(515) Working Girls
Korea Times
04-23-2009 15:55
By Andrei Lankov
One of the most frequently discussed topics in the Korean press of the 1920s was the rise of a new social group: employed women. This was seen as a novelty ― and indeed it was one.
This does not mean that in earlier eras Korean women remained idly at home. This might be true in regard to women belonging to the affluent gentry, but they formed a tiny minority, hardly more than 1-2 percent of all Korean females.
Most women worked. They were weeding the fields, planting and harvesting rice, making clothes, and bringing water from distant wells. But they were not paid for their work, and their labor was to the benefit of their families. According to the modern (capitalist) logic, theirs was not “real work.”
Only in the late 1910s did some women begin to look for paid employment. Once again, the vast majority of the newly employed females went from paddy fields to the factories (usually, but not necessarily, this was a change for the better).
But these poor, semi-literate girls had no choice; their families were either unable or unwilling to feed them until they got married.
Educated elite women were a different story. In most cases, they were driven to work not by poverty but by their wish to acquire “economic independence.”
In the West, educated women began to join the workforce around 1890. In earlier times, girls from “good families” were supposed to stay at home, but from the 1890s, there was a growing labor market for female white-collar workers.
Of course, it was supposed that normally, a woman would not work after marriage, and nobody would seriously consider promoting a woman, even to a low level managerial position. But this was still a major break with the past.
The changes began in Germany and the U.S. but the new trends reached Korea only after the First World War, in the 1920s (and via Japan, of course).
From 1919, Korean girls could be employed as phone operators. In those days, before the introduction of dialing, connections at a telephone exchange had to be made manually.
Girls spent their work time near large switchboards, plugging and unplugging wires. The work required concentration ― and other qualities as well.
In order to get such a job, an applicant had to have some formal education, a pleasant voice and be taller than 143 cm (smaller girls could not reach the upper part of a switchboard).
In January 1920, Cho Su-ja became the first Korean woman to get a clerical job at a bank (Chohung Bank).
Cho soon was transferred to Tokyo, so all the attendant fame was passed on to Kim Saeng-ryo, who became a bank employee in December 1921. It was said that her presence attracted visitors to the bank branch where she worked.
For the less educated, there were positions as sales assistants in the new department stores. The shop owners soon discovered that the presence of girls with good looks could increase sales and began to hire female staff.
In those times, however, being a “shop girl” was seen as a low middle-class occupation, suitable for the educated minority. Farm girls would not get such jobs, which required literacy and numeracy ― skills which the average country girl seldom had until the late 1930s.
And a “shop girl” also had to have a reasonably sophisticated appearance. Girl typists could be found in Korea as well, but in much smaller numbers than in Western countries.
The reasons were linguistic. Until the 1960s, Korean documents used a large number of Chinese characters, which could not be typed with any convenience (there were some Chinese typewriters, but these contraptions were remarkably slow and cumbersome).
Thus, documents usually had to be handwritten. And, of course, most of them were compiled in Japanese anyway (with the same abundance of Chinese characters).
Elite working women included professionals: female doctors, journalists, and artists. But they were few and far between, since in Korea women could not receive a university education.
Thus, all female professionals had to study overseas, ensuring that their numbers remained small. Few Korean families had money to pay for overseas studies, and only a fraction of those who did would be willing to spend such an exorbitant sum on their daughters ― or sons.
Thus, these female professionals were an elite and saw themselves as such.
Female teachers of primary and middle schools formed a much larger group. Being a teacher was not as glamorous and lucrative as, say, being a doctor, but it was still a prestigious and reasonably well-paid position.
In 1930, the average female teacher would be paid 48 won a month ― that is, twice the average salary of an unskilled female worker.
It was commonly understood that a woman worked only until she married ― with some professionals being an exception. Married life was seen as incompatible with work, and this view was commonly held by women themselves.
Perhaps such was really the case, since in the era before gas stoves, vacuum cleaners and running water, mundane family tasks were very time-consuming, leaving almost no time for anything else.
The system of obligatory or near-obligatory retirement of married women lasted until the 1980s, when the growth of feminist consciousness and technological changes finally made work and family compatible.
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.
