Feminism and Gender Construction in Modern Asia

Gender and gender identity in much of the twentieth‐century in Asia were framed in terms of feminism and nationalism. This chapter focuses on feminisms – the quest for rights and improved status and conditions of women – in South, Southeast, and East Asia. It also explores the defining of gender in the context of nationalism. By the late nineteenth century, women in much of colonial Southeast Asia were subject to European law as well as local customs and practices. In the twentieth century, independence movements, mainly but not exclusively led by men, emerged in Southeast Asia, and women's roles in nationalist movements, conditioned by both precolonial practice and modern liberatory rhetoric, helped construct gender. Korean nationalists urged modernization, which required discarding past practices, including Confucianism, in favor of education and respect for women.