Medford, Mass.

PARK GEUN-HYE, who was elected yesterday to be South Korea’s first female president, will also become the first elected female leader anywhere in the Confucian civilization, which consists of China, Japan, North and South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam, and makes up nearly a quarter of the world’s population.

Yet the mark she puts on history will not be determined by her gender, or even by the domestic policies she campaigned on. It will depend on how successfully she can address the greatest moral challenge to the Korean nation: alleviating the tremendous suffering of fellow Koreans in North Korea, who are perhaps the most systematically oppressed people in the world today.

To be sure, cracking the citadel of masculinity in a culture steeped in millenniums of male chauvinism is historic. Simply by winning, as the candidate of the governing center-right New Frontier party, Ms. Park instantly became a role model for hundreds of millions of women across East Asia.

Indeed, her very candidacy revealed the depths of male chauvinism that many educated South Koreans blithely accept. In October, for example, a male psychology professor at a leading university pointed out that Ms. Park has never married or given birth, and commented on a TV program: “Women in Korean society attain the phenomenon of womanhood by getting married, giving birth and raising children. Park Geun-hye falls short of those conditions. Only her reproductive organ makes her a woman.”