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Crossing Borders: a feminist history of Women Cross DMZ
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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On May 24, 2015, thirty women peacemakers from fifteen nations, including American feminist activist Gloria Steinem and two Nobel Peace laureates, Mairead Maguire from Northern Ireland and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia, walked with Korean women of the North and South to call for an end to the Korean War and the peaceful reunification of Korea on the seventieth anniversary of its division. The arbitrary division of the peninsula in 1945 by the United States and the Soviet Union led to the creation of two separate states, setting the stage for an all-out civil war in 1950 that became an international conflict. After nearly 4 million people were killed, mostly Korean civilians, fighting was halted when North Korea, China, and the United States representing the UN Command signed a ceasefire agreement in 1953, which called for a political conference within three months to reach a peace settlement. Over 60 years later, we are still waiting. To renew the call for a peace settlement by offering a model of international engagement, Women Cross DMZ organized peace symposiums in Pyongyang and Seoul where women shared experiences of mobilizing to bring an end to violent conflict, and crossed the two-mile wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates millions of Korean families as a reminder that division can be overcome. As one of the members of the organizing committee of Women Cross DMZ, I travelled with other international women peacemakers to meet face-to-face with Korean women on both sides of the DMZ and cross the military demarcation line that divides Korea. On the seventieth anniversary of Korea's partition this August 2015, I write as a historian of modern Korea to reflect upon the experience specifically from a feminist standpoint.
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Notes
1 See the working definition of feminism offered by a feminist discussion forum (accessed July 27, 2015). I thank Nan Kim for this helpful reference.
2 The Korean War is conventionally understood as a three-year war between 1950 and 1953 but as discussed below, its civil origins complicate the beginnings that take its roots back to the colonial and postcolonial period, and the consequences of its unending remain to this day. For a fuller discussion, see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library Chronicles, 2010).
3 Shin Hyon-hee, “80% of N.K. defectors are female: data,” The Korea Herald (July 5, 2015) accessed July 27, 2015.
4 Jane Kim, “Trafficked: Domestic Violence, Exploitation in Marriage, and the Foreign-Bride Industry,” Virginia Journal of International Law, Vol. 51, No. 2 (December 16, 2010): 455 (accessed July 5, 2015). See also, Good Friends: Centre for Peace, Human Rights and Refugees, Alternative NGO Report on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, First Periodic Report of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (June 2005) (accessed July 5, 2015).
5 Using this logic, feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick has coined the term ‘maternal thinking’ to describe the kind of praxis that arises from caring labor, a human activity that transcends gender but has come to be associated with femininity and motherhood due to particular historical developments. See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); and Sara Ruddick, ‘The Rationality of Care’, in Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (eds), Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), 229-254.
6 Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women's Activism and Feminist Analysis (London: Zed Books, 2007), 208.
7 Stephan Haggard, “Women's Walk for Peace,” North Korea: Witness to Transformation Blog (March 17, 2015) (accessed July 2, 2015)
8 Rudiger Frank, “Political economy of sanctions against North Korea,” Asian Perspective 30, no. 3 (2006), 5-36.
9 Stephan Haggard, “Women Cross the DMZ,” North Korea: Witness to Transformation Blog (June 8, 2015) (accessed July 2, 2015)
10 Tae Yang Kwak, “The Failure of Women Cross DMZ,” Korea Exposé (May 27, 2015) (accessed July 2, 2015). As the unofficial resident historian for the delegation, I must point out that Kwak is incorrect that there were “only” one to two million deaths from the war. Bruce Cumings, a leading historian of the Korean War, writes that death tolls could be even higher than 4 million with “upward of three million North Koreans…along with another one million South Koreans, and nearly a million Chinese.” See Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: New Press, 2004), chapter one. Moreover, while technically correct that Korea was divided by Allied powers, as those reassessing the history of the Cold War know well, the conventional understanding that the Cold War “started” with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 is simplistic. Some scholars take the origins of the Cold War back to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, but certainly it was no later than Roosevelt's death and the use of atomic weapons in 1945 – and with that the demise of the vision for a pluralist and internationalist world – that marked the onset of the Cold War. Korea's division in 1945 should be placed within that longer frame of the Cold War. Symptomatic of this perspective is the inauguration of the Korean Association for Cold War Studies just this year on the seventieth anniversary of the division of the peninsula. See Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2006 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006); David C. Engerman, “Ideology and the origins of the Cold War, 1917-1962,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds. The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Origins, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
11 Namkoong Young, “Similarities and dissimilarities: The inter-Korean summit and unification formulae,” East Asian Review, 13, no. 3, (2001), 59-80. Agreements between the North and South which explicitly state that the two sides recognize and respect each other's system include the December 1991 Basic Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-aggression, and Exchanges and Cooperation, the February 1992 Joint Declaration on Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and the June 15, 2000 Joint Declaration.
12 Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 238. See also Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library Chronicles, 2010).
