Page:Village life in Korea (1911).djvu/88

76 the way of cash payment as in the first case above mentioned. It is a simple contract of her surrendering all claims to her own person and becoming the property of her master for the sake of a home. And once a slave, by this method, always a slave. She cannot, as in the first case, redeem herself with a price, and is therefore considered the lowest class of slave.

From the above it may be seen at a glance that the family in Korea may be a much complicated organization, with its fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, to say nothing of the mothers, grandmothers, and the great-grandmothers, who spend their time in ruling with an iron hand the younger women of the household. Among the younger women are to be found the wives and concubines of the younger men of the family, and in many cases the prospective wives of the boys who are not yet married, but whose brides have been selected and placed in the family in order that they may be trained up in the way of absolute obedience to a mother-in-law.

It must be said before leaving this subject that the family in Korea is a, variable quantity. By this is meant that when you have seen the members of a family once you cannot be sure that the same persons will constitute the family the next time you see it. It may be that some one of the men will change wives before you see them again. Or it may be that wife No. 2 will have been added to the household by the time you call again. Or it may be that some wife has been disobedient to her mother-in-law and has for this reason been divorced, and the husband has not been able to find another to take her place, therefore