🧵 The Way Koreans Kept Intergender Distance
“Males-females age-seven not-same-seat!”
“Males-females age-seven not-same-seat!”
“Reaching the age of seven, boys and girls are no longer to sit together.” This is a teaching of Confucius long adhered to in Korea. Based on this tenet, there arose a custom and a system that strictly regulated or prohibited contact between the sexes.
This was a kind of social rule, keeping a proper “intergender distance” (nae-oe beop). Together with the so-called “way of the three obediences”
(sam-jong-ji-do),
(sam-jong-ji-do),
which require that a female obey her father before marriage, obey her husband after marriage, and obey her son after her husband’s death, the intergender-distance rule was a very effective unwritten social rule to restrict the freedom of women during the Joseon Dynasty.
This intergender distance-keeping rule was in force even after the Kabo Reforms of 1894, which eliminated the class distinctions between yangban (aristocrats) and commoners,
and thus allowed women to cast off their woman’s shawl (sseugae-chima) used to cover the head and upper body when going out, similar to the Muslim woman’s burka.
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