The study of Korean modern and contemporary family history has focused on historical analyses of how the ‘modern family’ has been formed with respect to the notion of the non-historical ‘family’. The study of Korean modern and contemporary family history can be divided into the 1920~1930s when colonial modernity emerged, and the 1950~1960s during industrialization after the Korean War. The fields of study can be classified into three categories: the family-head system, family discourse, and family experience.
Although the family-head system adopted under the Family Law(1958) was introduced by Japan during the colonial period, it was perceived as ‘traditional’ because it was in accord with patriarchal interests. Moreover, various studies have highlighted the fact that while Korea’s family system nominally belonged to the nuclear family, it was more closely related to the kinship system. With regard to family discourse, studies have shown that the new notion of family and familism where rules governing women’s standing as good mothers and wise wives were perceived as the core precepts, was introduced during the Japanese colonial period using the Western middle class family as its model. In particular, during the 1950s the Republic of Korea actively used the family as a medium through which, based on the family discourse, individuals focused their energies on the state in the aftermath of the Korean War. The family experience identified ‘family’ as a life community. This particular field of study has focused on analyzing strategic changes in the family that have taken place amid wider social changes of modernization and industrialization. Studies on the diversity of families and the differences in experiences and identities based on gender and age of the family members, have gradually increased.
In order to perceive pre-modern, modern and contemporary eras in a diachronic way, new approaches need be found to combine the results of the studies conducted in these three categories. It is also necessary to develop a problem awareness that will make it possible to produce an egalitarian community that is not bound by the state or normal family discourse. Once this eventuates , the study of Korean family history can contribute to new historical studies that move beyond divisions of public and private, and macroscopic and microscopic spheres.