Life and Work of Korean War Widows during the 1950s

Abstract

This paper examines the realities of life and work for women during the 1950s through life history interviews with Korean War widows. The 1950s was a time when many women began to enter the public arena in South Korea. This period witnessed, at the level of social discourse, radical discussions on women’s economic activities in relation to the goal of women’s liberation. What characterized the dominant discourse of the day was an activist thrust that defended women’s entry into jobs outside the home as a natural outcome of the changed conditions of the era, as a matter of women’s human rights, or as a prerequisite for the reconstruction of Korean society. On the other hand, however, the realities of war widows’ lives in the 1950s show glaring discrepancies from what the discourse produced by contemporary journals portrayed. Most war widows spent their lives playing the role of family head, caring for children, and supporting their in-laws. It is hard to find signs of the changing status of widows in the family corresponding to their expanded economic responsibilities. Most war widows maintained their daughterin-law roles while also assuming the role of breadwinner for the family. In short, there was a gap between the image of modern women produced by intellectuals and the actual life stories of war widows. A major reason for this divergence is the fact that women began their economic activities to secure the livelihood of their families following their husbands’ deaths. For war widows having a job often meant becoming even more bound up in the framework of traditional value systems and family institutions, rather than a process of achieving their own individual rights. In the cases of war widows who sought to work not for family reasons but of their own volition, we find that opposition from the family often thwarted their desires. Although ending in failure, the life courses of this latter group reveal much about how, during the 1950s, a radical and modern consciousness was forged while the traditional family system and pre-modern consciousness persisted.