Abstract

This article examines how The Women’s News(Yeoseong Sinmun), founded amid the popularization of the women’s movement in the late 1980s, encountered “housewives, ” who constituted a large part of the female public, and explores the achievements and tensions of feminist journalism that emerged through this encounter. The Women’s News constructed women’s concrete experiences and emotions—including housewives’ suicide and hwabyeong, as well as feelings of guilt and responsibility surrounding child- care and care work—as matters of feminist “news value, ” and reinterpreted them as structural problems in which particular emotions and responsibilities were repeatedly assigned to women. At the same time, in repositioning housewives’ sensibilities of managing housing, consumption, and the living environment as resources for public solidarity and everyday-life politics, the newspaper also revealed tensions arising from its renewed affirmation of women’s “managerial affect” and reproductive roles. Rather than reducing these fissures to a lack of feminist commitment, this article understands them as emerging from the negotiation between visions of women’s liberation and the lifeworld of the female public. Through this analysis, the article illuminates the uneven temporality of women’s liberation, in which changes in women’s lives unfold at different speeds across multiple dimensions, while also examining the difficulties faced by a feminist medium addressing a mass female readership in negotiating with the concrete lifeworld of the female public.