Lee Tai-young

Early life Lee Tai-young was born on 10 August 1914 in Pukjin, Unsan County, Korea, Empire of Japan (now in North Korea). She was a third-generation Methodist. Her father was a gold miner; her mother was named Kim Heung-Won. Most girl's parents taught girls how to work, but her parents thought that girls need to study, so she went to school with other boys. Her maternal grandfather founded the Methodist Church in Lee's hometown. After completing school in Pukjin, she studied at Chung Eui Girls' High School in Pyongyang. She attended Ewha Womans University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in home economics before marrying the Methodist minister, Yil Hyung Chyung (who had studied in America), in 1936. He was suspected of being a spy for the United States in the 1940s and was imprisoned as "anti-Japanese". He later became the Minister of Foreign Affairs of South Korea. Tai-young lived in a patriarchal society (as was the tradition in Korea) and she had four children, three daughters and a son. In 1952, she was the first woman to pass the National Judicial Examination.

There are two English-language biographies of Lee, David Finkelstein's Korea's 'Quiet' Revolutionary: A Profile of Lee Tai-young (1979) and Sonia Reid Strawn's Where There is No Path: Lee Tai-Young, Her Story (1988). Three years later, she received the international legal aid award of the International Legal Aid Association. Some of the other awards that she received were the World Methodist Peace Award in 1984, and in 1981 the Honorary Doctorate in Law from the Drew University in Madison, NJ. In 1971 she won the conference award when she participated in the World Peace Though Law Conference held in Belgrade. In 1992, she won the Samil Prize.