A Study on Women’s Writing in the 1950s : Focusing on Im Ok-in’s “Sentence Lectures for Female Students”

In 1950s Korean society, the cultivation of women was concretized through education that reflected the demands of the era. During this period, women's education encompassed not only universal knowledge for character building but also a symbolic system of virtues and roles society expected of women. Notably, women's education served as a crucial means of expressing the unconscious biases of the time, and textbooks on writing that embodied these goals implied the gendered representation of communication at that time. Lim Ok-in's book Sentence Lectures for Female Students is fundamentally a work that aims for the unification of spoken and written language, concretizing various situations and forms of sentences. Simultaneously, it is a textbook that embodies the political unconscious that shaped women at the time. Unlike writing textbooks that focus on rhetorical categories such as theories of composition or systematic writing processes, this work limited its discussion to the context of writing forms, focusing on the linguistic communication situations of female students. The process of setting “female students” as the target audience and prioritizing their educational goals simultaneously encompasses a forward-looking meaning that actively calls upon the identity of female learners, as well as a restrictive meaning that limits the target group. Furthermore, this work can be interpreted as analogous to the 'modern wise mother and good wife model' predicated on the American lifestyle of the 1950s. This suggests that Im Ok-in's work signifies the limitations of women's education and the hegemony of conservative women's education. In conclusion, Sentence Lectures for Female Students, while highlighting female creators or writers, siAbstract multaneously restricts the level of women's narrative context and sets limits on the purpose of women's education. The content of the examples in the book signified a limited identity that embodied women's fixed gender roles, and the women's theory of writing, categorized as a sub-category of 'general' or 'standard' writing, was differentiated as an object of enlightenment as the identity of female learners was realized.