Discussion with Suzy Kim:
Making of North Korea Women
as Revolutionary Mothers, March 8

Suzy Kim, assistant professor of history at Emerson College in Boston, Mass., will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Monday, March 8 to discuss "The Woman Question: Making of North Korea Women as Revolutionary Mothers (1945-1950)." The event, open to all, will be held in Parents Dining Room and begins at 6:45 p.m.
Situating the North Korean woman question' within the historical context of debates about women's liberation during the first half of the 20th century, Kim's research explores how North Korea dealt with the issue of women's liberation in the revolutionary "liberated space" of the immediate post-colonial period (1945-1950).
North Korean women obtained strong institutional support for political and economic participation through mass mobilization, empowering them to go beyond traditional boundaries, and yet they were also constrained in their freedom to create their own visions of female revolutionary subjectivity.
Consequently, Kim asserts, the figure of revolutionary mother' became the quintessential icon of female subjectivity in post-liberation North Korea, melding the old and the new. Her research focuses on the role of women in the North Korean Revolution, and how they may have been constrained by colonial legacies by looking at Chos?n Y?s?ng, the only women's journal published in North Korea after liberation.
Prior to joining Emerson, Kim previously taught at Oberlin and Boston colleges, and received her Ph.D. in Korean History at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include gender studies, oral history, and social theory.