The State of the Family Ethics in the Period of the Early Deconstruction of Confucian Family Ethics (From the Beginning of 1880's to the 3.1 movement of 1919)

유교적 가족윤리의 해체 전기(前期: 1880년대 초부터 1919년 3.1 운동이전까지)에 있어서의 가족윤리 실상

This study was inquire into the state of the family ethics during the period of the beginning of 1880′s to the 3.1 independence movement of 1919 which has been the black period in the history of Korean family ethics. The research was conducted by analyzing the newspapers, magazines, related literature and articles of the period. It was the beginning of the 1860′s and by the "Cheondo-Kyo" (the Religion of the Heavenly) way that the issues regarding the equality of sexes as the central concern of the modem family ethics came to be the object of the social discourse for the first time in Korean history. The social discourse had come to be positively activated around 1900, when the intellectuals of the "Korean enlightenment" had begun to the feel necessity of the modernization of Korean socialite and the importance of the women education as the essential part of it. However, the activation of the social discourse itself, especially with the newspapers of that period did not mean the changes of the traditional Confucian family ethics, but the discourse of the modernizing forces had become the seeds for changing the family ethics of the Korean people. The made chauvinistic nature of the family ethics of the period was not so much different from those of the preceeding patriarch societies, but the state of the family ethics during the period are characterized by several social phenomenon such as the rising needs of using the "Hangle"(Korean alphabet) instead of Chinese character for the equal education of the both sexes, increasing practices of the early marriage, customs of trade marriage in accordance with the demand of excessive weeding presents, and regarding social consciousness of the traditional family ethics as patriotics attitude against the Christian rejection of the ancestor worship ritual.