In her fascinating book on factory women in colonial Korea, Janice C. H. Kim poses the question, “Were factory women's identities indeed defined by feminist, working-class, or nationalist consciousness? Or were their identities more complex, contingent, and transient?” (p. 4). Employing an impressive array of archival research, oral accounts, and theoretical frameworks, Kim provides a detailed and provocative account of the everyday experiences of factory women in colonial Korea.
Kim challenges long-standing narratives by feminists, nationalists, and Marxists that have largely focused on underscoring “the gender-specific abuses of industrial capitalism,” illustrating ethnic exploitation under Japanese colonial rule, or subsuming everything under class struggle. In doing so, Kim asserts that these approaches have undermined “the more intimate modes of identification” (p. 15). The author illuminates a more complicated world wherein factory women “vacillated between alliances based on ethnicity, race, class, gender, and age in various circumstances” (p. 165). Kim identifies a dual problematic. She seeks to find “a broader definition of women's political consciousness” as well as explore the shifting and multiple subjectivities of female labor (p. 16). Throughout the book, Kim eschews a unilateral interpretation and instead looks at how female employment underwent innumerable changes throughout the thirty-five years of colonial rule.
The book is divided into five chapters. Following an important introduction that lucidly positions this important study, Kim examines the complex transformations and processes of industrialization and urbanization against the backdrop of agrarian society in colonial Korea. “Through a myriad of bureaucratic and social scientific technologies,” Kim notes that the colonial government “set in motion the schemes to make the Korean population more amendable to political and productive programming” (p. 34). As the number of factories rose from 252 in 1911 to 4,261 in 1930, more women entered the workforce, constituting roughly 33 percent of the total industrial workforce. By the end of the colonial era, women and children could be found in skilled positions ranging from machine parts to munitions (p. 47).
In the second chapter, Kim examines the emergence of women's wage work. Kim masterfully documents the complex patterns, networks, and choices that shaped the modern family wage economy. Convincingly, she suggests that women's contributions to political economies were driven by familial, personal ties (p. 52). Of particular importance is her discussion of the impact of modernization and how it transformed the “setting of life and work” and “altered the characteristics of human alliances” (p. 55). According to the author, if women joined the workforce to appease their parents, they were “simultaneously planning for their future welfare” (p. 74).
The third chapter provides readers glimpses of the everyday life inside the factories. Kim carefully distinguishes the different industries and the gendered division of labor. For example, the food processing and rubber mills frequently hired older, married women, while the textile mills mostly hired single women. The author demonstrates a discerning eye for detail as she describes the stark and frenzied environment at the factories. While mechanization did transform the textile industries, the “modern procedures of drawing thread from cotton,” for example, were “based on timeless customs” (p. 81). The author also pays attention to the various tasks such as scutching, piecing, vulcanizing, as well as the dangerous working conditions in the factories. Equally illuminating are the author's insight into the recruitment process, draconian wage system, as well as a wide range of gender-specific abuses in industrial labor. Here, too, the author shows how interpersonal networks became very important on the shop floors and within the dormitories as women workers learned to “organize and assert their interest” over time (p. 96).
The study then turns to factory strikes. According to Government-General documents, the number of strikes increased from 36 in 1921 to 201 in 1931, involving 17,114 workers. The most compelling point the author makes is that the motives of women workers were “arguably more capitalist than socialist” (p. 126). For example, women workers competed with each other as “urban factory workers vehemently opposed the hiring of rural female recruits; housed workers envied day workers; women of varying skills and rank stayed away from each other; women of similar backgrounds kept to their own; women of different ages remained apart” (p. 117). While socialist and nationalists sought to subsume these strikes under the broader struggle against colonialism or capitalism, such lofty discourse could not help ordinary women as they struggled to articulate their daily grievances in the factories. Kim is quite correct to emphasize these demands by women workers, who articulated “not only designs for immediate relief but also long-ranging plans for the future,” such as extended holidays, financial compensation for work-related injuries, maternity leave, and unrestricted time for breastfeeding (p. 106). Of central importance to Kim's argument is a persistent concern over survival as well as “agency through association” (e.g., feelings of displacement and imprisonment)—that is, how women workers “embedded meaning into work” (p. 125).
In the final section, the author seeks to establish more firmly the impact of the Pacific War and the life courses of women workers. As Kim aptly shows, there is more we can learn from these crucial years, particularly the impact war had on women workers. Most studies on factory women end in the late 1930s with “highly politicized portraits of comfort women,” which simply reinforces “representations of colonial women as powerless people” (p. 130). Especially interesting is Kim's discussion of the Labor Volunteer Corps (chŏngsindae) and how activists and academics have used it interchangeably with comfort women, eliding “the diversity of women's wartime labor” (p. 130). More importantly, perhaps, Kim demonstrates how ordinary women recruited into war-related services not only diverged from their traditional roles but also engaged in wage work. The author is right to point out that women were offered a wide range of employment heretofore unavailable to them a decade ago in fields such as mining, electricity, aircraft manufacturing, and shipbuilding (p. 145). This is not to suggest that one laud Japan's imperialization movement, but, as Kim points out, the “values and motivations of citizens became closer to those of militarists” as wartime mobilization and policies “broadened the range of female employment” and “inspired different modes of identification” (p. 152). In conclusion, Kim observes that while war inhibited people from pursuing everyday activities, “paradoxically, it prompted enormous changes in the relationships among the groups and classes that constituted society” (p. 166).
In summary, among the book's many strengths is Kim's attentiveness to the quotidian and the popular forms of consciousness among ordinary women in colonial Korea. The book also sheds new light on our understanding of women workers after the Second Sino-Japanese War and the new types of work that women encountered. If the book has any shortcomings, the first is the absence of any discussion by the state and contemporaries in the Korean press about women and work in general. For example, how should they be treated in the workplace? Would industrial work interfere with their biological reproductions? The yŏgong (female factory worker) does become a troubling and visible figure by the 1920s. Second, Kim does not engage with the large proletarian literature on factory workers, which could have further supported her arguments. None of this should detract, however, from the contributions made by the book. It is eloquently written, thoroughly researched, and altogether engaging text. It is fresh in its approach and will certainly stimulate further discussion. Scholars in various fields, including women and gender studies and colonial studies, will benefit from this well-researched book.
