Abstract

This paper first tried to inquire about the aspects of how the gender symbol of ‘girl’ discerned from ‘boy’ was constructed and discussed in order to explore the modernity of ‘girl’ that existed outside the composition of ‘boy’ amid the patriarchal plans that attempted to embody ‘Boy Korea’ and imagined ‘boy (boyhood)’ as the subject to drive ethnic reformation since the modern enlightenment period. To this end, this paper examined the circumstances around the early and late 1900s and 1910s, when the new word ‘girl’ was coined by modern media, and how ‘girl’ was conceived as a symmetric (asymmetric) symbol of boy through ‘female students,’ who acquired visible presence with the expansion of education for women in the 1920s and on. In particular, New Women, the first popular magazine that claimed to represent female students, was reread as a convincing original medium that invented ‘girl (girlhood)’ as a modern symbol. New Women played the role of a full-scale public sphere to discuss female students in adolescence and a medium that formed an imaginary community of ‘female students and girls’ by selecting female students as readers or writers. However, in New Women, female students and girls were depicted as targets of gaze instead of subjects. Rather than pronouncing themselves, they were frequently spoken for. In other words, amid the patriarchal desire and anxiety to discipline girls into good wives and wise mothers of the future, the ‘girlhood’ or femininity of teens in puberty was shaped as an ‘innocent but ignorant mind vulnerable to impulse and temptation.’ ‘Girls’ were stressed as naive yet dangerous beings who always need protection and surveillance. However, such patriarchism or ‘girl (girlhood)’ produced by patriarchy that dominated New Women was always and already being destroyed by girls in the real world who claimed to be ‘different girls’ doubting and opposing it. That is, the ‘girlhood’ or ‘image of girls’ became negotiable instead of being fixed because of the ‘discordant girls’ who cracked patriarchism while imploding delinquent girls. This paper is an introductory exploration to recover the modern times of these rebellious girls or the forgotten modern times of girls omitted by the modern times of boys.