Published: Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 5:10 AM Updated: Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 10:00 AM
By Robert L. Smith, The Plain Dealer
John Kuntz, The Plain Dealer
Local alumni members of Ewha Haktang, South Korea’s top school for women (from left), Susan Whang, Young Hec Kim and Judy Choi, listen during a planning meeting in July at the Korean Central Presbyterian Church in Brecksville.
BRECKSVILLE, Ohio — On a select day each spring, a group of local Korean-American women gather at a grave marker at Evergreen Cemetery in Streetsboro. They place fresh flowers at the final resting place of Lucinda Baldwin, a farmer’s wife who died in 1898, and recite prayers of thank
s.
John Kuntz, The Plain Dealer
Local alumni members of Ewha Haktang, South Korea’s top school for women (from left), Susan Whang, Young Hec Kim and Judy Choi, listen during a planning meeting in July at the Korean Central Presbyterian Church in Brecksville.
This month, more than 100 women, many of them from South Korea, will retrace that pilgrimage. They will assemble at the grave site of their heroine and thank her for an act of charity that improved the lives of generations of Korean women.
As part of a grand and unusual reunion, they will honor the Cleveland connections to one of Korea’s cherished success stories.
A little more than 125 years ago, Baldwin, a member of the Ladies Aid Society at her Methodist church in Ravenna, contributed $88 to start a school for girls in Korea. It was a time when Korean women were kept veiled, unschooled and homebound.
With that donation, another local Methodist, Mary Scranton, founded Ewha Haktang — Pear Blossom School — which grew into one of Asia’s top schools for women. From Ewha’s graduating classes come female educators, scientists, business executives, government leaders and world-class musicians.
As Ewha approached its 125th anniversary, local alumni — who number about two dozen women — persuaded their alma mater to hold a celebration in the city of the founders; to finally thank Cleveland for its little-known gift.
Dr. Jung Jin El-Mallawany, for one, thinks it’s time to share the story.
‘People in this city, in this region, should know what they contributed to the education of Korean women,’ said El-Mallawany, a Shaker Heights psychiatrist and a leader of the local Ewha alumni group. ‘They should be so proud.’
A night in Seoul
Music is a big part of an education at Ewha high school and university in South Korea and it will play a central role in the local 125th anniversary celebration.
As part of a reunion in Cleveland, Ewha graduates, the children of Ewha graduates and local artists will present a concert of classical music and a performance of gayageum sanjo, traditional Korean music. Showtime is 8 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 27, in Kulas Hall of the Cleveland Institute of Music.
A festival chamber orchestra conducted by CIM President Joel Smirnoff will feature a solo by violinist Joan Kwuon. Choral selections will be presented by the Ewha Vocal Ensemble, the Ewha Opera Ensemble and the Ewha Alumni Chorus in traditional Korean dress.
Tickets can be purchased at Kim’s Oriental Food, 3700 Superior Ave., by calling 440-526-3025, or by emailing ewhagirls.northamerica@gmail.com
The honors fall most squarely on the region’s United Methodist Church, which in the late 1800s sent missionaries to the far corners of the world to spread the faith. One of those missionaries was Mary Scranton, a plucky New England widow who had moved to Cleveland in about 1882.
With her son, William, a doctor, Scranton sailed to Korea in 1885, becoming its first female missionary. She was 52.
While William Scranton opened medical clinics, Mary Scranton opened minds. Armed with Baldwin’s donation, Scranton in 1886 founded a girls’ school in a nation that never had one before.
Her idea took root and bloomed. Ewha grew into a grammar school, two high schools and a university as it sent ripples of change across a patriarchal society. Thanks to Ewha, admirers say, female intellect and career potential began to be taken seriously, though maybe not seriously enough.
Graduates of the prestigious Ewha Womans University have always been prized as wives and daughters-in-law, said Michael Seth, an historian at James Madison University and an expert on Korean education. Some deride it as a finishing school that grooms women for marriage to high-powered men.
John Kuntz, The Plain Dealer
Dr. Jung Jin El-Mallawany leads a local group of Ewha alumni planning a reunion later this month to mark Northeast Ohio’s role in founding the school.
Dr. Jung Jin El-Mallawany leads a local group of Ewha alumni planning a reunion later this month to mark Northeast Ohio’s role in founding the school.
‘Until recently, few women went into professions, so most of its graduates simply married into good families or to men with prestige degrees and excellent career prospects,’ Seth wrote in an email.
Still, Seth argues, Ewha graduates are justifiably proud of their degrees and their classmates, who often earned more than their M-R-S.
From Ewha came Korea’s first woman doctor, university president, lawyer and judge. Ewha alumni include LPGA golfer Grace Park, violinist Kyung Wha-Chung, independence leader Yu Gwan-sun — who was tortured to death during the Japanese occupation — and Han Myung-sook, who became Korea’s first female prime minister in 2006.
The local roots of those achievements are still being uncovered. Four years ago, Betty Defer, a member of the Streetsboro Heritage Foundation, was visiting family graves in Evergreen Cemetery when she crossed paths with Korean-American women bearing flowers. She struck up a conversation with El-Mallawany.
‘I said, ‘Do you come here often?’ ‘ Defer recalls. ‘She said, ‘Every year and sometimes more.’ ‘
That’s how the heritage foundation learned of Lucinda Baldwin and her Korean legacy.
Defer and her colleagues found the Baldwin home, a small farmhouse still standing on Page Road. Later this month, they will lead two busloads of Ewha graduates on a tour of the grounds.
Baldwin made her donation in 1883, a year after her husband died, after reading missionary accounts of a reclusive nation where girls were not considered worth educating, said Sarah Fast, a retired teacher and the vice president of the heritage foundation.
‘She thought they should be able to go to school and to live like Christians,’ Fast said.
Much more is know about Scranton, who lived out her life in Korea, where she is honored with statues, commemorations and a leadership training center. On a visit to Ewha in 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton drew cheers when she described ‘Madame Scranton’ as one of her role models.
Ewha alumni in Greater Cleveland, who represent a variety of skills and careers, talk passionately of the power of seeds. Lucinda Baldwin’s donation. Mary Scranton’s devotion.
‘That’s what Ewha grew from. Those seeds. It all started here,’ said Judy Choi, a graduate of Ewha Girls’ High School and a founder of a Kumon Learning Center in Broadview Heights. ‘That’s why we’re so excited about our 125th celebration. We are coming back to where it all began.’
Ewha graduates are expected to arrive from around the world for anniversary events that climax Aug. 27 with a concert of classical and Korean music at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Reunion activities also include a worship service at the First United Methodist Church of Ravenna, a lecture at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and a bus trip to a grave site and a farmhouse in Streetsboro.
Lucinda Baldwin no doubt never knew the price of immortality. It was $88.