Korea Times
By Andrei Lankov
She is now turning 60. You, dear reader, have probably seen her when she was riding the subway with her childhood friends, a small group of cheerful aunties with permed hair, or perhaps you came across her in a park or met her in a neighbourhood shop.
She is a Korean woman born in the late 1940s. Many people like her are around us, and if one wants to understand present-day Korea, their life stories are of great importance.
So, let’s talk about the life of a typical Korean woman born in the first years of the country’s independence. For our convenience, we’ll call her Mrs. Kim.
In all probability, Mrs. Kim did not graduate from a college. Until around 1970, a majority of Koreans believed that a university education was an unnecessary luxury for a woman.
However, from the late 1950s onwards secondary education was common for both boys and girls, so Mrs. Kim has anything from six to 12 years of formal schooling.
Having graduated from middle or even high school, Mrs. Kim probably went to work. It is quite likely that she was born in the countryside, where most Koreans lived in those days, but moved to a city in her youth.
If she came from a relatively well-to-do family she might have spent a few years doing some clerical work. If her origins were more humble, she probably worked at a factory or sweatshop for a while.
However, at any rate, her career did not last and was not meant to last. Until the 1980s it was a common-sense assumption that a married woman could not and should not work, and in most companies young female workers were expected to resign after marriage.
Until recently, staying single or postponing marriage was simply not an option in Korea. Everybody had to marry and have children. So, Mrs. Kim married when she was approaching 25. Most likely she did not look for her husband herself.
“Love matches” remained a rarity until the 1980s, and spouses were normally selected by parents or even bosses, even though by the late 1950s the girls had acquired the power of veto in case they strongly disliked the candidate (a freedom unthinkable for their mothers’ generation).
Most likely, Mrs. Kim’s husband was the same age as her (or slightly younger) and came from a roughly similar social background.
Early married life must have been difficult, since Mrs. Kim faced a formidable mother-in-law. There were exceptions to this rule, of course, but generally relations between the two women were tense: mothers-in-law could be very demanding and tyrannical.
However, Mrs. Kim lived through the era which one anthropologist recently described as a “switch from motherhood to wifehood.” Indeed, Mrs. Kim’s parents assumed that a woman’s primary responsibilities would be to her children, mostly sons, while husbands tended to come second.
In colonial Korea, women were part of a large patriarchal family, but their interaction with males, including their own husbands, was limited. They worked at home or in the fields under the supervision of their mothers-in-law, and they took care of the children.
To Mrs. Kim’s generation, children were important, but it was the husbands who began to play a major role in the women’s lives.
It is also possible that Mrs. Kim’s family moved away from the in-laws and started a new life in one of those apartment complexes which mushroomed in Korean cities from 1970 onwards. This probably helped ameliorate some of the friction with her mother-in-law.
Was Mrs. Kim happy in her family life? It depends, but even if she was, she did not see her husband so much. The 1960s and 1970s were the decades of the great economic breakthrough, but it did not come easily: present-day Korean prosperity was built by the backbreaking labor of millions.
So, for decades Mrs. Kim’s husband left home early in the morning, at 7 a.m., perhaps, not to be seen again until 9 p.m. Sundays were probably days off, but he spent most of this time sleeping.
Vacations were short or completely absent. The hard-working husband did not interfere much with home affairs, and every month gave all his salary to Mrs. Kim who provided him some modest daily allowances.
Mrs. Kim had fewer children than her mother, since her child-bearing years coincided with a dramatic decline in the birth rate. She probably had two or three children, and their education remained her major worry for a couple of decades.
Even if her husband was a manual worker, Mrs. Kim tried hard to send at least some of their children, especially sons, to college and she probably succeeded in this.
Mrs. Kim was in full control of the family purse, and she made the most of it. She might have been one of the bokbuin, the “real estate ladies,” who planned and exercised daring land speculations in the 1970s and 1980s when land prices skyrocketed (in some urban areas the land prices increased a thousandfold within 15-20 years).
The Korean women of her generation had more free time than their mothers, thanks to the smaller number of children and the arrival of time-saving household appliances. Many used their free time to run investment schemes.
Most did well, and some became rich, the income from their investments could even greatly exceed their husband’s earnings.
Even if Mrs. Kim was not so lucky, by 1995 she could look at her life with a measure of satisfaction. She enjoyed prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of her parents. Her children were far better educated than was possible for her.
However, we might suspect that she discovered that her grown-up daughters are critical of all her assumptions, and want very different lives for themselves. Why? That is another story.
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He has recently published “The Dawn of Modern Korea,” which is now on sale at Kyobo Book Center and other major bookstores. The book is based on columns published in The Korea Times. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com
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