State, Rural Women, and Domestication in Korea: The Aspiring Middle Class

This book explores the dynamic interactions between the state and society during the industrialization of South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on rural women as a marginalized social group.

By illuminating rural women’s interactions with the state and their aspirations for entering the middle class, it effectively reveals insights into the gender and class perspectives of industrialization in South Korea. Utilizing an analysis of personal letters from peasant movement activists, documents and periodicals issued by the Korean Catholic Peasant Women’s Organization, as well as in-depth interviews with farmers, housewives, activists of the peasant movements, and governmental officers, this book represents a reconsideration of state-society relations, as well as a reinterpretation of housewife ideology theory.

Highlighting the often-invisible experiences of marginalized rural women, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Korean Studies, Women’s Studies, and Rural Studies.

Jaok Kwon is a research fellow in the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her research interests include the sociology of development, labor and gender in East Asia, and transnational labor migration.

Table of contents

Introduction: Modernization, the State, and Rural Women 1. Rural Development in the 1960s and 1970s in South Korea 2. (Re)defining Work: Rural Women in Productive and Domestic Labor 3. Family Planning, Nation Building, and Rural Motherhood 4. Rural Women as Saving Agents: The Morals of Frugality, Thriftiness, and Saving 5. State-led Rural Women’s Organizations and the Making of Rural “Housewives” 6. Gendered Social Mobility Strategies and Limited Negotiation Conclusion: Gender, Class, and State-Society Relations