Chung Chil-sung

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Chung Chil-sung (1897-1958), also known by her art name Geumjuk, was a Korean dancer, feminist, and independence activist. Born in Daegu, she trained as a Kisaeng and later moved to Seoul in 1915, where she danced and played the Gayageum. After taking part in the March 1st Movement in 1919, she stopped performing to focus on nationalism, socialism, and women’s activism.

Two trips to Tokyo in the early 1920s deepened her Marxist feminist ideas. There she read socialist writings, helped edit a socialist journal, and learned editing and translation. She returned to Korea with a class-centered view of women’s liberation, stressing economic independence and workers’ rights. She joined Samwolhoe, a group of socialist-minded women students, and in 1926 published an influential essay redefining the “New Woman.”

What Chung called the true New Woman was a proletarian worker in tobacco, textile, and other factories, who labored from dawn to night and faced harsh conditions. She argued that such working women were the real leaders of women’s liberation, not fashionable urban elites. This perspective shaped her later work in the women’s movement.

Chung helped found Geunuhoe (Society of Women) in 1927 and was elected to its Central Executive Committee. She led lectures across Korea and worked to build local branches. In 1929 she became Chair of the Central Executive Committee and helped create the Labor and Peasant Women’s Department and the Publishing Department. Geunuhoe started the journal Geunu, which Chung edited and used to promote solidarity among working-class women.

Facing growing repression and internal Split between left and right, Geunuhoe began to dissolve. Chung left the organization in 1930 due to health reasons but remained committed to educating and raising the consciousness of proletarian women. She then ran a handicraft workshop, Bunok Suyesa in Seoul, teaching embroidery, sewing, and knitting throughout the 1930s to support women’s vocational skills.

After Korea’s liberation in 1945, Chung joined socialist women’s organizations in the South and later moved to North Korea. She held several high-level roles, including leadership positions in the North’s women’s unions and the government’s bodies. She served as a deputy to the Supreme People’s Assembly and held other senior posts in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Chung Chil-sung’s final years are not well documented. Some sources say she was purged in 1958, while others report that she died that year with the exact cause unknown.

Throughout her life, Chung moved from performance to politics, always focusing on education, labor rights, and women’s independence. Her work helped define a Marxist, working-class vision of feminism in Korea.