On the changing occupational roles of women in 20th century Korean society

Abstract

The events that occurred in the Korean peninsula in the past 100 years, such as the conversion of Koreans to Christianity, appealed to many women especially due to the fact that “it advocated human rights, social equality, and other democratic principles” (De Mente 2017, 661), the Japanese colonization of the country (1910-1945), which granted the Korean women the right to institutional education, and the rapid growth of industry starting with the early 1960s, a phenomenon that enabled young girls to work outside their houses as soon as they graduated from high school or college were important factors in the social emancipation of Korean women. This emancipation brought with it a change in the ‘jobs’ or ‘occupations’ women had, from more traditional ones, like jungmae (matchmakers), haenyeo (sea divers), to more modern ones, such as factory workers, university professors, or office employees. The current paper aims to bring to the fore these changes by making use of primary data gathered from various novels authored by Korean and American-Korean, as well as secondary data (Statistics Korea), and to show that these changes are part and parcel of women’s liberation movement. The theoretical framework employed is content analysis (Baker 1994, Cohen et al. 2018), according to which the fragments excerpted from the novels will be categorized in terms of the occupational themes. The findings of the analysis will show that despite the fact that for a long period of time Korean women were enslaved, being confined in their parents’ or in-laws’ homes, their aspirations for better jobs, mainly held by men, were fulfilled only when they achieved a certain degree of social freedom.