Put simply, the aim of feminism is "strengthening women's status and power." Feminist thought is usually divided into two broad streams, most commonly described as "waves." The so-called first wave, around the late 19th century, centered on women's suffrage, the core of women's demands for political and legal rights, and began with the history of women gaining political and legal power. The first country to give women the vote was New Zealand in 1893, followed in Europe by Finland in 1906 and Germany in 1918, while France allowed women to vote only in 1944. The second wave arose in the late 1960s, as feminist groups appeared in large numbers alongside the youth protest movements. At that time women's liberation came to the fore and a new generation of feminists emerged. In the 1970s it developed into a radical women's movement, and from then on the word feminist became common. The basic idea of the feminist movement, analyzing the state, its institutions and social structures as patriarchal and resisting and fighting to overthrow patriarchy, continues today. The second wave produced a surge of feminist groups with diverse agendas, and the decades of struggle to change laws and institutions are regarded as a great and proud achievement of a social movement. Today there is no family register. The family register system was abolished on January 1, 2008, and the family relations register is now used instead. When I said in a public lecture last year that the family register had disappeared, the men were very surprised, asking how that could be, when it happened and who abolished it. They apparently thought the family relations register had begun but the old register still remained. The abolition of the hoju system was an important event that greatly advanced gender equality in Korea. The hoju system had been the foundation of the family system since the Civil Code took effect in 1960, defining relations between the head of the family and other members as vertical and authoritarian. The head had the power to consent to various changes in family status, succession to the headship went first to the eldest son, then the second son, and a daughter inherited the headship only when there was no son. From the time the code was enacted, critics argued this violated the constitutional ideals of gender equality and individual dignity. Because it failed to reflect the diverse families of modern society, calls for abolition continued. For example, if a father died leaving a one-year-old son and a daughter over twenty, the infant son inherited the headship; even if there were only young children, the wife could not succeed to her late husband's position, and the children inherited it. Especially since the widowed wife handled all family matters while the head was a small child, problems detached from reality kept arising, and the hoju system was losing its footing. A sign of its coming abolition was the call to end the ban on marriage between people of the same surname and clan origin.

To add: on February 3, 2005, the Constitutional Court ruled the hoju system incompatible with the Constitution (2001Hun-Ga9 and others), and the revised Civil Code passed by the National Assembly in March that year took effect on January 1, 2008, replacing the family register under the Family Register Act with individual family relations registers under the Act on the Registration of Family Relationships. The revised code kept the rule that children take the father's surname but allowed them to take the mother's surname if the parents agree when registering the marriage, and also introduced court-approved surname changes and full adoption. The same-surname marriage ban was replaced in 2005 with a ban on marriage between blood relatives within the eighth degree (Article 809).