Postcolonial Nation Building and State Feminism: Institutionalizing the North Korean Democratic Women’s Union, 1945–1949

This article examines the development of state feminism in the emerging North Korean state, in particular the institutionalization of the North Korean Democratic Women’s Union (Pukchosŏn Minju Yŏsŏng Tongmaeng) to mobilize women for the building of the state from 1945–49. It examines how the women’s union became the sole women’s organization and how the organization became a state agent, politically mobilizing female voters for the communist party, and an intermediary, translating international socialist materials into Korean educational literature. In this period, the women’s union contributed to the political legitimization of the Communist Party as the people’s party. In addition, the women’s union translated international socialist narratives on the liberation of women and reformulated them for the Korean context to construct an ideal modern citizen embodying the postcolonial “tradition within modernity.” They also deployed this unifying ideology of “entwined liberations”—that the state liberated women and women liberated the nation via their roles as innovative workers and revolutionary mothers. The article seeks to show that these active participation by the women’s union was fundamentally interlinked with and instrumental to nascent postcolonial state building of North Korea.