ABSTRACT
From the 1960s through to the 1980s Seoul busied itself in becoming a showpiece of industrial luxury to outshine that rival city to the north: Pyongyang. In these decades hundreds of thousands of country girls flooded into Seoul’s back streets, carrying within them dreams of what they might find in the newly constructed boulevards and skyscrapers of the capital. As the lynchpin of South Korea’s first stage of export-oriented industrialization, factory girls have been simultaneously thanked and dismissed, elevated and patronized as symbols of a patriotic and selfless devotion to national/family prosperity. Not only did the political suppression of factory girls in all-male unions and their economic marginalization in deadend jobs obscure the significance of their role in late industrializing South Korea, but they were also central to the rapid development project in so many ways that seemed to efface them – as low-paid, diligent workers; as financial supporters of rural households; as young females slotted in at the bottom of the factory’s gender hierarchy in ways that provided continuity with older patriarchal hierarchies.
