겨울 쓸어내는 아가씨들
This photograph and caption appeared in the Jeju Sinmun Newspaper (제주신문) on February 20, 1971. It shows students from Shinseong Girls’ High School (신성여고) sweeping the streets of Jeju city as winter gave way to spring. The caption’s invocation of the Greek goddess Hygieia reflects the civic sanitation rhetoric that accompanied the early Saemaul Undong (새마을운동 / New Village Movement) mobilizations of the early 1970s.
겨울이 물러간 거리에 신성여고 학생들이 빗자루를들고 나왔다. 「淸潔의 女神 히게이아」처럼 이거리에서 모든 질병과 더러움을 쓸어갈 것 같다.
The students of Shinseong Girls’ High School took up their brooms in the streets from which winter has retreated. Like “Hygieia, Goddess of Cleanliness (淸潔의 女神),” it seems they will sweep all disease and filth from these streets.
Commentary
Hygieia (Ὑγίεια), daughter of Asclepius in Greek mythology, was the goddess of health and sanitary practice — the English word hygiene derives from her name. The caption’s Hanja rendering 淸潔의 女神 (“Goddess of Cleanliness”) slightly narrows her domain but reflects her popular association with public sanitation.
This photograph sits just at the formal launch of the 새마을운동 (Saemaul Undong / New Village Movement), which President Park Chung-hee inaugurated in 1970 with major mobilization from 1971 onward. Female students participating in public street-cleaning was a visible feature of these campaigns — their labor framed simultaneously as civic duty, feminine virtue, and national progress.
Sources & Further Reading
- Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 214–215
- Emma J. Edelstein & Ludwig Edelstein, Asclepius: Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 [1945]), vol. 1, T. 251–290
- Sung Chull Kim, “The New Village Movement and the Making of a Developmentalist Countryside in South Korea,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 5 (2011): 1037–1057
- 국사편찬위원회 (National Institute of Korean History), Saemaul Undong collection — db.history.go.kr