Modern Womanhood, the Ideology of the Housewife, and Young Female Rural–Urban Migrants in the 1960s and 1970s in South Korea

Abstract

This paper attempts to clarify how young female rural–urban migrant workers were positioned within the ideology of the housewife as a form of modern womanhood, which was regulated by the developmental state as part of the modern nation-state building in the 1960s and 1970s in South Korea, by analyzing media discourses on the mobility, space and labor of single female workers. First, within the ideology of the housewife, in which women were required to settle down in the private sphere away from the main breadwinners after the Korean War, the mobility of young rural girls was depicted as ‘unsettled’ and ‘unstable’ and thus was socially deviant relative to the ‘settled’ and ‘cared for’ women in the private sphere. Second, the working space as well as the residential space for single female workers was illustrated as a loss of control of their bodies and sexuality under the normative ideology of the housewife, which led to the idealization of the institution of marriage as the final savior for single female workers. Finally, under the patriarchal system and the redefinition of women’s labor in the developmental state based upon familism, the labor by single female workers was ‘housewifized’ either as ‘filial piety’ or a ‘natural duty’ to the family as well as to the motherland.