Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2023 John K. Fairbank Prize and the 2023 James B. Palais Prize.
Women in the Sky examines Korean women factory workers'' century-long activism, from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on gender politics both in the labor movement and in the larger society. It highlights several key moments in colonial and postcolonial Korean history when factory women commanded the attention of the wider public, including the early-1930s rubber shoe workers'' general strike in Pyongyang, the early-1950s textile workers'' struggle in South Korea, the 1970s democratic union movement led by female factory workers, and women workers'' activism against neoliberal restructuring in recent decades.
Hwasook Nam asks why women workers in South Korea have been relegated to the periphery in activist and mainstream narratives despite a century of persistent militant struggle and indisputable contributions to the labor movement and successful democracy mo
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. A "Woman-in-the-Sky": Female Workers on Strike in Colonial Pyongyang
2. Factory Women in the Socialist Imagination: The 1930s
3. Coping with Women Strikers: Nation, Class, and Gender under Colonial Rule
4. Factory Women in the Postwar Settlement: The 1950s
5. Women Workers in Industrializing Korea: From the 1960s to the 1980s
6. Female Strikers in Recent Decades and the Politics of Memory
