일상을 통해 본 ‘돌봄-독립운동’- 대한민국임시정부 한국독립당계를 중심으로 -

초록

This study examines the caregiving activities of women affiliated with the Korean Independence Party faction within the Korean Provisional Government during the Japanese colonial period, focusing on how these activities sustained the exile community and eventually expanded into political movements. Existing scholarship on the Korean independence movement, structured around ideology, organizations, and political lines, has tended to confine women’s activities to mere “contributions” to the movement. Studies of women’s independence activism have likewise been constrained by a concept of “movement” that presupposes the separation of public and private spheres, thereby limiting the visibility of women within that framework. To complement this prior scholarship, this study draws on the perspectives of the history of everyday life, diaspora studies, and care theory to attend to daily life in exile and to trace the process through which caregiving was transformed into political activism. This activity is provisionally termed the “caregiving-independence movement.” The analysis draws primarily on memoirs and diaries of women associated with the Provisional Government, including Jeong Jeong-hwa’s Jangganggi, Han Do-sin’s Kkumgateun yetnal pi heuleun iyagi, and Choe Seon-hwa’s Jesi-ui ilgi. The Provisional Government developed under diasporic conditions in which the distinction between public and private collapsed, and the boundary between survival and struggle dissolved amid extreme poverty and illness. Under such conditions, women provided material, educational, and emotional care to a wide range of dependents, including their own families, fellow activists, and Korean expatriates. This caregiving formed the foundation that prevented the fragmentation of the community and enabled the Provisional Government to endure. Through these caregiving activities, women came to reinterpret their own actions as public undertakings, thereby developing a form of political subjectivity that also produced certain ruptures in the patriarchal gender norms governing the Provisional Government. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, these women entered formal political activities, including membership in the Korean Independence Party and participation in the Korean Patriotic Women’s Association in Chongqing—a development that extended their accumulated “caregiving-independence movement” into the realm of institutional politics. After the return to liberated Korea, however, the dissolution of the diasporic space rendered the caregiving of these women invisible once again. This trajectory reveals the historical dilemma of care: urgently summoned in moments of crisis, only to be forgotten in their aftermath.

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