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Women in North Korea : From Revolution to Markets

The author is an expert on North Korean affairs in South Korea.
She holds a master's degree from Seoul National University and a doctorate from London School of Economics and Political Science, U. K. .
After passing the administrative examination, he worked for 27 years and nine months at the Ministry of Unification, which oversees South Korea's unification policy. He served as the South Korean representative at the negotiating table with North Korea.
She served as the President of Settlement Support Center for North Korean Refugees (Hanawon) from May 2009 to June 2012 and as the President of National Institute for Unification Education from August 2013 to February 2015.
When she was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., in 2006-2007, she realized that there were no English-language books about North Korean women, so she wrote a book for university students and scholars studying North Korea in the United States and other Western countries.
She analyzed the unyielding lives of North Korean women who led a North Korean-style market economy called Jangmadang.

저자는 한국 내 북한 문제 전문가이다. 서울대학교에서 석사 학위를, 영국 런던정경대학에서 박사 학위를 받았다.
행정고시에 합격한 후 한국의 통일 정책을 총괄하는 통일부에서 27년 9개월간 근무했다. 북한과의 협상 테이블에서 한국 측 대표로 활동했다.
2009년 5월부터 2012년 6월까지 북한이탈주민정착지원센터(하나원) 원장을, 2013년 8월부터 2015년 2월까지 국립통일교육원장을 역임했다.
2006~2007년 미국 워싱턴 D.C. 우드로윌슨센터에서 방문학자로 일하던 중 북한 여성에 대한 영문 서적이 없다는 사실을 깨닫고 미국을 비롯한 서방 국가에서 북한을 연구하는 대학생과 학자들을 위해 책을 집필했다. 그녀는 이 책에서 북한식 시장경제인 장마당을 이끄는 북한 여성들의 억척스러운 삶을 분석했다.

Nevertheless, women continued to work outside and inside of the home for the sake of their family and themselves.

