Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea by Hwasook Nam (review)

The democratization of South Korea in 1987 was the culmination of a long-fought series of contestations by dissident activists, intellectuals, workers, and students, working in cooperation against the forces of dictatorship. Yet when one peruses the public discourse and popular media in South Korea, one is left with the nagging question, where are the women? In both popular and academic depictions of anti-authoritarian and labor activism, South Korean men are given the lion's share of attention. This selective representation of resistance not only diminishes the role of Korean woman factory workers, or yŏgong, in these two areas, but also threatens to distort the chronology of how it all came to be.

Nam Hwasook seeks to address this failing and demands reflection on the persistent retrospective peripheralization of yŏgong, and establishes continuities from colonial to present-day South Korea though three pivotal moments in Korean labor history. Women in the Sky chiefly concerns the yŏgong, confronted by the state, whether colonial Japanese or South Korean, and by their Korean male counterparts in the labor and democracy movements through an examination of state and society, gender, and labor. What is apparent throughout her narrative is the continuing subordination of yŏgong interests at their expense, in favor of the normative nodongja (laborer) and minju (democratic) activist, both assumed to be male.

In Chapters One to Three, Nam examines colonial-era representations of yŏgong across the ideological spectrum, including bourgeois nationalists, Christians, and socialists, and illustrates that in the case of yŏgong exploitation, their main antagonists in the 1930s Pyongyang rubber strikes were not Japanese, but instead Korean factory owners of the nationalist camp. Nam considers these strikes as not only being the first focal point in the shaping of labor by Korean workers but also its significance to gender relations (pp. 24 and 27).

Korean male intellectual projections of women strikers, such as Kang Churyong, as "rescuers of the female masses," met with early feminist activist conceptions of a "genuine new woman" (pp. 46–47). It is in this context Nam presents post-liberation representations of yŏgong militancy in popular media in three types of stories employed by the Korean left and right, as an unusual event, "wailing woman stories," and as yŏt'usa (female fighter) (pp. 66–68). Notable is the mention of colonial-era hakch'ul (from the student movement) and the proliferation of Reading Societies (RS), socialist study groups, as organizing spaces for yŏgong, both making an appearance in the 1970s and 1980s, functioning in the same manner and in greater scale.

Chapter Four involves the second focal point of the Pusan Chobang textile strikes of the early 1950s whereby she identifies the colonial continuities of both the 1930s and the Sanpo (Industrial Patriotic movement) wartime labor-mobilization regime, into the landscape of postwar labor in South Korea with the "factory self-management movement," and the institutionalization of both ideological and personnel continuities of bourgeois nationalist reformers and Christian intellectuals under United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) (p. 92). The Chobang strikes precipitated the drafting of South Korea's first labor bills and the securing of the rights to collective bargaining. Though made possible through yŏgong participation, the consequence was the monopolization of regular employment and union leadership by men.

Chapter Five addresses the betrayal of yŏgong by their male counterparts in Korean labor through the establishment of a gendered system in Park Chung-hee's developmental state. Despite the dual-exploitation of women by male-led unions, the enshrining of the male breadwinner in both the public and in the household, Nam demonstrates yŏgong as having mobilized against male-centered labor and developing a "gendered class consciousness and militant activism" (p. 112). This in turn allowed for the establishment of autonomous and democratic labor activist spaces for women...