13 In calling for a formal end to the Korean War, statements issued by Women Cross DMZ have specifically referred to the need to replace the armistice with a peace treaty to underscore the importance of an official termination of the war. However, the peace settlement called for in the armistice can take many forms, and therefore I have used the terms peace treaty and peace settlement or agreement interchangeably throughout this essay. According to legal expert Patrick Norton, under international law “any [formal] agreement between states, however denominated, constitutes a ‘treaty’ in the sense of an agreement legally binding the parties to its terms.” For Norton's incisive discussion of the legalities involved in replacing the armistice agreement, see Patrick M. Norton, “Ending the Korean Armistice Agreement: The Legal Issues,” Northeast Asia Peace and Security Network (March 1997) (accessed July 28, 2015). For concrete suggestions for steps to formally end the Korean War, see Peter Hayes, “Overcoming US-DPRK Hostility: The Missing Link between a Northeast Asian Comprehensive Security Settlement and Ending the Korean War,” NAPSNet Special Report (December 21, 2014) (accessed August 4, 2015).
14 For Jodie Evans' reflections on the trip, see Jodie Evans, “Stitching Korea Back Together After 60 Years of Military Divide,” AlterNet (June 15, 2015) (accessed July 2, 2015)
15 For the history of the women's union, see Suzy Kim, “Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Volume 52, No. 4 (October 2010), 742-67; Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), chapter four.
16 Asan Report, “South Korean Attitudes toward North Korea and Reunification,” Asan Institute for Policy Studies (February 2015), 29-30.
17 Katharine Moon, “Why did ‘Women Cross DMZ’ in Korea?” Up Front, Brookings (June 3, 2015) (accessed July 2, 2015). For an earlier piece that also pointed out the sexist difference in receptions to Women Cross DMZ in comparison to Hyundai founder Chung Ju-Yung's 1998 DMZ crossing with 500 cattle, see John Feffer, “Women's Delegation to Cross the DMZ,” The World Post (April 22, 2015) (accessed July 2, 2015).
18 Kozue Akibayashi, “Women Cross Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) on Korean Peninsula for Peace,” (accessed July 5, 2015).
19 Christine Ahn, “Continuing the Centennial Work of Women and Citizen Diplomacy in Korea,” Inter Press Service News Agency (April 28, 2015) (accessed July 5, 2015).
20 Hŏ Chŏng-suk was an important feminist figure during the colonial period, but she is rarely acknowledged in South Korean historiography of feminism. Just one indication of this is the Sŏdaemun Prison Museum in Seoul. As a prison that held many of the political prisoners during the colonial era and later anti-government democracy activists in the postliberation period, it has been renovated as a historical site and museum since its closing in 1987. There is a women's building within the prison that commemorates the female prisoners held there, especially highlighting Yu Kwan-sun (a Christian independence activist tortured to death in the prison), but there is no mention of Hŏ Chŏng-suk despite her prisoner identification card being displayed. She has been relegated to anonymity due to her high-level ascendancy in the North Korean government after division. For a biography, see Ruth Barraclough, “Red Love and Betrayal in the Making of North Korea: Comrade Hô Jông-suk,” History Workshop Journal 77 (1) (Spring 2014), 86-102.
21 As historian Francisca de Haan argues, the history and work of the WIDF have largely been overlooked as a direct result of the Cold War. Francisca de Haan, ‘The Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945-1991’, in Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin (eds), Women and Social Movements, International 1840 to Present (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, October 2012) available at http://wasi.alexanderstreet.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/help/view/the_womens_international_democratic_federation_widf_history_main_agenda_and_contributions_19451991 (accessed September 14, 2014). See also Francisca de Haan, ‘Continuing Cold War Paradigms in the Western Historiography of Transnational Women's Organisations: The Case of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF)’, Women's History Review (Sept. 2010), 547-573.
22 Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Report on the Congress of American Women (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1950, 23 October 1949) cited in de Haan, “The Women's International Democratic Federation,” endnote 4.
23 Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, “Fighting fascism and forging new political activism: The Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the Cold War,” in De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change, eds. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza (New York: Routledge, 2013), 55-56 [52-72]. Mooney explains that some of the bias against WIDF was the result of conflations with the Soviet “peace offensive,” a highly publicized worldwide campaign that contrasted US “warmongers” (for its use of nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of WWII) with “peace-loving” communists as part of Soviet policy. For the variety of women's organizations that took part in WIDF, see 60-61.
24 Melanie Ilic, “Soviet women, cultural exchange and the Women's International Democratic Federation,” in Reassessing Cold War Europe, eds. Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy (New York: Routledge, 2010), 160.
25 We Accuse! Report of the Commission of the Women's International Democratic Federation in Korea, May 16 to 27, 1951 (Berlin: WIDF, 1951).
26 We Accuse, 2.
27 We Accuse, 6.
28 We Accuse, 48.
29 Christine Ahn, “Why Women Must End the Korean War,” Foreign Policy in Focus (March 8, 2013) (accessed July 5, 2015).
30 Deann Borshay Liem and her film crew have documented the trip in detail to produce the documentary film, Crossings, which will likely include the details of this debate. A description of the film is available here (accessed July 28, 2015).
