Sexual Roles Still the Rule in South Korean Society

SEOUL —  When Kim Myong In remarried last year, she hoped the stigma that divorce still carries in South Korea would not be passed along to her 7-year-old daughter.

But although the girl has a new father, she has to keep the old one’s name.

“My daughter goes to school next year. If her classmates find out that she has a different family name from my new husband, they will ridicule her as the daughter of a divorced woman,” said Kim, a department store clerk.

She and some 100 other women are fighting to change things. Backed by feminist and civic groups, they have appealed to the Constitutional Court, saying the rules on names violate laws that guarantee gender equality.

The newly created Ministry of Gender Equality supports revising the 40-year-old code, and the court, the nation’s highest legal authority, could decide the case soon.

Korean women have made big strides toward social and financial independence in the past decade. But the patriarchal stamp of Confucianism, the Chinese teachings of devotion to ancestors and family that arrived in Korea in the 4th century, remains dominant.

The civil code defines family members as descendants along the male line. A Korean woman cannot take her husband’s family name because they don’t share the bloodline, and a divorced woman like Kim cannot register her children under her own or her new husband’s name, even if she is rearing the youngsters.

The system of hoju, or “family headship,” decrees that even a baby boy becomes the family head if he is an only son and his father dies.

“It’s outdated and does not reflect today’s society,” said Shin Myong Sook, a 31-year-old housewife.

“A family needs a head and I think it should be a man,” said her husband, Kim Ki Hyong. “But I do think that the law should be revised to save women victimized by the system.”

Confucian purists consider any challenge to the system as an affront to tradition and a dangerous Western influence.

“It’s the universe’s most basic rule: Man is the seed and woman is only the field that helps the seed grow into a man,” said Kim Dong Dae, director of policy at Sungkyunkwan, headquarters of South Korea’s Confucianists.

Opponents have won some legal battles. Sons are no longer automatically entitled to the bulk of their parents’ estate, although most fathers still hand over their assets to the eldest son before they die.

The system recalls the Confucian teaching of sam-jong-ji-do, or “women obeying three masters”--father, husband and son. Women in old Korea could not eat at the same table with men and instead ate from seats on the floor or in the kitchen.

A man is the sole breadwinner in most Korean households and suffers dishonor if he fails. During the 1997-98 Asian currency crisis, a sharp increase in suicides among jobless fathers was reported.

Women still feel pressured to have boys, and up to 30,000 female fetuses are aborted annually in the nation of 46 million, according to women’s groups.

Abortion is illegal, and under tough new regulations doctors can lose their licenses for performing abortions or revealing the gender of fetuses through prenatal ultrasound tests.

“Mothers often come to us asking for prescriptions that can help them bear a boy,” said Ko Eun Kwang Soon, an Oriental medicine doctor.