KJCKorea
Journal Central

The present study was conducted for testing the hypothesis that magazine <Sinnyeoseong> could not play its role of awakening women in those days to their right identity. For this, we reviewed the line of male intellects that continued from <Sonyeon> to <Cheongchun> and <Gaebyeok>, and discussed that <Sinnyeoseong> treated women not as ‘persons (future leaders)’ but only as ‘women.’ In addition, from terms related to women, we extracted words describing the ideal image of women in those days, which were ‘mild,’ ‘nice,’ and ‘clean.’ These words were contrastive to masculine adjectives such as ‘powerful’ and ‘strong,’ and along with ‘waste’ and ‘vanity’ mentioned as women’s problems, these words prove that women were not regarded as workers responsible for the future of Korea. Lastly, we extracted metaphorical expressions of women and processed them statistically. According to the results, women were objects to be purchased and sold, and it was quite contrastive to editorials emphasizing women’s equality and freedom. This supports the hypothesis that women in modern discourses on women were images of women abstracted by male intellects and therefore they would show the difference between reality and ideal.

<Sinnyeoseong>, high frequency, womanliness, metaphor, [Women are objects]