Minmyonuri and Kim Ku

Like China, pre-independent Korea also had a marriage system involving the transfer of the prospective bride from her maternal household to the household of her future husband. This was done when the bride was usually six or seven years old, but it was not totally unheard of for girls in their infancy to be sent out as prospective brides.

Known in China as 童养媳 (which literally meant "a daughter-in-law raised as a child"), the system is known as minmyonuri in Korea.

As Youngsook Kim Harvey pointed out, minmyonuri marriage was under no circumstances the preferred form of marriage, as it was an option "for families negotiating on the basis of mutual disadvantage."

Practiced only by impoverished families out of economic necessity, minmyonuri marriage was a social humiliation for the families involved. For the bride's family, extreme poverty left it no choice but to send the daughter away, often to be badly treated by her future mother-in-law.

Indeed, Kim Ku was said to have rejected such a marriage that his mother had arranged for him.

The national hero of the Korean Independence Movement compared the institution of minmyonuri marriage to the Japanese annexation of Korea, and vowed in a letter to his mother that he would resist such a marriage, due to his resistance against Japanese colonial rule.