Abstract

This article examines two different representations of traveling women from popular women’s magazines in 1970s developing South Korea. The two contrasting representations reveal the social construction of women’s autonomy, conventional boundaries, and moral sentiments in an authoritarian society. The Park Chung-hee government sought to regulate and naturalize various obligations for women, cultivating boundaries and moral sentiments according to a developmental compass. This is well represented in the first representation, in images of full-time housewives traveling with their husbands and children in model families. This depiction is compromised by the second imagery— images of leisure women who travel alone or with other women. While chastised by the government, male writers, and the broader society as immoral and dangerous, leisure women illuminate how women drew their own boundaries and attempted to carve their autonomous consumer subjectivity. Together, the two portrayals, among other images, provide a historical explanation for gendered dimensions of moral agency, self-determination, and mobility in developing South Korea.