Page xiii →Series Editor’s Preface

It is my great pleasure to write a preface for Pioneer of Korean Female Education: Missionary Lulu E. Frey’s Letters from Ewha Haktang, 1893–1918, edited by Julie Choi and Duk-Ae Chung, published in the joint USC Press and NTU Press series, East-West Encounters in Literature and Cultural Studies. This series is designed to promote scholarship on the fraught history between East Asian literature and culture and an often hegemonic and colonizing influence exerted by European and North American imperial powers. Of course, the outline of the standard narrative of these relations is well-known: from the gun boat diplomacy portrayed in Madama Butterfly, to the burning of the summer palace in the Second Opium War, to the later Korean and Vietnam Wars. And although this narrative holds more than a little truth, it is also overly simplistic and at times condescending in its oft unstated assumptions of the monolithic nature of two supposedly opposed civilizations and implicitly gendered opposition between an active, masculinist colonizing power and a passive, yielding, colonized other.

Pioneer of Korean Female Education: Missionary Lulu E. Frey’s Letters from Ewha Haktang, 1893–1918 is exemplary in showing the limits of this traditional narrative. In it we meet a series of single women, who have set out from the United States as Methodist missionaries. Yes, they came to convert their charges to Christianity, but they also wind up establishing the first university for women on the Korean peninsula. These American religious women, in concert with their Korean pupils and sisters, created an extraordinary community of women that became not only a center of resistance to a traditional Confucian subjugation of women but also a center of learning in which young Korean women would establish a node of resistance to Japanese colonialism. Thus, while this remarkable volume is certainly the story of an East–West encounter, it is far from a story of a simple binary relationship. Rather it unfolds across a complex set of overdetermined gender dynamics, a multipolar system of power, and a utopian dream of building an international community of—if not completely independent then certainly liberated—women.

Page xiv →The correspondence of Lulu Frey is, then, an extraordinary archive in the history of Korea, colonialism, feminism, and religious studies. Expertly edited with a critical introduction by Julie Choi, these letters tell the story of the founding of the first university for women in Korea and the second oldest in East Asia. Today Ewha with 20,000 students is one of the largest universities for women in the world. Frey’s correspondence tells the story of a young woman, who sailed to Korea as a missionary at the end of the nineteenth century to “convert the heathens” and to offer education to other young women who, within their society, had been denied the opportunity. Frey comes loaded with all the prejudices one might expect of a young missionary. But the Korea she arrives in is one that was already under serious colonial pressure from the Japanese and by 1910 would be annexed. Thus, Ewha’s missionary school rather than simply imposing Western culture on Korean indigeneity, which it did, also became a crucible of resistance. These missionaries saw their role as the education of good Christian wives for Korean husbands, but in doing this work they inadvertently established an all-female community of single women who functioned as a gynocentric family unit for many years. Religious conversion and even conformity, thus, became an at times ironic means of resistance to colonial and patriarchal power. It is a remarkable story.

Paul Allen Miller

University of South Carolina and Ewha Womans University