A Sovereign New Korea: North Korea’s Postcolonial State Building, Women’s Liberation, and Early Cold War Internationalism, 1945-1954

This research examines North Korea’s equation of women’s liberation to modernity and as an essential marker of independence and self-determination after colonial liberation in 1945. The Democratic Women’s Union of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) functioned as both the discursive emblem of liberation and as a critical channel for internationalism. During the Korean War, this organization forged solidarity ties with what was then the world’s largest international women’s organization, the Women’s International Democratic Federation, and stood at the forefront of a “New Korea.” This study focuses on how North Korean women constituted an integral metonym of state integrity and authority vis-à-vis South Korea in the competition for postcolonial legitimacy between the DPRK and the Republic of Korea (ROK), as well as at the forefront of North Korea’s dynamic internationalism that preceded a turn toward Third Wordism beginning in the mid-1950s.