The Mother of the 5th Republic-The First Lady Politics during the Chun Administration, Focusing on the Association for Fostering the New Generation

This paper focuses on the first lady policy during the Chun Doo-hwan administration, which indicates the range of the presidential spouse’s authority and its intrinsic logic in the context of Korean society. In the universal sense, First Ladies are a good example of the fact that the separation of public and private domains presupposed by the modern political system is neither consistent nor rational. Even without a systemic or procedural-legal justification, they naturally exert a considerable degree of influence in actual politics. Korean First Ladies during the period of Korea’s military regimes reveal how governments had used stereotyped gender roles to cover up problems in the authoritarian regimes. During the Chun administration, the government tried to take the initiative for the first time in the field of daycare and operation of kindergartens, where the interests of various stakeholders were intertwined. Their first lady, Lee Soon-ja, became the main player in this challenging area based on her motherly role as a part of the public relations policy in the government. In the beginning, she could mobilize full-scale governmental support and garnered enormous donations from private companies, as an incarnate symbol of the authoritarian regime. However, due to the fundamental limitations embodied in her position as a spouse, the unrealistic goal of expanding daycare institutions nationwide to change the landscape of out-of-home child-raising became difficult to glamorize the First Lady. Accordingly, since the mid-1980s, her corporation had to shift its focus from quantitative and substantial expansion to non-material and rhetorical measures. Considering her own status based on her husband, preaching about the value of “normal families” became rather a suitable project for the First Lady. Right after her husband lost his power due to democratization, Lee Soon-ja’s activities, which she had unprecedentedly expanded, immediately became an easy target for the anti-dictatorship movement. In that even her husband’s position and power was derived from an unconstitutional military coup, the First Lady was viewed as a niche in the system of the military regime and was thus considered as a weak link against which anti-government sentiment could easily accumulate.