caution, there are no further mentions of any political events in her remaining letters as the Japanese began to exert ever greater control on the education and acculturation of the Korean populace to Japanese language, culture, and values.

In 1908, the Japanese residency-general of Korea ordered private schools run by missionaries to register and adopt a standard curriculum that included instruction in the Japanese language. A stricter set of regulations introduced in 1915 decreed that “religious teaching during school hours was strictly prohibited” (Cha, 112). Schools that had preregistered were allowed a ten-year grace period. Thus began an active struggle between the missionaries who ran mission schools and Japanese rule. Eventually the strictly enforced requirement for students to bow at Shinto shrines starting in the 1930s would lead to voluntary closure of some schools run by Presbyterian missionaries, resulting in greater control by Korean church leaders. Most missionaries left or were repatriated Page 29 →when the relationship between Japan and America turned hostile in the Asia-Pacific War after the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941). Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that the busy principal with foresight who had instituted the first kindergarten (1914) and the first kindergarten-teacher training school (1915) in Korea, in addition to the college program to Ewha Haktang, establishing a truly complete education for Korean women, did not live to see the desultory end of the missionary endeavor in a nation that had become colonized.

From the initial encounter with the “queer” other body on the steamer, the letters reveal her growing closeness to her Korean students she thinks of as daughters as evinced in an exchange she has with a woman in a remote area in Chungcheong Province where she goes annually to evangelize. She recounts the episode to her sister Georgia, “As I was starting from the Inn the people gathered around the chair one woman said, Have you any sons?”—I said “no but I have many daughters and she said ‘Dakhara!’” (What a calamity!) It is no use telling them I’m not married etc. for they can’t understand it at all, I meant the school girls” (October 16, 1917). Not producing a son was considered one of the seven sins of womanhood in the Joseon period. Not being married also defies explanation as does having daughters that are not biological progeny. None of this makes sense to the woman who nonetheless has come to learn the Bible from Frey as did many others who studied very hard from year to year as the missionaries came to test them on their progress and confer new status as full members of the church:

We have a “Home Study Course” and I inspire them to study and examine them in it, give passing cards to them each year. The first year is the hardest because I find so few who have learned to read & of course that has to be learned before anything else. They commit the Lord’s Prayer, Apostle’s Creed and ten commandments and know how to read their Bibles & write their names. The second year they study Mark’s gospel & a little book “Advice to Mothers” on the care of children and recite the 23[rd] Psalm. Each year is a little more difficult (October 16, 1917).

There was an incentive to literacy to become a card-carrying member of the church, and such membership was something Korean women had never experienced before, explaining perhaps why they were so invested in following the rigorous course of Bible study. Modern ideas of hygiene and mothering infiltrate the rural areas through the teaching of female missionaries like Frey, and so the work of enlightenment is not restricted to the dream of higher education alone.

Page 30 →Frey avers in her last letter home that all she cares about is how her Korean students feel upon the extraordinary feast they prepare for her fiftieth birthday:

The next morning at six the girls sang two songs outside my door—double quartette. At 12 they brought me a beautiful silk suit of clothes & did my hair up in Korean fashion & put a funny little bonnet affair on my head, I was pronounced beautiful & so young by the Koreans. Unfortunately the foreigners couldn’t see it that way but said “was I only fifty?” & such remarks but the Koreans were immensely pleased & that was all I cared. A big Korean feast gotten up by the school girls after a little program in the chapel. All the mission & near friends lined the sides of the long chapel & the school girls filled the centre, about 200 all dressed in beautiful colors. A picture was taken but it will never show up in a picture. The girls sang a special song about me & bowed Korean fashion (March 11, 1918).

The other missionaries and Western guests are the “foreigners” whose opinion is no longer very important. The ceremonial bowing before parents, especially on special occasions like the Lunar New Year or a big birthday, is an abiding Korean custom that honors filial piety over all other virtues. There seems to be no doubt that Frey’s “daughters” considered her as more than parent in the care they put into this celebration that resembles the hwangab, the 60th birthday to celebrate living out a complete 60-year lunar zodiac cycle. Frey herself writes to her sister she does not understand why they could not wait another 10 years for the proper hwangab, but it turned out that she would not live until that birthday. The affection, admiration, and respect Frey’s students felt for her are amply documented in records of those who were at Ewha during her tenure. Helen Kim writes:

We all admired and loved Miss Lulu Frey for the courageous stand she was taking on our behalf. Miss Frey was the person who had the vision of a woman’s college in Korea. In spite of opposition she had held on to her vision and had worked to fulfill it.

