Yet some women's organizations that advocated the adoption of a woman as the face of a banknote are up in arms. Shin Saimdang is the epitome of a good wife and good mother, they say, and therefore inadequate as a role model for modern women. The head of a feminist organization that opposes the decision most vociferously said the decision “announces to the world that our nation is culturally a developing nation."

Is she really so unsuitable to the Korea of the 21st century? Granted, the selection of faces for banknotes is a symbolic act conveying the country's values, world-view and vision; but I beg to differ from the logic of these activists.

We have to question whether Shin Saimdang really symbolizes a good wife and mother in the patriarchal value system. True, it was only in the mid-1970s that Shin was first upheld as a national heroine. The government at the time, needing material for a national propaganda campaign justifying the draconian Oct. 17, 1972 Yushin or “revitalizing” reforms by president Park Chung-hee, cited her as the “mother of the nation" -- admiral Yi Sun-shin, who crushed Japanese fleet during Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s invasion in the 16th century, was the “father.” Establishing the Saimdang Education Institution in Gangneung, Gangwon Province, her hometown, the government gathered girl student leaders and gave them propaganda lectures upholding her as the archetypal good wife and mother.

But in the sense the government meant, Shin was neither. She is one of a tiny handful of female artists who left to posterity both their art and their name. She did not sacrifice herself for husband and children. She did not forsake her art throughout her life, staying at her parents' home for decades after her marriage and living in Pyeongchang, Ganwon Province and Paju, Gyeonggi Province, a long way from her husband’s home in Seoul. She was assertive and intelligent enough to attempt to persuade her husband to stop running after men of influence. On that score, she resembles more a heroine of the kind of feminism advocated by Betty Friedan, one of the leading lights of America's postwar feminist movement, refusing to restrict her existence to being a mere wife and mother.

Shouldn’t feminists take the lead in removing the Yushin stain from Shin? She was misrepresented by men in the authoritarian era as a submissive wife and a success story of producing and nurturing children.

Instead, Korean feminists should erase that stain and show her as a woman who could look after herself in difficult times. In the last 30 years, Yi Sun-shin has been allowed, in Kim Hoon's novel "Song of Sword", to evolve from a stuffed shirt to a human being who agonized in confronting the ravages of history; but Shin Saimdang has yet to be freed from the patriarchal mythology. Part of that responsibility lies with woman intellectuals. If they look at Shin Saimdang in the mid-Chosun dynasty through the eyes of a modern feminism that stresses self-reliance, they will find clues to the powers women should fight for, and against. Whether Shin Saimdang is appropriate as a female role model in the 21st century, in other words, depends on the eyes of the beholder.

The column was contributed by Pak Sunny, the Chosun Ilbo’s senior reporter for women's affairs.