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- Title
Red Love and Betrayal in the Making of North Korea: Comrade Hŏ Jŏng-suk.
- Authors
Barraclough, Ruth
- Abstract
This paper analyses the life of one the most famous communist feminists of modern Korea, Hŏ Jŏng-suk, whose political career and personal life span an extraordinary slice of modern Korean history. A rare bureaucrat who never quite fell out of favour in North Korea, Hŏ Jŏng-suk was early in her life famous for her scandalous love affairs with leading male communists. Rather than depict Hŏ Jŏng-suk as an isolated exceptional figure, this article endeavours to place her in context as a member of a political family, amidst a peer group of exiles and freethinkers in Shanghai and later Seoul. Hŏ Jŏng-suk bears comparison also with socialist and communist woman orators and leaders elsewhere in the world who embraced political life and party leadership in the early to mid twentieth century. Since the 1945 division of Korea and her rise to political power in the north, Hŏ Jŏng-suk has come to represent two rival narratives of female leadership on the Korean peninsula. In communist North Korea she stands for the expansive political role given to women in a reorganized society, while in the south her promiscuity and complicity with the Kim Il-Sung regime mark her as embodying the pathologies of communism. In this way Korea’s early communist women continue to exercise a powerful hold upon the political imagination of divided Korea, while their personal stories give an intimate insight into the making of communist culture.
- Subjects
HO Jong-suk; WOMEN politicians; WOMEN communists; WOMEN -- Biography; NORTH Korean politics &; government; NORTH Korean history; TWENTIETH century
- Publication
History Workshop Journal, 2014, Vol 77, Issue 1, p86
- ISSN
1363-3554
- Publication type
Biography
- DOI
10.1093/hwj/dbt003