Pioneer of Korean Female Education: Missionary Lulu E. Frey's Letters from Ewha Haktang, 1893-1918

The American who opened women's higher education in Korea

Lulu E. Frey served in Korea for the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church beginning in 1893. She became a teacher and later principal at Ewha, the country's first girls' school. There, Christian principles were taught along with academic subjects, hygiene, and the sanctity of the woman-centered domestic sphere. The precepts of evangelical Christianity merged with seemingly liberating ideals of modernity. In 1910, the year Japan officially annexed Korea, Frey established Ewha's college program. Many of the young women who studied at Ewha became the first female teachers, nurses, and doctors in Korea and joined a rising cohort of "New Women" across East Asia.

These previously unpublished letters offer intimate insight into the work of running, expanding, and raising funds for a school during the political turmoil and wars that marked the end of the Joseon Dynasty, the short-lived Korean Empire, and the first decade of Japanese occupation.


"In Choi's elegant rendering, the quiet force of Christian missions emerges not simply as an institution, but as a catalyst for modern Korean womanhood—a flame that still burns within Ewha Womans University, the world's largest institution of women's education."　　——Yoo Theodore Jun, Yonsei University, author of The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea