Why It Sucks to Be a RETURNED Woman (in Joseon Korea)

In 1637 the Qing army carried tens of thousands of Koreans north as captives, and families paid ransom to buy their wives and daughters back. When the noblewomen came home, their husbands' families didn't want them. One father-in-law asked the king to let his son divorce her. You're her. A noble daughter of Hanyang, married into one of the great families of Joseon, captured when Ganghwa Island falls, ransomed from the market in Shenyang, and brought home to a house that won't take you back. This is your life from the warm floor you're born on to the question nobody ever answers. Told in second person and based on the court records. The fall of Ganghwa, the ransom market, your father-in-law's petition, the king's two rulings that contradict each other and the change in the law in 1649 are all in the Veritable Records. Your name is not, so your childhood is our reconstruction of a girl of your class. Based on the first wife of Jang Seon-jing (1614-1678), whose divorce the Joseon court argued over in 1638 and 1640. SOURCES Injo sillok (Veritable Records of King Injo), 1638 and 1640 Hyojong sillok (Veritable Records of King Hyojong), 1649 Han Myung-gi, "Rereading the Byeongja War", Seoul Shinmun (2008) Lee Gi-hwan, "Hi-story" no. 108, Weekly Kyunghyang (2023) JaHyun Kim Haboush, "Dead Bodies in the Postwar Discourse of Identity in Seventeenth-Century Korea", Journal of Asian Studies 62.2 (2003) Na Man-gap, The Diary of 1636, trans. George L. Kallander (Columbia University Press, 2020) Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, "Jang Seon-jing" #history #korea #whyitsucks