Finding Belgium and More

Ewha Womans University is the top Korean women college. It was established by American missionary, Mary F. Scranton in 1866 and since then, the university has been dedicated for women education in Korea. Based on the Wikipedia, it is the largest female educational institute word-wide.

Currently, the number of students are over 21000, and quite a few numbers from foreign counties. Interestingly I learned that there is small minority of male students accepted in the school recently. Accordingly to Korean JoongAng Daily, about 10 male students were enrolled in 2008.

When I attended the school, there were no male students. In fact, no men were allowed in the school campus except May festival (May is typically one of popular festival months in universities in Korea). At any given day, you could see large numbers of men lining up outside the campus to wait for their girlfriends. I don’t know whether this is still true now, but when I was in school, a marriage before the graduation was not allowed. If you were married, you were required to resign.

I owe who I am now to the education I got from this school. The education I received in this school was invaluable and molded me in a way I could not have even imagined at the time. Foremost, since there was no gender gaps in the school (everybody was female, did I tell you? :-)), you did not get treated differently and you learned to be independent very quickly. You may think what the big deal is now for women being independent at school and labs.

Humans are by nature social animals and our learning in society has been deeply rooted for many generations. No doubt now is much better, but we are not still completely out of social behaviors which we have raised in. I think this is true in Korea, US and all over the world. Different degree, and the core of the problems still remain in our daily lives.