Miss Frey held her ground. She was so right in her persistent idea that Korean women leaders were needed in all fields, and that they should be trained in Korea. She had already tried training a few by sending them abroad, and knew from experience that the better way was to do it within their own country. So she stood firm against all opposition and obstacles and carried on with a handful of students. Gradually the enrollment increased, and for thirty years, a whole generation, Ewha College served Page 31 →the women of Korea as the only institution of higher education for women (Kim, 32).

Frey’s students were acknowledging by bowing to Frey that they fully understood what she had done to raise Korean women to be leaders of their own people.

The birthday letter is the last surviving letter we have from Frey, and we unfortunately have no personal account written by her of the turmoil undergone by Ewha and the nation during and in the aftermath of the revolutionary fervor of the March 1st Independence Movement of 1919. But in September Monkey, the personal account of Pahk Induk, who had graduated from the college in 1917 and stayed on to teach at Ewha, we have a record of how Frey personally accompanied her to the police station upon her arrest for participating in the demonstrations. Pahk recounts, “When we arrived at the gate they stopped Miss Frey, telling her that she might go no further, and in spite of her frantic claim that they could not take me away from her they forced her to turn back. As we parted she whispered to me in English, ‘Trust in the Lord’” (Pahk, 59). After solitary confinement, Pahk is surprised with food much superior to the standard prison fare of “boiled soybeans, millet and a few grains of rice which was gritty with sand” (Pahk, 62): “Twice each day from that time on the same high quality food was handed through the door and later I learned that it had been sent by Miss Frey” (63). Pahk also writes about Frey’s visit to her prison cell:

It must have been about a month later when my door suddenly opened and I looked up to see my beloved friend, the principal, standing there with a guard. Not a word was permitted to be spoken but each of us paled as we gazed into each other’s eyes. Somehow we both felt that spoken words were unnecessary. Then the door was banged shut and I wept bitterly. That was the last time this great missionary leader and I ever saw each other for not long after, Miss Frey returned to America, and two years later died of cancer on March 18, 1921 at Milton, Massachusetts, at the age of fifty-two. She was buried in Bellefontaine Ohio. She will go down in Korea’s history (Pahk, 66).

It is a shame that Frey has not yet been fully recognized even in Korea for her work for school and nation. Frey would also spend several weeks in the spring of that year providing food and clothing in an encampment outside Jeam-ri (today Hwaseong, near Suwon), where the Japanese had massacred 29 villagers Page 32 →in a Methodist church, shooting and then setting the church and neighboring houses on fire in April 1919. Frey would go to America on furlough later that year for what would become her final return. Frey writes in her journal entry dated January 9, 1920, “Today word reached me that Induk had been arrested again. I’ve not been able to think of anything else knowing how cold it is in the prisons & what they suffered before.” A cancer was discovered in her breast in the summer of 1920, and despite surgery and treatment she was unable to recover.

To the end, Frey was in close contact with Koreans working to promote the cause of Korean independence in America such as Philip Jaisohn (Seo Jaepil), Syngman Rhee, and Marcella Shin (Sin Masuk), one of three of the first graduating class of Ewha College in 1914, as documented in her last journal entries of 1920. The very last letter of the Frey collection in the Ewha Archives is from Syngman Rhee, the future president of an independent Korea, and prime minister of the provisional government based in Shanghai, from Honolulu. Rhee addresses Frey as a colleague and deeply trusted cohort in the struggle for independence from Japanese rule:

To confess the truth I cannot point out any one thing that makes me optimistic, except in a general way—My encouragement comes from two sources, our God and our people. I believe God’s hand is guiding in this movement. I am perfectly confident that in due time we’ll realize our dreams & that due time is not very distant. I would not express myself in this way to any one else for they will laugh at me but I believe it and I am hopeful. Our people are more determined than ever before (Rhee, September 8, 1920).

