Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea

The labor movement in Korea played an enormously important role in the anticolonial/nationalist movement before 1945 and in the democratization of South Korea. Labor's significance has long been recognized by Korean historians, but most of their studies have been from a class framework that focused on men. As Hwasook Nam, in her new book Women in the Sky, states, women industrial workers (yŏgong)—their struggles, contributions, and issues—have largely been invisible. This is no longer true, however, thanks to Nam's work and that of Chun Soonok, Janice C. H. Kim, Seung-Kyung Kim, Theodore Yoo, and others. Historians now recognize that women were often at the forefront in the movement for labor rights, and for democracy and social justice while dealing with issues of gender. This book provides further evidence of this fact.Nam's book covers the women in the labor movement from around 1930 to the 2010s. It is not a survey; rather, it focuses on specific episodes and on the remarkable women associated with them. The book examines the early rubber industry in Pyongyang in the early 1930s. It also explores the labor struggle at the Choson Spinning and Weaving plant in Busan, 1951–52, and surveys women laborers in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The book ends with the labor movement in the period of democratization and neoliberalism, when women found themselves overrepresented in nonunionized, contingent, precarious, and low-paid jobs, with a focus on a shipyard strike in Busan.Nam's research has uncovered some dramatic moments and fascinating people that illustrate the issues and roles of women in Korean labor history. She begins with her first “woman in the sky,” Kang Churyong, a rubber plant worker who on May 30, 1931, climbed to the top of the Ulmil Pavilion, which overlooked a major square in Pyongyang. While perched precariously high above, she made an eloquent, impassioned speech to astonished onlookers about the hardship that recently imposed wage cuts would bring to workers and their families. Nam ends with another “woman in the sky,” the labor activist Kim Jin-Sook, who “shocked society” with a thirty-day sit-in atop a tall crane in a Busan shipyard to draw attention to workers’ grievances. In between these two incidents, the author presents other women who spearheaded labor activism. For example, the author narrates the “extraordinary struggle of women factory workers” during the politically oppressive 1970s, when President Park Chung Hee assumed near-dictatorial powers and brutally suppressed dissent (151). Laborers at that time who attempted to organize strikes were met with physical violence at the hands of company thugs and riot police. But Nam only briefly mentions the most famous incident, the female-led strike at the YH Trading Company that was a catalyst for the unrest that preceded Park's assassination by his security chief. This brief treatment of such a key incident follows a pattern in which Nam focuses more on the lesser-known stories in the history of Korean women workers.Nam points out women workers’ special difficulties. First, labor itself suffered from Korea's hierarchical society and its Confucian disdain for the manual workers who occupied its lower rungs. Then there was the added burden of working in a highly patriarchal society. Patriarchy was especially pronounced in Korea. Women factory workers were called kongsuni, a derogatory term implying that they were of low status, immature, unsophisticated, and, as the author explains, sexually approachable (172). When women workers protested appalling working conditions, management often responded with violence that turned sexual (127). The author examines the connection between the women's labor movement and the feminist movement and the general effort to improve women's rights in Korea. Here it should be noted that she differs with the work of Hagen Koo and others, who argue that women labor leaders became concerned with feminist issues only after democratization began in the late 1980s. Instead, she argues that the important turning point was the “heightened gender consciousness” that emerged among women factory workers in the late 1970s (138).The author asks why, if women were so important in democratic unions, their contributions have been largely forgotten. She attributes this loss partly to the fact that most histories of the movement were written by men, some of whom believed that women labor activists focused on shop-floor issues rather than political ones. Another major reason women have been left out of these histories, she argues, was that after labor's key role in the democratic movement of 1987, shifts in South Korea's economy led to the decline of the low-skill industries such as shoes and textiles where female workers were most concentrated. As a result, women's role in the labor movement was diminished and their past contributions were forgotten.Nam presents no new interpretations. It is now well established just how important women industrial workers were in organizing strikes and promoting social justice and reform. Instead, she provides a highly readable, informative history that brings to light some previously neglected incidents in women's labor history. A major strength of her book is that it is well written, at times engagingly so, and it is clearly accessible even to readers without much background in Korean labor history or in Korean history more generally. She narrates women workers’ efforts to achieve goals as workers and to deal with their special concerns as women in male-dominated workplaces, which are universal in the story of modern labor.