Technology and Culture

In familiar narratives on industrialization in South Korea, the focus has been on its relations with rapid economic development from the 1960s to the 1980s and the male actors involved in the process, such as politicians, technocrats, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Hwasook Nam's Women in the Sky conveys a different story: a history of female factory workers and their struggles, going back to the 1920s, when Korean industry [End Page 363] emerged under Japanese colonialism. This book is aligned with recent literature—such as Janice C. H. Kim's To Live to Work (2009) and Soonok Chun's They Are Not Machines (2003)—reconsidering the women-led union movement in colonial Korea and postcolonial South Korea, which in the past has been devalued as a simple reaction against material poverty and as lacking an ideological or political foundation. At the same time, it suggests reconsidering female factory workers not as oppressed by capitalists, the state, and the patriarchal system in individual labor disputes, but as manual laborers who had a new identity through industrialization. Nam reveals that this is a valid lens to probe the country in the twentieth century, as Ruth Barraclough does in Factory Girl Literature (2012).

By highlighting the creative and militant ways of female factory worker–activists and by revealing the networks through which they conceived such strategies and developed class- and gender-consciousness and further solidarity, the author presents a series of portraits of extraordinary women activists in a century-long continuum. The author describes Kang Churyong—a female worker at a rubber shoe factory, who drew her country's attention with a speech during her sit-in on the roof of a famous pavilion in colonial Korea in 1931—and her colleagues, who had already experienced bitter strikes against Korean companies since the 1920s, and their link to communist activists; Yi Oesŏn and her anonymous female coworkers at Chosŏn Spinning and Weaving factory, who played crucial roles in industrial disputes in 1951 and 1952 and, in turn, the enactment of the Labor Standard Act, which stipulated rights for labor disputes, labor unions, and conditions at work, including the maximum working hours of eight hours a day and forty-eight hours a week in 1953; and several female worker-activists at export-industry factories such as textile, wigs, and electronics companies in the 1960s and 1970s, who developed their grassroots organizational power in relationship with Christian organizations and set gender-specific agendas, while male workers ignored their actions and even sometimes helped to oppress them for fear of losing their jobs. The author concludes the narratives of female factory worker–activists with a story of another woman in the sky, Kim Jinsook, once a worker in a textile factory and one of the few female welders in a male-dominated shipyard and a legendary activist, and her 309-day sit-in atop a crane in a shipyard of Hanjin Heavy Industries in 2011. By describing the unprecedented nationwide solidarity of diverse social movements and individuals beyond her shipyard coworkers that Kim drew, Nam reminds readers of the continuing, albeit invisible, contributions of female manual workers to "the labor and democracy struggle in Korea," which she dates to colonial Korea.

This book is a history of labor with a focus on the labor movement across industries, rather than a history of labor in a specific industry or company that historians of industry or technology might expect. This means that the author hardly pays attention to what the female workers actually did in their [End Page 364] workshops or how their labor was organized, the unique characteristics of individual industries such as recruiting, or labor processes or workplace culture that might have shaped their subjectivities in different ways. However, even for those more interested in labor in detail, this book is a useful and interesting analysis that glimpses the history of labor beyond the period of rapid industrialization and reminds us of...