Before Frey passed away in March 1921, she mentioned to all her friends that her only remaining hope was to return to Korea. According to sources who met her in her last months, “she inquired by name for each of her girls and just couldn’t hear enough about them. The conversations, often extending into the hours of the night, always ended the same: ‘If I can only go back even for a short time, I’ll ask for nothing more’” (Church and Thomas, 156). Dr. Oliver Avison of the Presbyterian mission, founder of Severance Hospital and trusted longtime friend and cohort, was the last to meet her and give her his expert opinion. The last line of her journal reads: “I saw Dr. Avison today and he examined me. He tells me he has an X-Ray expert and new apparatus to take back with him in February.” This is the last entry of her journal dated January 14, 1921. Her obituary written for Woman’s Missionary Friend by her friend and Page 33 →comissionary to Korea, Mary Hillman, notes that “[u]ntil the last weeks she was buoyed up by the hope of returning” but died and was buried in Bellefontaine in the same cemetery as her parents. In the memorial service held for Frey in Seoul on April 9, 1921, Dr. Avison “spoke of her grief that she could not see Korea again, and when she knew that her days were numbered she longed that she might return and be buried in the land to which her heart was so completely given so long ago.”¹⁷

Frey was unwaveringly appreciative of the support she and her fellow missionaries received from the Woman’s Board, but often frustrated with what she perceived to be lack of full support from the general board she refers to as the male board (see letter dated January 24, 1898, cited above). The economy and fervor of the girls she teaches and the women she works with stand in marked contrast to what Frey perceives as male carelessness. She reports on the wholeheartedness of poor Koreans in their offerings, and is particularly touched by dying girls who do what they can to contribute to the construction of the first Methodist church building in Jeongdong. Mourning the imminent death of a student named Clara, she writes to Georgia:

She made little thimbles & sent them to America and had four dollars for the church yesterday. Our little girls all had saved a string of cash for the collection and were as happy as could be to give it. Pongui, our little girl who died of cholera so suddenly—she was your age—had saved 800 cash (about 16 American pennies that is very much here) which we found in her box (September 19, 1895).

Missionary publications had sections for children who too were enlisted to contribute what they could for the cause of world evangelization. Male boards were jealous of the mighty money-raising prowess of the women’s boards and began to interfere with how women could raise funds under their separate control. The WFMS was prohibited from collecting money either in public meetings or through Sunday schools. The various publications of the women’s boards, including Woman’s Missionary Friend, were crucial in raising funds for missionary work in faraway places like Korea. Patricia Hill notes, “As a regular and intimate visitor in the home, the missionary magazine did not allow appeals for missions to be limited to a yearly missionary Sunday or the infrequent visits of actual workers home from the foreign field” (Hill, 87). A talk Page 34 →by a celebrity missionary like Clementina Butler could draw thousands. Even a relatively obscure missionary like Frey frequently gave talks when on furlough, and her mother too is invited to contribute letters from her missionary daughter for local chapters of women’s boards (see “Letter to Aunt Emi” of January 1904). Women began to take interest in international developments even in countries as far away as Korea because they were personally invested in the emissaries they themselves had sent to such outposts to enhance the kingdom of God. The ability of women to raise funds was considered by some to be a dangerous forewarning of their potential involvement in the women’s rights movement. Others meanwhile hoped that overseas missionary work would usefully divert women’s energy to concerns outside national politics.

Frey followed news of the temperance movement back home with particular interest. Women in Ohio spearheaded the Woman’s Crusade (1873–74) against alcohol consumption, and Frey and many of her fellow missionaries who were from the Midwest were deeply familiar with the cause. The strong teetotalism Korean evangelicals advocate even today can be traced to the outlook on alcohol of the early missionaries. The Woman’s Crusade afforded an early moment for participation by ordinary women in a matter of national political interest. Although female participation in politics and the growing call for female suffrage were viewed as problematic, many women thought it their public duty to show up at public saloons to pray, sing, and exhort the closing of such businesses that they argued led directly to male drunkenness and violence. Such activism resulted in the formation of the highly organized Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Hillsboro, Ohio, in 1874. Keeping men sober was directly linked to protecting the home and maintaining it as a spiritual sanctuary from evil.

