Short-haired modern girls: colonial Korean women’s fashion as the standards of civilization

Abstract

This article revisits colonial women’s contributions to constituting a new standard of civilization during the interwar period with a focus on fashion, specifically Korean women’s short hair. Existing scholarship on the standard of civilization has paid little attention to the agency of colonial women. Focusing on everyday politics through fashion, I argue that gendered actors, especially colonial women, constituted the standard of civilization through contestations over the appropriate conceptions and agents of modern civilization. By analyzing social debates surrounding women’s short hairstyles via periodical magazines and newspapers, I demonstrate that the so-called Modern Girls played a crucial role in interpreting and practicing the standard of civilization under multiple hierarchies—a non-Western polity, colonized nation, and patriarchal society. The Modern Girls advocated for short hair’s economic efficiency, hygienic benefits, aesthetic worth, and social values for women’s liberation as the standard of civilization while facing ceaseless social degradation for unfulfilling “genuine” modernity. This study expands the literature on the standard of civilization and Global International Relations by highlighting women’s agency in non-Western and non-imperial societies and recasting the plurality of modernity through women’s fashioned bodies.