ABSTRACT

Women’s economic marginalization has been structurally interwoven with their continually disrupted working life history. An overwhelming majority of female industrial workers, most of whom have been mobilized from village life, customarily quit their jobs before or after marriage, making their industrial worker status a youthful career. Many of them would reenter the labor market once their children are raised and/or as supplementary family income becomes indispensable. But only casual wage labor, part-time work and self-employment have been available to them. Ironically, the South Korean industrial take-off, for which women’s work in labor-intensive export industries was crucial, has led to a modern, yet patriarchal, system of labor division characterized by chronic instabilities and discontinuities in women’s economic participation. As surveyed in 2001 (see Figure 5.1), recent generations of women showed not only much higher likelihoods of working in their early to mid twenties, but also much more precipitous declines in the working rate in subsequent ages. In other words, those born in the more recent decades rode the tide of rapid industrialization in terms of rising working rates, but they were also subjected to a new labor regime and family culture that badly discouraged young housewives’ social employment.13 When farm household women are excluded (Figure 5.2),

newer generations showed much higher working rates throughout life (herein recorded). This conversely reveals that women in farm households did not experience such discontinuous working life histories as did their city counterparts. That is, women’s economic retreat pending marriage is much more a modern phenomenon accompanying industrialization and urbanization than any archaic tradition. While these figures indicate that large proportions of middle-aged women returned to the workforce (after painstakingly bearing, rearing, and educating children), few of these returnees would be entrusted with full proletarian status based on stable long-term employment in major industrial sectors. Even in their earlier working careers, prospective marriage (and ensuing home care duty) used to be regarded as a due rationale for denying women mainstream working careers. Given the indispensably enormous social value of women’s domestic duties such as homemaking, childbearing and childrearing, and caregiving for aged, sick, and handicapped persons, industrial capitalism has only abused social contributions by women while constructing and reinforcing a modern, maledominated economic system.