By Mark Peterson
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The document tells of a woman named Pak who is the mother-in-law of a woman named Hong. Their husbands, father and son, are named Yi.
The document says, "My husband died young, leaving me with only one son. I've always longed to have a daughter, and now, finally, with a daughter-in-law, my dreams have come true. Every time I see your face I am overcome with joy. Here on the occasion of your marriage I have a gift for you of five slaves [each is named and identified by gender, age, and parentage]. Have them step and fetch for you to make your life more comfortable."
There are several points to draw from this document. References to slavery remind us of the slave-holding tradition of Korea.
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But the thing I want to emphasize today is that the document clearly shows that by 1694 women still had separate property ownership rights. We have seen in other documents, and I've written about this in several columns in the past, that women lost inheritance rights by the start of the 18th century. And as they lost their rights to inherit family property, surely their access to other property was limited. I think we can say that loss of rights to inherited property meant loss of rights to property ownership in general.
This document may have been one of the last of its kind. Within the next generation, if a similar situation arose, the property would have all been owned by the father. And when he died, the property would be in the control of the son, no longer touched by the father's wife, or the son's wife. The mother-in-law and daughter-in-law would have been excluded from formal property rights. I imagine informal gifts, access to use of slaves or land, could still have been available ― mother-in-law says here, you can use these five slaves, but they would clearly be in the ownership and control of the father and then the son.
Therefore, this document is a snapshot, a window, a view of a time before the complete Confucianization of Korea in the late 17th century that I've been writing about in this series of columns ― the Frog Outside the Well perspectives on Korean history. One more piece of evidence.
Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
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