It has been seventeen years since I published a book titled The Policy towards Women in North Korea (in Korean, 1991). During the past seventeen years, many changes have occurred, shedding new lights into the life of North Korean people. Kim Il Sung, the supreme leader of North Korea, died in 1994. North Korea suffered a great famine during the mid-1990s. One notable aftermath of the famine was a flood of refugees from North Korea to third nations or to South Korea. There were two inter-Korean Summits in 2000 and 2007, many rounds of separated families' reunion events, and many conferences and gatherings of socio-cultural exchanges. All these changes provided outsiders an opportunity to look into the secretive state.
Many friends of mine urged me to revise the aforementioned book in
accordance with the newly discovered facts about North Korea. However, for me, the new discoveries were rather reinforcing my argument in the book: Although North Korea claimed to emancipate its women as a part of socialist revolution, its political power succession from father to son reinstated the patriarchal social order and subjugated women to men. My argument remained strong and viable after almost two decades of publication. North Korean women were not emancipated, and the policy towards women in North Korea was not emancipating or gender-specific. Therefore I hesitated to add a mediocre book to the overabundant publications in the bookstores. Another book would be a torture to some and a bore to most readers. However, after I arrived at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC on April 2006, I realized how little outsiders knew about women in North Korea, and made up my mind. There should be at least one book about North Korean women in English, however boring it might be.
If one were to Google the term "North Korean Women," he or she would mostly find news headlines dealing with trafficking, slave labor, refugees etc. This creates an image of North Korean women as poor, weak, and defenseless. The image, of course, correctly portrays a number of North Korean women in desperation. After the great famine struck North Korea in the mid 1990s, many women fled to China and other neighboring countries to obtain foods. Many women were fallen victims to the human-trafficking and slave-labor. However, not all North Korean women were defenseless victims. Many other women vigorously fought against the famine, and survived. They tilted the barren soils and cultivated grains and groceries. They also bought and sold anything that could be changed into money and food. More women than men became the breadwinner of the family and managed the family to survive the famine. They were strong mothers and bald daughters. They were also new economic forces that drove North Korea to marketization.
This book is a history of North Korean women after the Liberation in 1945 to the present. Whereas my aforementioned book of 1991 was about public policy of North Korea, this book is about women's struggle since 1945. My argument is that women in North Korea have always been an active player, not a passive object, in the making of their life and the North Korean history. While North Korean government attempted to grant women "equality" through legal and social reforms, persistent social customs and economic conditions hampered women to gain equality in reality. It was women's struggles and continuous effort to obtain social recognition and change in gender relations.
North Korea launched a communist revolution during the late 1940s. The North Korean revolution attempted to change the whole society and the status of women. North Korean regime promised equality of men and women, and took measures to mobilize women into society outside of the home in accordance with the Marx-Engels' theory of women's emancipation. During this revolutionary era, from 1945 to 1950, women actively participated in social and political rallies and polls. During the disastrous Korean War women took the machines instead of their soldier husbands and sons, and cultivated the rice fields. Many women became the labor heroes and advanced into the Supreme People's Assembly. The proportion of women in the labor force reached up to a half, and the proportion of women in the People's Supreme Assembly recorded around 20 percent since the 1970s.
After North Korea claimed to complete the socialist revolution and designated Kim Jong Il as heir-apparent in the 1970s, however, North Korea began to lose interest on women's issues, insisting that it had accomplished
women's emancipation. Furthermore, the idolization of the Great Mothers, the mothers of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, demanded women to be loyal to their rulers and husbands. The Confucian tradition was reinstated. Nevertheless, women continued to work outside and inside of the home for the sake of their family and themselves. Women also opened a small but significant path to market by opting for "unemployed" Domestic Workshops instead of mandatory job assignments. Becoming the member of Domestic Workshops were rather highly rewarding, because they were allocated with consumer goods that the workshops were producing. In an economy of chronicle shortage of consumer goods, the access to consumer goods was not a bad deal. By the end of 1980s, contrary to the state statistics, seventy percent of married women in rural areas became "unemployed."
During the 1990s when North Korea's GDP was reduced by half, many women became the breadwinners of the family, since their husbands were practically unemployed. They cultivated vegetables in their small backyard, produced small handcrafts, or bought and sold goods that they obtained illegally by trading with the Chinese across the border. It was mostly women who kept their family alive. It was women who introduced markets to North Korea from the grass-roots. In a sense, it was women who made the regime muddle through during the economic debacle. As the economic crisis resulted in the increase of women's role in supporting their family, women's attitudes and consciousness regarding men and society began to change.
I did not visit North Korea until I had first published the aforementioned book. Only after the historical Inter-Korean Summit in 2000, I had many opportunities to visit North Korea. Although I was a member of government delegation that usually engaged in political affairs, I was naturally inclined to
Women in North Korea 8
9 Preface
watch women in North Korea, mainly because I had experienced discrimination as a woman, and also because I wanted to examine my book through the reality. I was amazed by the scene of farming women. During the spring farming season, the workers who were stooping down and manually planting rice in the field were all women. The only man I could see was standing far away, probably inspecting the field. Sure, I thought, work that needed to be done by stooping down was so menial that it did not suit men. Menial work should be done by women. It was what I heard so often from many women refugees from
North Korea.？
Even before I visited North Korea, I encountered many female refugees
among whom some escaped from the North as early as the 1970s. While I continued to watch the refugees, I realized significant changes in their attitudes corresponding to the period of their escape. Women who fled the North during the 1970s and 1980s kept the typical "virtues of Korean women" that meant to be polite, complaisant, and submissive to men. They often insisted that "women should be feminine." However, women who escaped after the late 1990s, after the period of the so-called "Arduous March," tend to be more assertive and to have a strong will to survive. They were survivors.
This book is to argue the active role of women throughout the history of North Korea. Women were directed or suggested to choose what the regime desired them to do. Women's response, however, was not always in accord with the regime's intention. Women's conscious or unconscious choices wove their lives and social conditions, as well as unwittingly changed the regime's path from time to time. I hope this book could contribute to enhancing the understanding of North Korean women who are perseverant survivors and adamant warriors.
This book is organized in chronological order. I divide the time span into three periods: from Korean Liberation in 1945 to the end of Korean War (1945~1953); from the post-war rehabilitation to the brink of the "Arduous March" (1953~1989); and during and after the "Arduous March" (1990~present).
The first period was the most dynamic and turbulent. It was the era of revolution. It was the era of passion and zeal for the abolition of the old order and the construction of new nation. The pure passion for change shaped the first state.
The question of when the second stage began would be not so easy. The War and post-War rehabilitation period together would make an independent period. Or, the post-War era could be included in the first phase of the North Korean revolution. However, I observed, there had been more circumstance- driven tactical decisions than strategic decisions regarding women since the end of the War. Women's legal status, in a sense, was almost fully settled in 1946 with the Sex Equality Law. No other legislation afterwards enhanced women's lot much further.
The last period was during the Arduous March. There could be another controversy when the Arduous March actually began. However, following a joint study project carried out by Sejong Institute, I designate the year 1989 as the beginning of the Arduous March. I was involved in a three-year project on North Korean society, "Continuities and Changes in North Korea," by the North Korean Research Center, Sejong Institute in Seoul during 2004-2005. The project yielded a seven-book series in 2006.1 Seven scholars who were engaged in the socio-cultural part of the study had a lengthy discussion about the periodization of North Korean change, and finally agreed on the year 1989 as the beginning of the Arduous March. At least articles dealing with social and cultural changes in the seven books had the year 1989 as the criterion.
I have quoted many testimonies in this book. The sources of the testimonies are existing publications and interviews. For the early stage of North Korean regime, I mostly relied on historic documents and publications, because there were only few defectors from North Korea who were able to testify women's conditions until the late 1980s. For the lives of women during the Arduous March, I mainly relied on materials of in-depth interviews with refugees from North Korea, because there were a flood of refugees from North Korea during the 1990s. Many NGOs in South Korea systematically carried out interviews and regional surveys targeting the refugees. Many scholars concerning North Korea also published a variety of books containing their in-depth interview results with the refugees. The list of books that contain interview materials is provided in Appendix 2.
In addition, for the above-mentioned joint study project, Sejong Institute carried out an in-depth interview series for three years. Each interview was carried out once a week, with some exceptions, for eight hours a day. Four to seven scholars of different disciplines met one refugee each week and recorded the whole interview with the refugee's consent. I heavily relied on the interview results. I attach the list of those interviewees and the date of interview in Appendix 1.
For Romanization of Koreans, I have followed the Standard Romani zation System of the National Institute of the Korean Language [국립국어원].
However, there are some exceptions:？- For Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il I have followed the North Korean
practices in their official publications and translations such as the Works
of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.？- For the North Korean place names and ideological terminology (e.g.
Juche) I also have followed the North Korean practices.？- For the North Korean publications, I followed the Library of Congress
romanization, for the sake of the retrieving the books from libraries.？- I have placed the family name last in Korean names except Kim Il Sung,
Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong-Suk and Kang Ban-Sok.？- Ihave inserted a hyphen between the two elements of personal names of
Koreans, except Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and author's own.