Frey writes on March 16, 1901: “Mail came in yesterday, bringing me two home papers & few others but no letters—I read the papers with a great deal of interest. The Commercial Club and the ‘Carrie Nation’ discussion to be in M[ethodist] E[piscopal] Church.”Carrie A. Nation (1846–1911) was a temperance advocate famous for using a hatchet to demolish barrooms. Frey’s active interest in the cause of temperance allows us to connect her to the most important woman’s movement of her time. Nancy Hardesty notes the irony of the reversal of fortunes of abolitionists and temperance advocates, the former reviled by the majority in their times and the latter lauded by contemporaries for their strong stance as moral reformers (141). The most notable female leader of the temperance movement was Frances Willard (1830–98), who served as the president of the WCTU from 1879 until her death. Under Willard by 1890 Page 35 →the WCTU became the largest women’s organization in the world. Willard described the spiritual revival that occasioned “the Crusade” as the Pentecost of God in the grand tradition of the revivals that had initiated the Second Great Awakening earlier in the nineteenth century led by Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), who also advocated for social causes such as abolition and equal educational opportunities for women. Oberlin where he served as president from 1851–1866 was the first college in America to admit women and African American students.

The issue of female suffrage became central to Willard’s feminist vision as she became more and more convinced that women needed the vote to protect the home, a platform that came to be known as “the Home Protection Ballot,” which her closest supporters, evangelical Christian women, initially opposed. Willard’s moment of conversion to the cause of “the enfranchisement of women” is captured in her autobiography, Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman (1889):

Upon my knees alone, in the room of my hostess, who was a veteran Crusader, there was borne in upon my mind, as I believe, from loftier regions, the declaration, “You are to speak for woman’s ballot as a weapon of protection to her home and tempted loved ones from the tyranny of drink,” and then for the first and only time in my life, there flashed through my brain a complete line of argument and illustration—the same that I used a few months later before the Woman’s Congress, in St. George’s Hall, Philadelphia, when I first publicly avowed my faith in the enfranchisement of women (as cited in Warner, 161).

The imperative of woman’s suffrage became Willard’s new gospel, and despite the great apprehension of the conservative members of WCTU, her 1876 address to the national convention on the topic of suffrage gathered overwhelming support. Such was the emotional impact of the need to defend the home that was laid at the feet of good Christian women.

Frey herself never achieved the kind of authority and acclaim achieved by women like Willard, and yet she was deeply influenced by their model of what Nancy Hardesty has called “evangelical feminism”—a paradoxical term perhaps, but one that manages to bridge the divide between the growing fervor of fundamentalism and the fragile moment of modernism within American Protestantism. Though the temperance movement in the United States eventually came to be viewed as a sorely misguided project, there was a strong feminist agenda in the reformist impulse of the women who led important campaigns Page 36 →in the name of “woman” such as raising the age of legal consent for minors, better education for females, and of course the disbarring of alcohol, which was perceived as leading to addiction and violence against women. Willard was known for her “Do Everything” campaign, and Frey too advocated for women to learn everything to do everything for themselves. In one letter to her father, she regrets not having learned more from working at his hardware store as such knowledge would have come in so handy in the building of Main Hall:

Miss Rothweiler & I have made out the Hardware order for our new house. I wish you could have been here to have loaned us your experience. Don’t you see how a missionary ought to know everything? Why didn’t I look into your boxes and inquire as to the best kind of locks, window fasteners etc.? What a lack of knowledge I discover I have every day. Teach Georgia to observe everything. There is such an education in just observing nature as we see it, character in those around us, how things are done in all branches of work. I believe a child ought to be impressed that he may need to know this or that thing, altho’ it may seem most improbable, and encouraged to observe (January 24, 1898).

Frey was eager to have Georgia more “completely” educated than herself in accomplishments such as music, dreaming of buying her a piano or even sending her to Europe to finish her education. Women like Willard had had the opportunity to travel to Europe after graduating from university. Yet she also believes in the supreme importance of practical education, telling her mother, “I prefer to not have her graduate in college if she must take all the things required in the course at the expense of some things not in the course which I consider more practicable. One must live and learn. I have learned a few things by experience and intend that she shall profit by it” (September 23, 1895).

