Women's Class Mobility and Identities in South Korea A Gendered, Transnational, Narrative Approach

Abstract

In examining post-war south korea, we cannot but be struck by the rapid decrease of farm work and the dizzying increases in urban production and petty-entrepreneurial work over the course of a single generation. It is remarkable, for example, that from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s the farming population declined by almost 50 percent. Indeed, South Korea is an exemplar in the development industry and a popular example in the annals of development studies (Amsden 1989). Sociologists, however, have reached little consensus about the meaning of these structural transformations and the nature of their effects on individual and familial trajectories. In consideration of the reorganization of the labor market, even some of the most basic numbers are debated because analysts do not agree on how to characterize and classify post–Korean War jobs.