Preface
？Chapter I. Introduction
1.1. Korean Culture on Women
1.2. Colonization of Korea 2
1.3. Kim Il Sung and Women

Chapter II. North Korean Revolution and Women (1945-1953)
2.1. Formation of North Korean System
2.2. Legislation for "Sex Equality"
2.3. Reform Measures for "Sex Equality“
2.4. The Responses of Women

Chapter III. Reinstating the Patriarchal Oder (1953-1989)
3.1. Establishment of the Juche Thought System
3.2. Boasting of the Emancipation of Women
3.3. Working-Classization in Traditional Gender Relations
3.4. Patriarchal Order in the Family
3.5. Male Superiority in the Society
3.6. Under-Representation of Women in the Politics
3.7. Coping Strategy of Women

Chapter IV. The Arduous March and the Hour of the Women
4.1. Kim Jong Il Regime
4.2. The Great Famine and Its Social Impacts
4.3. The Plight of Women
4.4. The Hour of the Women
4.5. Changing Society and Women
Chapter V. Conclusion

Appendices
1. List of Interviews Carried out by the Sejong Institute
Appendix 2. List of Books based on Testimonies of the Refugees
Appendix 3. Major Laws related to the Status of Women
Appendix 4. A Note on the Rape in North Korean Penal Code

References
Index