Book Review Korea Journal, vol. 64, no. 1 (Spring 2024): 222–226.
doi: 10.25024/kj.2024.64.1.222
Remarkable History of North Korean Women
and Their Movement in the Global Arena
Among Women Across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War by Suzy Kim. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2023. 348 pages. ISBN: 9781501767302.
Cheehyung Harrison KIM
The solidarity against imperialism as demonstrated in 1963 by Korean and
Chinese women leaders, along with their counterparts from Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, in the wake of the controversial World Congress of
Women organized by the Women’s International Democratic Federation
(WIDF), as featured in the third chapter of Suzy Kim’s marvelous Among
Women Across Worlds, is an illuminating account of an under-recognized
dimension of the Sino-Soviet Debate. Kim makes the compelling case that
the Third World women’s radical politics of anti-imperial struggle in the face
of war and oppression, in opposition to the Soviet Union’s advocacy of
“peaceful coexistence” and “disarmament,” was a significant part of the
1960s Debate—the women, in transnational solidarity, expressing the notion
of a just peace that comes from collective action, “that the foremost task for
women’s movement was the struggle against imperialism and colonialism,
and that peace could only be achieved through such struggle” (p. 130).
Until I read this part of the book, I (a historian of North Korea) had not
fully considered the North Korean women’s movement in such a light, thus
inducing an indelible change to my own understanding. Such a transnation-
ally contextualized explanation giving the rightful importance to socialist
and leftist women’s movement is the very style of analysis and storytelling in
Cheehyung Harrison KIM is an associate professor in the Department of History at the
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. E-mail:
[email protected].
BOOK REVIEW—Remarkable History of North Korean Women and Their Movement in the Global Arena 223
Among Women Across Worlds. Moving beyond—and heavily critical of—the
still common view of treating civic activities from North Korea as political
theater, Among Women Across Worlds is a recovery of (and a tribute to) the
history of socialist women’s contributions to peace and anti-imperial
movement in the second half of the 20th century. A crucial way the book
accomplishes this is by discussing how maternalism, feminism, and
socialism converged to bring about a radical politics in which motherhood,
now a matter of both public and private domains, became a collective
political issue just as consequential as productive labor. Such a positioning
created a culture in North Korea (and in other socialist states) celebrating
gender equality and gender difference while also prompting, for instance,
legislative campaigns to protect women from overtime work at night.
Embedded here is the idea that achieving equality requires advantageous
measures of reparation for women. What is offered in these pages, then, is a
history of the practice of “communist feminism” that presents a “decolonial
genealogy, different from that of Western historiography of the global
women’s movement” and different from “Korean historiographies of the
women’s movement, either as influenced by Western feminists in the South
or as led by Kim Il Sung and his family in the North” (p. 16). To be sure,
Suzy Kim recognizes the patriarchal practices, the opacity of state
apparatuses, the sexual division of labor, and the limitations of official
publications all firmly existing in North Korea, but the “point is not to deny
the challenges women faced, but to see how they navigated around obstacles
to make gains despite these challenges” (p. 17). Feminism that emerged from
the praxis of socialism and communism in the 20th century is complex,
fascinating, and perhaps more useful today than ever, and this book is a
superb historical exploration of the topic.
Among Women Across Worlds starts on a high note. As chapter 1 shows,
the Korean War became a galvanizing moment for progressive women’s
organizations around the world, including the American Women for Peace,
the Save our Sons Committee, and the Congress of American Women, from
the very country responsible for the greatest amount of destruction on the
Korean Peninsula. A culminating event was a visit to war-torn North Korea
224 KOREA JOURNAL / SPRING 2024
in 1951 by a delegation organized by WIDF, the world’s largest women’s
organization dedicated to the advancement of women and peace. The visit
had been initiated by an invitation from Heo Jeongsuk (Hŏ Chŏng-suk) and
Bak Jeongae (Pak Chŏng-ae), two renowned women leaders of North Korea,
with Bak as chair of the Korean Democratic Women’s Union and executive
committee member of WIDF. From May 16 to 27, a delegation of twenty-
one women from seventeen countries visited Sinuiju, Pyongyang, Anak,
Sincheon, Nampo, Gangse, Wonsan, Cheorwon, Huicheon, and Ganggye
and produced a report titled We Accuse!, which presented detailed accounts
of killings, especially of women and children, as well as the destruction of
farms, schools, houses, and hospitals. “Although the report would be red-
baited as communist propaganda in the polarized context of the Cold War,”
Suzy Kim writes, “the accounts of utter destruction and violence were by no
means an exaggeration…the international women’s commission and its
report provided a crucial platform by which to discuss possible war crimes”
(p. 43, 45).