31 For an analyst's assessment of similar kinds of institutional differences, see Patrick McEachern, Inside the Red Box: North Korea's Post-totalitarian Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
32 Jodie Evans, “Stitching Korea Back Together After 60 Years of Military Divide,” AlterNet (June 15, 2015) (accessed July 2, 2015); Gregory Elich Interviews Christine Ahn, “Opening the Door to Peace on the Korean Peninsula: Women Cross DMZ,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 28, No. 3, July 13, 2015 (accessed July 27, 2015); Mairead Maguire, “Opinion: Why Women Peacemakers Marched in Korea,” Inter Press Service News Agency (July 13, 2015) (accessed July 27, 2015); Ann Wright, “Coming Under ‘Fire’ at Korea's DMZ,” Consortium News (July 15, 2015) (accessed July 27, 2015).
33 “N. Korean economic conditions appear to be improving: CRS report,” The Korea Herald (July 27, 2015) (accessed July 28, 2015).
34 Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
35 For details of what happened in Christine's own words, see Gregory Elich Interviews Christine Ahn, “Opening the Door to Peace on the Korean Peninsula: Women Cross DMZ,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 28, No. 3, July 13, 2015 (accessed July 27, 2015). Once we became aware of North Korean media distortions of our Mangyondae visit, we lodged sharply-worded criticisms with our North Korean hosts, and physically prevented the journalists from covering our visit to the International Friendship Exhibit in Myohyangsan, where gifts to the leaders are displayed.
36 For a comparative analysis of the way the Korean War has been memorialized in the two Koreas, China, and the US, see the special journal issue “(De)Memorializing the Korean War: A Critical Intervention,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (March 2015) (accessed July 5, 2015).
37 Christine Ahn and Suzy Kim, “Opinion: Improve North Korean Human Rights by Ending War,” Inter Press Service News Agency (December 2, 2014) (accessed July 28, 2015)
38 Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990); Marc Bossuyt, The Adverse Consequences of Economic Sanctions on the Enjoyment of Human Rights (Geneva: United Nations Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights, 2000).
39 Rudiger Frank, “Political economy of sanctions against North Korea,” Asian Perspective 30, no. 3 (2006), 8-9. Frank found that sanctions are only effective when they are quick and decisive with an average of three years duration imposed by friendly states before affected countries develop “sanctions immunity”. Otherwise, sanctions often serve to rally support for the regime, confirming the government's rhetoric of foreign hostility (13-17).
40 For a detailed look at the devastating effects of sanctions on the general population in Iraq, see Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
41 “Koryolink faces big problems with cash, competition,” North Korea Tech (June 25, 2015) (accessed July 13, 2015).
42 UN General Assembly Human Rights Council 25th Session, “Report of the commission of inquiry on human rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea,” A/HRC/25/63 (February 7, 2014), 16, 19-20 (accessed August 4, 2015).
43 Emma Campbell, “‘Fieldwork’ North Korea: Observations of daily life on the ground inside the country,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 40, No. 2 (October 6, 2014) (accessed August 4, 2015).
44 I thank Steph Lee for our fruitful discussions on this in the summer of 2013.
45 Paik Nak-chung, Division System in Crisis: Essays on Contemporary Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 161-172. As he explains, Paik focuses on the role of South Korean civil society due to the lack of a civil society in North Korea or a supranational body like the European Union that can play a role in Korea.
46 In this regard, Women Cross DMZ can be differentiated from other border crossings carried out by South Korean activists, like the one by Im Sukyŏng in 1989 as a representative of the South Korean student movement. Comparing our Peace Walk to footage of Im's reception in Pyongyang, there were many similarities from the rows of women dressed in traditional Korean dress, waving red flowers, to their slogans, which called for chaju t'ongil (autonomous reunification). Despite such overlapping aesthetics, the two crossings are situated in different affective spaces as Im's crossing performed “emotional citizenship” to challenge the state mandated citizenship that inscribed the division into its very formulation by designating the other side as illegitimate. Rather than relying on such ethno-nationalist appeal to the concept of minjok, Women Cross DMZ emphasized global citizen diplomacy led by women as key. For fuller discussion of emotional citizenship as related to Korean border crossings, see Suk-Young Kim, DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship along the Korean Border (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
47 Eric Talmadge, “Small steps: Kindergarten plan symbolizes novel attempt to empower North Korea's isolated deaf,” Star Tribune (July 8, 2015) (accessed July 28, 2015)
48 Representative Charles Rangel's Office Press Release, “Three Remaining Korean War Veterans In Congress Introduce Bill Calling for Formal End of Korean War,” (July 28, 2015) (accessed August 4, 2015).
49 For some concrete suggestions toward denuclearization, see Peter Hayes, “Ending Nuclear Threat via a Northeast Asia Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone,” NAPSNet Special Reports (January 06, 2015) accessed August 4, 2015; Peter Hayes, “Nuclear Threat and Korean Reunification,” NAPSNet Policy Forum (June 01, 2015) accessed August 4, 2015).
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