[ANON POST] Coming of Age and Manners in Joseon-Era Korea

[orange_fell]

Setting: fantasy world in a land loosely based on the Joseon period of Korea

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Class is highly relevant here - what situation is she going into? Joseon society is heavily gender-segregated and Confucianist in most classes - female children would have always had to have to have been "girls". Wherever economics allowed, women were kept away from the outside world entirely. Obviously this is not the case for lower-class women like subsistence farmers, some kinds of entertainers and/or prostitutes, but they still had very limited legal rights.

[lilacsigil]

She was a peasant before being orphaned

[lilacsigil]

Obviously we don't know as much about the lives of peasants, especially women, as we do of the higher classes, but her life is largely going to be defined by where she lives and what she chooses to do to survive. The sexes are very, very segregated - even poor families have separate areas for male and female family members - so she's really going to either need a female mentor of some kind, because a young woman who has no idea how to act around men is going to stand out in a bad way: if she's been living as a boy, she's now going to have to change her honorific use with everyone around her, for example.

Marriage around puberty is normal, but she's going to have limited options here as she has no dowry and no family. As an orphan in a highly family-oriented society, her options are very limited: she could marry a man at the very bottom of the social ladder such as a tenant farmer (or more likely off the social ladder - look into cheonmin), she could become a prostitute, a slave or possibly a shaman, particularly in rural areas.

[sushidog]

From a European perspective, there isn't really a point at which girl-children would stop being treated as children and start being treated as female; the fact that they are female and will one day be women is part of their childhood and they would learn to act "appropriately" throughout their lives.

[full_metal_ox]

If there's ever been reliable documentation of a human culture wherein gender socialization doesn't begin at birth, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

[quatorze]

This.

[full_metal_ox]

Look into breeching during the Victorian era. Children were genderless until a certain age.

[penknife]

I've never seen any evidence that would suggest that unbreeched boys in the Victorian era were considered "genderless." They wore dresses, which were considered "children's clothes," not exclusively girls' clothes, and wore their hair long. But certainly unbreeched boys knew they were boys and were aware of gendered social norms.