Lee Tai-Young (1914-1998) was a pioneering legal mind who spent her life fighting for women’s rights and access to legal representation.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s Local Legend was a pioneering legal mind who spent her life fighting for women’s rights and access to legal representation. The first woman in history to become a lawyer in South Korea, she founded the country’s first legal aid center where she worked with women who were heavily underserved by the traditional legal establishment. Let’s talk about Lee Tai-Young.
Lee Tai-Young was born on August 10th, 1914 in what is now North Korea to a gold miner and his wife. Both of Lee’s parents were second-generation Methodists, who were heavily involved in the local church founded by her maternal grandfather.
At a time when most Korean women ended their schooling relatively early to learn how to run a household, Lee’s family was fairly unique in encouraging her to receive the exact same education as the boys in their small community. Lee attended an all-girls high school in Pyongyang. She graduated in 1931 and then headed down to Seoul to attend Ewha Woman’s University, the premier educational institution for women in Korea. She received her bachelor’s degree there in Home Economics in 1936.
After graduation, Lee moved to Pyongyang to marry a Methodist minister 10 years her senior named Dr. Yil Hyung Chyung. In 1938, the new couple moved back to Seoul so that Chyung could take a teaching job at The Methodist Theological Seminary.
Lee and her husband lived comfortably for a number of years in Seoul, and Lee started to think about pursuing a law degree, an idea basically unheard of for a woman at that time in Korea.
But with the start of World War II in the 1940s, Lee’s world was thrown into turmoil. Her husband was arrested and imprisoned by the Japanese Colonial Government for being “anti-Japanese” and possibly an American spy. He had attended school in the United States and was politically active, making him suspicious.
Though Chyung was imprisoned for most of the war — first in Seoul, then Japan, then in Pyongyang — the couple managed to have three children during this period. With young children and a mother-in-law to support, per Korean tradition, Lee had to put away any thoughts of returning to school. Instead she took a job as a home economics teacher at a high school. The pay was so meager that she also took up washing and sewing, sold quilts door-to-door, and took a night job as a radio singer to make ends meet.
When World War II ended, and her husband regained his freedom, Lee’s thoughts again turned towards the law. With the support and encouragement of her husband, Lee applied and was accepted to Seoul National University to study law. In 1946, she became the first woman ever to attend the university. She earned her law degree three years later, and in 1952 she became the first woman to ever pass the National Judicial Examination, making her the first Korean woman lawyer in history.
In 1957, after the end of the Korean War, Lee opened a law practice in Seoul focused on poor and illiterate women, a population that she had noticed was heavily underserved by the legal community. The Women’s Legal Counseling Center became the first organization in South Korea to specifically focus on providing important legal services to this demographic. In an interview with the New York Times, Lee later recalled that her clients “were all poor and all female. My office became a central crying place.”
That same year, Lee published her groundbreaking guide to Korea’s divorce system, the first of its kind written for women. She would go on to publish 15 seminal books covering women’s legal issues in South Korea, including her immensely popular 1972 book Commonsense in Law for Women.
In 1976, Lee and her husband participated in the Myeongdong Declaration, which called for the return of civil liberties to Korean citizens. As a result of this and other publicly espoused political views in favor of liberal democracy, Lee was arrested as an enemy of the government and President Park Chung-hee. In 1977, she received a three year suspended prison sentence and was disbarred for an additional seven years.
Nevertheless, her law firm continued to flourish, eventually evolving into the Korea Legal Aid Center for Family Relations, South Korea’s first legal aid society. Over the course of 20 years, Lee and nine other women counselors, all law school graduates, handled more than 94,000 cases. Lee and her team also lobbied successfully for legislative changes to South Korean laws that disadvantaged women.
Lee received international acclaim for her work in expanding the legal access and rights of women in South Korea. In 1975, she received the highly coveted Ramon Magsaysay Award in the category of Community Leadership for "effective service to the cause of equal judicial rights for liberation of Korean Women." In 1978 she received the International Legal Aid Award from the International Legal Aid Association, and in 1984 she accepted the World Methodist Peace Award.That same year she published a memoir of her life called Dipping the Han River Out With A Gourd.
Lee passed away on December 16, 1998 in Seoul. She was 84 years old.
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Talk to you tomorrow!