Underneath the Mutual Agreements: The Socio-Legal Changes on the Domestication of Patriarchy in Middle-Class Korean Families’ Agreement Divorce Cases Under Japan’s Rule (1920s-30s)

Introduced under the Japanese Civil Code to colonial Korea under Japan's rule(1910-45), the mutual agreement divorce was a legal institution that allowed couples to dissolve their marriages by submitting their agreed intention to divorce to local authorities. While previous research has focused on the divorce by trial and poor families' mutual agreement divorces, little research has yet been done on Korean middle-class families' mutual agreement divorces. This article analyzes Korean lawyers' family registers in the 1920s and 30s to argue that their agreement divorces reflect the socio-legal changes in colonial Korea which enabled Korean middle-class men to domesticate existing patriarchal family practices. Modern education and jobs, accessible to men from middle-class backgrounds, often led the men to separate from their wives, cohabited with new women, and had even extramarital affairs and illegitimate children. With a dozen of agreement divorce cases in the family registers attached to the documents that the lawyers submitted to the Governor-General's Office for lawyer registration, I reconstructed the contexts and backgrounds of the divorces along with other archival sources. I found that the cases labeled as agreed in fact were intertwined with long separations between husband and wife, monogamy and illegitimate women, the children’s legal status in the family register, and the birth of male children. This article demonstrates that underneath the label of agreement there was the domestication of colonial family codes by which some Korean middle class produced a novel set of family norms with reference to pre-colonial family practices.