Marriage, adultery and concubinage

By Kyung Moon Hwang

In the United States these days, one of the more sensational and durable news items has been the “Ashley Madison data dump.” Ashley Madison, a website that helped people pursue extramarital affairs, was hacked, and its core mission of secrecy was shattered, as users’ personal information was released on the Internet.

However, preliminary analysis of this data by Gizmodo, a technology site, has found what in hindsight should have been expected ― the registered users were overwhelmingly male (31 million men vs. 5.5 million women), and that most of the “females” were likely not even real. This gender imbalance probably had many reasons, but we all understand the simplest and most important one.

A week earlier, something happened in Dublin, Ireland, that drew far less attention.

The steering council of Amnesty International, the venerable human rights organization, decided to pursue an effort to decriminalize prostitution worldwide.

The thinking was that the illicitness of the sex trade generated or worsened the exploitation of sex workers, almost all of whom are females victimized by violence, coercion, and human trafficking.

For South Korea, these two events appear not unrelated to the major ruling in February by the country’s Constitutional Court to decriminalize adultery. Although rarely enforced or enforceable, there had been a law, passed just after the Korean War in 1953, that sentenced anyone found guilty of having extramarital sexual relations to up to two years in jail.

In its recent judgment, the court declared that such a law violated an individual’s personal freedom, but not surprisingly there arose opposition from various interest groups that decried the potential consequences to Korean family life.

What became somewhat lost in the public debate, however, was the law’s original intent, which was less about restricting liberties and more about enforcing the ideals of gender equality. In fact the larger motive was to overcome an institution hundreds, if not thousands, of years old: concubinage.

All three events of 2015 cited above address the basic issue of personal freedom regarding sexual behavior, but for this historian of Korea, they also stimulate thinking about concubinage, one of Korea’s most interesting and long-standing historical problems.

I would suggest, in fact, that most of the efforts to reform Korean family practices over the past century or so, including through legislation, have been related to the ingrained practices of concubinage.

Of course Korea was hardly unique. Concubinage, the institutionalization of extramarital sexual relations between a privileged male and a subservient female, has been a universal phenomenon throughout world history. But the particular turns that this issue took in Korea illustrate some distinctive features of the country’s history.

It is difficult to say when concubinage became such a normal aspect of Korean life, at least among the elites, but it probably dates back at least 1,000 years, if not more.

Indeed, so fixed was concubinage in Korean society that even the fervor of (Neo-)Confucianism, the comprehensive ideology behind the establishment and maintenance of the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910), could not weaken it.

Like religio-ethical systems elsewhere after the ancient era, Confucianism appeared to favor the sanctity of marriage as central to the family system. In the early Joseon period, this meant that a privileged Korean man could no longer have more than one wife.

Instead, what used to be a second or third wife became downgraded into the status of a concubine, and a concubine’s children, who might be raised in the same household as their father, suffered legal and familial discrimination. Indeed, for most of the Joseon era, not only the concubine’s children but their descendants in perpetuity were forbidden from taking the state civil service exam, which was a marker for a much broader social stigma.

Given the prevalence of concubinage, simple math shows that, after several generations, the population of these concubines’ descendants would multiply exponentially. This is exactly what happened, and by the 18th century these suffering people began to organize themselves to seek social liberation.

They achieved some measurable successes, but no fundamental change could take place while concubinage ― which was based on and fortified a wider web of social and sexual exploitation, including slavery ― continued.

The Korean officials who led the Gabo Reforms in 1894 began the modern effort to tackle this problem through legal changes. Not surprisingly, many of these reformers were the descendants of concubines.

They and other idealists focused on the ravages of the traditional family system as a whole, including arranged and early marriage, in order to realize their ideals of modern society. But they, too, were limited in what they could do, for concubinage remained intact.

The Japanese colonialists, beginning in 1910, also did little to restrain this practice, and in fact they tread very carefully when it came to changing family customs, preferring a gradual process of displacing the patrilineal Korean family system with the patrimonial Japanese one.

The colonial regime thus encountered countless headaches in trying to adjudicate family disputes over inheritance, adoption, and divorce arising from concubinage.

In 1953 the Korean government took the desperate legislative step of criminalizing adultery to begin to address directly the mismatch between concubinage and modernity. The complex issues of sexual freedom, exploitation, and gender hierarchy had to be simplified into this admittedly extreme, but understandable, solution, given the equally complex and long history of this matter in Korea.

Kyung Moon Hwang is associate professor in the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, “맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사” (21세기 북스, 2011).