This chapter is engrossing to read. The interaction between the
narrative and primary sources is lively, and the analyses that move from
detailed readings to transnational glimpses are provocative and—dare I say
for a history book—thrilling. The chapter elucidates that the Korean War
was by no means a forgotten war as it came to be seen in some parts of the
world, especially in state capitalist zones. The solidarity among women’s
organizations to end the war and to rebuke the imperialistic policies of the
United States was truly global, with examples like the Union of Italian
Women organizing to make twenty-five thousand peace flags; the Brooklyn
Peace Committee leading the campaign to send anti-war letters to President
Eisenhower; and a Japanese woman’s letter criticizing American military
bases in Japan, from which warplanes carried bombs to the Korean
Peninsula (p. 50). The chapter ends with a touching poem by the Korean
poet Ri Yongak dedicated to Monica Felton, a prominent leftist British peace
activist and a member of the 1951 delegation to North Korea who was red-
baited and forced to leave the WIDF. The translated poem appears in its
entirety over three pages. I have used poems in my own work, too, but to
BOOK REVIEW—Remarkable History of North Korean Women and Their Movement in the Global Arena 225
publish the entire lengthy piece is an audacious move, which makes the
reader inevitably encounter a North Korean poetry in its fullness, what I
imagine must be a first for many readers.
Another noteworthy effort in Among Women Across Worlds is its
reclaiming of the lifework of North Korea’s women leaders from, on the one
hand, the party-state narrative that subsumes their work under the
hagiographic achievements of Kim Il Sung and the Korean Workers’ Party
and, on the other, the common narrative existing outside of North Korea
that views them as figureheads of propaganda. For the first time in the
English language, women trailblazers like Bak Jeongae (1907–?) and Heo
Jeongsuk (1902–1991) are given their proper treatment. They led
courageous, revolutionary lives—as anti-colonial fighters, as feminist
socialist thinkers, as high-ranking politicians and bureaucrats of a country
in a turbulent process of nation-building, and as leaders of a transnational
women’s movement representing the Third World. Included among the
women reclaimed in the book is the dancer Choe Seunghui (Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi,
1911–1969), in chapter 5. While her accomplishments during the colonial
period have been well researched, Choe’s career in North Korea has been
mostly discussed either as part of the party-state discourse or in the context
of people purged from North Korea’s officialdom due to their elite
backgrounds. Suzy Kim goes beyond these approaches and highlights Choe’s
tours of China, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Mongolia
throughout the 1950s, showcasing her original productions such as The
Story of Sado Castle, as well as Choe’s prolific, life-long practice of writing
about not only Korean dance but also the different forms of dance from
other countries, her ideas expressed in seminal texts such as the Basics of
Korean National Dance (1958) and the Basics of Korean Children’s Dance
(1964).
Through her performances, teachings, and writings, Choe ultimately
formulated a Korean dance attuned to what Suzy Kim calls as an “aesthetics
of everyday folk” (p. 169). For Choe, the essence of modern Korean dance
focused on everyday movements representing “both socialist content and
national form to elevate folk dance as the core…reflect[ing] people’s daily
226 KOREA JOURNAL / SPRING 2024
labor and everyday movements particular to their culture and environment”
(p. 189). In the late 1960s, Choe became part of a group of artists who falsely
received criticism from the party-state for being too elite and antirevolution-
ary (among them was her husband the writer An Mak). Choe’s reputation
has been somewhat restored in North Korea today, but her comprehensive
influence on North Korea’s dance aesthetics and culture is still under-
recognized. Among Women Across Worlds is alone among English-language
books in evaluating women like Bak Jeongae, Heo Jeongsuk, and Choe
Seunghui as serious thinkers and shapers of North Korean politics and
culture.
Suzy Kim’s craft as a historian is at its apex in Among Women Across
Worlds. Kim’s prose is bold, and every part of the book seems to have been
thoughtfully designed and placed. The book has stunning images (all thirty-
five of them), highly relevant texts-within-texts displaying primary
documents, and wonderful satirical cartoons. The title is enticing and
meaningful (the abbreviation of AWAW is brilliant!). The Acknowledgements
comes after the Conclusion, which is a signal to me that Kim is prominently
putting the North Korean women first. The Bibliography has seven
categories, including two categories of primary sources (in Korean and in
English and other Western languages). And there are surprising facts
throughout the pages, for instance the 1964 discussion of sexual slavery as
practiced by Imperial Japan, which must be one of the earliest published
accounts of the “comfort women” system in the Korean language (p. 228).
Suzy Kim’s Among Women Across Words is a masterpiece. The book has
elevated Suzy Kim as a top historian of modern Korea, whether North or
South. AWAW needs to be read across the world.
Received: 2024.02.19. Revised: 2024.02.25. Accepted: 2024.02.25.
