This paper is a study on Baek Woo-yong’s Twentieth Century Youth Women Songs (Changga) (二十世紀靑年女子唱歌), a collection of songs published for women for the first time in colonial Chosun. The paper first analyzes the lyrics and music of a total of 42 songs within a sociocultural context, in order to examine how the ideal identity of modern women was created. Then it compares the ideal and traditional images of women during that time period, in order to understand the change in Chosun people’s perception on the desirable image of woman in the course of modernization.
The first song collection, Twentieth Century Youth Women Songs can be regarded as the same attempt as the published writings at that time that argued for women’s education and social participation. Therefore, I first examines articles and writing such as Family Magazine (1906) and Independent Newspaper (1896-1899), which were published by the effort of intellectual males; then I will analyzes the song repertories of Twentieth Century Youth Women Songs in terms of music. Then I will makes a close investigation of the texts which can largely be divided into three categories.
The three categories include ‘Good wife and wise mother at home,’ ‘Confucian women in a traditional society,’ and ‘Enlightened women who fit modernization,’ highlighting the images of both traditional and modern women and illustrating the ambivalent attitude toward women in society at that time.
The fact that Twentieth Century Youth Women Songs is a collection of songs intended for women, yet it was composed by the male, clearly reflect the societal demand of the time. Furthermore, upon considering the following reasons, one wonders how these songs were actually learned by the general women and how these songs really reflect the emotions of the oppressed women of the time: twelve women activists participated in it as copy editors; an assumption that it was mostly used in weekend/night schools and institutions rather than regular schools; and the fact that many songs in Western music style were never easy for general women, the consumers, to sing at their musical level.
In the colonial situation, intellectual males could not perform any political reformation, therefore they controlled native women’s activities thinking that the changes of western women’s social status resulted in Western nations’ political power and wealth. Intellectual Korean males’ various enlightenment movements for women can be seen as an mimicry of the west to urges women to change for their country’s national prosperity and military power.
However, as this collection of songs reflects, it is difficult to claim that the attempt made by male intellectual at that time actually had a real influence on the real life of women in colonial Chosun.