Willard celebrated women’s physical activity, writing a piece on learning to ride a bike (A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, with Some Reflections by the Way, 1895). Frey had a “wheel” sent out to Korea and often describes taking her wheel across the city in her letters. A Western woman biking from Ewha Haktang in Jeongdong to the WFMS house at the East Gate and Sang-dong Church near the South Gate, stopping now and again to cool herself, must have been quite a sight on the unpaved streets of Seoul more than 100 years ago. One of the major educational revolutions at Ewha during Frey’s tenure as principal was the modified Korean-style dress adopted by the school to incorporate physical education as an integral part of female education. Helen Kim writes:

Page 37 →A vigorous program of physical culture was started. Regular gymnastic exercises, tennis, basketball for girls! These were revolutionary steps. Our skirts which had been tied tightly around our chests by long bands were now suspended from loose bodices to hang from the shoulders. This gave room for our breathing organs to grow and expand. Skirts were shortened, freeing our legs to walk and run naturally (Kim, 33).

The feeling of excitement and freedom is palpable. Greater physical mobility and athleticism were important aspects abetting the growing stature of women as moral leaders of a modern civilization.

Frey’s vision to keep Korean girls in school for as long as possible, even by adding a college curriculum in 1910 when conditions were hardly ripe for sustained higher education, can also be linked to the temperance movement’s emphasis on delayed marriage. Temperance advocates campaigned for raising the legal age of marriage from 10 to 18 and the age of consent from 12 to 20 in 38 states, 7 in Delaware. These measures were designed to guarantee women’s right to their own bodies. Prohibition was entirely tied to promoting women’s values and protecting the home as a female sanctuary. Women’s rights and especially the right to vote were secondary to the ideal of such a female-centered domestic sphere. Women of the temperance movement came to support the vote because suffrage was viewed by many of these early feminists as the only viable route to Prohibition. Even Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton began their feminist activism as founders of the Women’s State Temperance Society in upstate New York.

In one of her last journal entries Frey writes with quiet elation: “This is the first day of National Prohibition. It is wonderful that I should live to see it. At least our nation is all right” (January 16, 1920). Frey had no way of knowing the long-term fate of Prohibition, but her story serves to illuminate an important and little-celebrated moment in both Korean and American feminist history. Frey notes in her essay titled “Higher Education for Korean Girls”:

Someone has said that the more advanced the civilization the longer the childhood. One strong reason for having the higher courses in our schools is that by them we are able to keep our girls longer and see them fully developed physically, and with minds and hearts mature and settled. Looking back over years of primary school work, it is painful to note that scores of girls have gone from us before they were in any sense ready to marry (Frey, 1914, 308).

Page 38 →Delaying marriage was a necessary strategy for preparing women for the work of serving as guardians of the home and the faith. This may hardly seem a promising strategy for what we have come to label feminism, but protecting and educating women was viewed as essential for preserving the sanctity of the home. Women trained to be useful to the world through an education based on discipline, self-sacrifice, and Christian fervor was the goal of the largely unmarried Methodist female missionaries who founded Ewha.

Religion serves as a third space beyond state and family, overlapping at times, but gesturing toward a different order of space and time to the secular. The millennialism of the young missionaries who came to Korea at the end of the nineteenth century led to a rise in evangelical fervor on Korean soil rarely seen in Europe or America at that time, leading many to think of Korea as the New Jerusalem of the East. The translation of the evangelical center from the West to the East was cause for much excitement as well as a renewed sense of responsibility. Whereas the missionary involvement that had reached its zenith in this movement would dissipate, Korean Christians took up the torch and Korean women were at the forefront. Frey concludes her essay with the pronouncement that “Christianity is largely responsible for awakening in the Korean woman the desire for knowledge” (309). Frey helped to institute a new Garden of Eden in a land where the fruit of knowledge was amply to be tasted by the girls and women entrusted to her. Frey herself could never have imagined that the very small and poor country where Westerners perceived everything to be so slow would one day become one of the fastest-changing places on the globe. The girls and women she trained would serve to fuel the rise of a strong middle class influenced by the Christian ideals of Victorian domesticity. Many of these women would also go on to become the first doctors, lawyers, teachers, and female professionals in all fields. When the first building dedicated entirely to Ewha College was completed in 1923, it was fittingly consecrated as Frey Hall, commemorating the first woman to achieve the dream of higher education for Korean girls, not least by delaying their entry into marriage.