October 1st, 2025

We skipped a day because September 30th is truth and reconciliation day, so there was no school as it is a national holiday. Because of that we are back with my Women’s history class. Today was about domesticity in Cold War era South Korea. This is the last class before our lectures on the DPRK.

The bus that I was waiting for never showed up so I had to get the next departure, so I was late but thankfully didn’t miss anything. So, the South Korea version of domesticity was influenced by Japan and America. It was developed during the colonial period. So at first it was Japanese based but during the Cold War it shifted to being more like America, with mass consumerism that housewives wanted to emulate. There was a gap between economic growth and consumer sentiment.

Many women in South Korea were encouraged to be “full-time” housewives, which represented the domestic role and supremacy of the “good wife” precept that followed (arguably still follows) women around. Full-time housewives also did non-domestic labour but this did not receive any attention. Many South Korean housewives from the 50s to the 80s worked in small family firms and participated in ROSCAs. These are an informal network of pooling money, people pitch in I money and then one person gets all of it for that month, there is a constant rotation on who gets the money next time around. None of this was recorded by officials as when the census came around housewives would just say they worked at home, so their economic activity was never recorded.

Married South Korean women challenged the patriarchy by arming or borrowing money. Women used these ROSCAs and whatnot to gain financial agency within the home and participate in the consumerist society. Many women also worked in sideline businesses.

We ended class by talking about the purse strings debate. It refers to the conflicts between a husband and wife over who had control of the family finances. Mass media like magazines and radio, created images that portrayed this gendered divide over finances like omen being more concerned over buying things for the home while husbands were more interested in fun things. There were questions over who should control the finances, the wife or the husband?

She then brings up the South Korean show called Reply (1988), in the scene she showed us a son is deliberately creating problems in the home so his mother feels needed. This is because apparently the mom was depressed over her husband and children becoming more independent and not needing her to cook and clean for them. So he steps up to make the men in the house useless so she has something to do. This was portrayed as a sweet thing but my professor and the students felt it was weird, I agree.

This is where the class ended and next we will get into the DPRK.