차미리사 연구 = A Study of Milisa Cha

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Milisa Cha was born in 1879 in Ko-yang County, north of Seoul, married when she was sixteen, and become a widow when she was nineteen with a daughter. With her aunt's encouragement, she attended a Methodist Church in Seoul and received Christian name Milisa. In 1901, she went to Shanghai with the letters of recommendation from American missionaries in Seoul. In 1905 she graduated from the Virginia Girls School in Soju, China, but her hearing was much impaired because of recurring severe headaches.
Milisa Cha arrived Pasadena, California in the fall of 1905 to work to save money to pursue her further education. After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, she went to San Francisco to work with the Women' Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church at the Ellen Stark Ford Home for Japanese and Korean Women and Children. She worked as a social worker and daycare center operator for the transmigrating Koreans from Hawaii, and a Bible woman for the Korean Mission in San Francisco. She was also involved with the Korean independence movement by becoming a founding member of the Korean patriotic organizations such as Taedong Kyoyukhoe[Promote Education Society] and Taedong Bogukhoe[Protect Korea Society]. She published her calling for the armed uprising against Japanese in Taedong Kongbo, a Korean weekly newspaper in San Francisco in November in 1907, prior to the two Koreans shoot down the pro-Japan American Durham White Stevens in March 1908 in San Francisco. She organized the first Korean women's organization called the Korean Ladies Patriotic Society in May, 1909.
With the recommendation from the Women's Home Society, she was enrolled at the Scarritt Bible and Training School in Kansas City, Missouri in September, 1910. After graduating from the missionary training school, she became a strong believer of the Social Gospel Movement that was to change the social system rather than saving individual soul, and returned to her homeland as a missionary assigned to Paewha Girls School in Seoul as the head-master for dormitory and a Bible teacher in fall of 1912.
Next eight years(1912-1920) at Paewha, Milisa Cha had a rare opportunity to learn and to think on the educational problems of Korea that became a colony of Japan in 1910, with the patriotic educators such as Christian leader Yun Chi-ho, Yi Man-kyu who wrote the first book on History of Education in Korea, the renowned lawyers Huh Hun and Yi In who were the school board members.
In 1920, Milisa Cha had to resign her position at Paewha because her involvement with the student demonstration on March 1st to commemorating the first anniversary of the March First uprising. Then she organized the Joseon Women's Education Association that offered a night school for illiterate women at the Methodist Church she had been attending and a monthly lecture series the current issues and on the world affairs, and take over a monthly magazine Yeoja Siron[Women’s Opinions] to inform and to enlighten the women who had been the captive in household for the centuries. In 1921she conducted three-month lecture tour in the summer through out Korean peninsular calling on over 80 villages and townships to conduct the series of lectures for women's rights, enlightenment, education, and bring up children. Over thousands of rural area women attended this lectures offered by six women speakers with musical instrument players and singers. The daily newspaper called this lecture series was the first largest women gatherings since beginning of the Korean history.
With donations she collected in the lecture tour series, she lunched a Geunwha Hakwon [Hibiscus Academy] in 1923 by changing its name from Jeosun Women's Education Association, and started a regular girls school in downtown of Seoul. Next step for her was to set up a patronage organization for her girls school to be recognized by the Japanese Government-General in Korea. In 1925, she got a permit as a hybrid girls' school, between the regular and the vocational schools, could offer the intensive courses as well as some vocational courses. After establishing a foundation, she received a permit in 1934 as a vocational school that was a high school level. That was the first girls vocational school in Korea. With Geunwha Yeoja Silup Hakkyo, she offered business and sewing courses. With these courses, she wanted to educate modem and nationalistic Korean women who would be economically independent. Under the Japanese rule in Korea in the 1920s and the 1930s, her achievements were numerous and marvellous.
In 1938, the Japanese Government-General in Korea forced to give up the name of “Geunwha” because it means the Korean national flower. So that the school name changed to Duksung. In 1940, she was finally forced to resign since she was almost deaf and did not speak Japanese as a principal. When Korea was liberated in 1945, Russian and Americans divided up the Korean peninsular along the 38th parallel. Some landlords and the Koreans who had been collaborated with Japanese in the south and the pro-Russians Korean communists in north wanted to set up their own regimes in both sides. However, the one-hundred-eight Koreans signed to support Kim Koo who opposed to setting up two regimes in the Korean peninsular and went to Pyongyang, North Korea to prevent to set up their own pro-Russian government in 1947. Milisa Cha was the only woman who signed on the declaration that denounced of setting up two regimes. In Korean modern history, she became the first Korean who wrote an editorial for the armed struggle against the Japanese in 1907 and the only woman signed against setting up the two regimes in Korea to prevent the eventual civil war in 1950.