About the Founder

Hi, my name is Kate, and I am a high schooler in the Bay area. I grew up in Korea and relocated to the US in 2019. As a child, I remember hearing vague, dark stories of gratitude from my grandparents and parents about what our ancestors, especially women, had to go through during World War II and The Korean War. It wasn’t a commonly talked about topic, but it was one that held weight, particularly for my grandparents, who were children during The Korean War.

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Years later, during middle school in the US, I joined the Debate club and became interested in studying history. This developed into an interest in women's rights, and I remembered the stories I had heard as a child. So, for the summer of 2022, I sought out a volunteering position at the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul. It was there that I learned about "comfort women."

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The museum’s exhibitions included videos of comfort women talking about their experiences, paintings they had created, and audio stories too. It was powerful and moving and revealed to me a sinister history that I couldn’t believe I had not learned about in school – either in Korea or the US. It seemed to me that the stories of the comfort women had been stigmatized, and concealed by traditional Korean values. It wasn’t a HerStory I was reading, it was a His-Story. 

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I created the Through HerStory project to shine a light on these stories and to educate others about the experiences of women of war, both historically and in the present day. Through this work, I hope to contribute towards the destigmatization of these experiences and liberate the untold stories of survivors, past, present, and future.