Confucianism, Law, and Democracy in Contemporary Korea by Kim Sungmoon;

Author:Kim, Sungmoon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Daughters’ Rebellion: The Case

Background

In 1999, the clan organization of the Samaenggong Branch of the Lee Clan from the ancestral seat of Yong’in distributed among its members dividends resulting from a sale of the clan’s land property.[9] According to its internal regulations predicated on traditional Confucian patrilineal clan law (c. zongfa 宗法), governed by Zhu Xi’s Family Ritual (c. Jiali 家禮), which admits only adult men as full members in the capacity of sons, the association gave adult male members 150 million won (approximately US$150,000) and male members under the age of 20, regarded as associate members, between 16.5 and 55 million won (approximately between US$15,000 and $50,000) each. Though not recognized as “formal” members in light of clan law, female members of the clan, namely unmarried daughters as well as daughters-in-law, who are responsible for, among other things, preparing the food for family rituals and clan activities, also each received 2.2 million won (approximately US$2,000) and 3.3 million won (approximately US$3,000) respectively, not in terms of dividends, which are only given to formal members, but in terms of “inheritance.”[10] In the course of distributing the clan’s wealth, however, married daughters (i.e., the clan’s daughters who had married members of another clan) were completely excluded based on the traditional patriarchal Confucian custom that regards daughters as “outsiders” upon marriage (in Korean words, ch’ulgaoein 出嫁外人).[11]

Infuriated, more than a hundred married daughters openly protested the clan council’s decision and demanded their “due” share as members of the clan, pointing to the clan association’s somewhat equivocal definition of membership as pertaining to “any descendant of the Samaenggong branch when one comes of age.” In the face of unflagging protests from the married daughters, the clan council eventually offered each married daughter 2.2 million won (approximately US$2,000), also in terms of inheritance, hence not recognizing their formal membership. However, this decision fell far short of assuaging the anger and frustration of the protestors, who soon found out that the clan’s daughters-in-law had received more money than they did. As one of the participants in this protest expressed later, what frustrated them the most was not so much the amount of money but the clan’s patriarchal tradition that systematically discriminated against the married daughters simply because they were women (and admitted women’s partial membership only in their capacity as the wives of the clan’s sons).[12] Recognizing that verbal protests would not be sufficient to gain formal acceptance into the clan association as members, in 2000, some of these women brought the case to the district court, asking the court to adjudicate the legality of the clan’s stipulations regarding membership. After losing in both district and appellate courts, five of the married daughters from Samaenggong, together with three of the married daughters from the Hyeryŏnggong branch of the Shim Clan from Ch’ŏngsong, who had suffered the same defeats in lower courts, appealed to the Supreme Court. After a long deliberation accompanied by a public hearing, the first of its kind in the history of Korean jurisprudence,

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