2 - Materiality: The Experience of Modern House and Home

Summary

Taking the idea of the “modern home” as a key concept on which national, colonial, and missionary projects converged, this chapter explores a wide range of issues that were part of the discourse on modern domesticity: architectural features, scientific management of the household, proper domestic routines, cultured family life, rational household budgeting, and healthy child development. It specifically investigates the role of American missionaries, the Japanese colonial authority, and foreign-educated Korean intellectuals in introducing what constitutes the ideal house and home through examples of the “missionary home,” the 1915 Home Exhibition organized by the Japanese colonial government, and Euro-American domestic life. The chapter also analyzes the institutionalization of “home economics” as an academic discipline in women’s higher education, viewing it as the culmination of the transpacific flow of ideas and people in fashioning modern domesticity in Korea. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how the intimate sphere of the domestic space became one of the most dynamic sites for understanding the confluence of the local, the national, and the global.