Women in the Sky

Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea

Hwasook Nam

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501758263
• eBook ISBN: 9781501758270
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

Winner 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 movement. Women in the Sky opens and closes with stories of high-altitude sit-ins—a phenomenon unique to South Korea—beginning with the rubber shoe worker Kang Churyong's sit-in in 1931 and ending with numerous others in today's South Korean labor movement, including that of Kim Jin-Sook.

In Women in the Sky, Nam seeks to understand and rectify the vast gap between the crucial roles women industrial workers played in the process of Korea's modernization and their relative invisibility as key players in social and historical narratives. By using gender and class as analytical categories, Nam presents a comprehensive study and rethinking of the twentieth-century nation-building history of Korea through the lens of female industrial worker activism.

1

A “WOMAN-IN-THE-SKY”

Female Workers on Strike in Colonial Pyongyang

In the early morning hours of May 29, 1931, a hundred or so Pyongyang citizens walking near the Ŭlmiltae Pavilion were surprised to find a woman squatting on top of the pavilion’s roof, making a feverish speech. She said she would jump to her death if anybody brought a ladder to the roof. Ŭlmiltae, a popular site for morning walks for Pyongyang citizens, was perched on the edge of scenic Moran Peak on the northern shores of the Taedong River, which runs across the city of Pyongyang from northeast to southwest. The pavilion building where she sat was a little more than twenty-four feet above the ground on the front (southern) side, but the opposite (northern) side was built on a thirty-six-foot-high Koguryŏ-period stone embankment, a part of the Pyongyang fortress that followed steep mountain ridges to the north.1 A morning walk through the Ŭlmiltae area was a popular activity for Pyongyang citizens and became part of nationalist programs for nurturing modern citizens through a healthy lifestyle.2 For the purpose of grabbing the attention of the public, the roof of the Ŭlmiltae was thus a superb and creative choice for a protest. The woman’s unprecedented tactic created a sensation among her astonished audience and attracted national news media attention to her and the strike that pushed her up on the roof.

She explained later how she had climbed up on the roof. She had purchased a roll of cotton cloth, tied a stone on one end of it, and hurled it above the roof until it caught. The Pyongyang police sent dozens of officers in three cars and brought in firefighters to find ways to make her come down. This unusual instance of a working-class woman taking a bold action in public and, moreover, making “eloquent” (talbyŏn) speeches on heavy-duty subjects such as solidarity of the proletariat (musanja) and the deplorable actions of employers caught media attention, and her story made national news the following day.3 In the following weeks the Dong-A ilbo (Tonga ilbo; East Asia Daily), a major bourgeois nationalist Korean-language newspaper, reported almost daily on her and on the strike that propelled her to start the sensational high-altitude sit-in.4 The paper also bequeathed to us the iconic photo of the woman, Kang Churyong, on the roof of the Ŭlmiltae Pavilion. A nationalist journal, Tonggwang (Eastern Light), published an interview with Kang in its July 1931 issue.5 The author of the Tonggwang interview article, writing under the pen name Muhojŏngin (“A person of no-name house”), stated that Kang’s speech during the sit-in showed “the [high] level of class consciousness of the Woman-in-the-Sky [ch’egongnyŏ].” After she explained how the strike at her factory, P’yŏngwŏn Rubber, was in fact a pattern-setting battle that would affect the fate of two thousand rubber workers in Pyongyang, Kang told the crowd she would not come down unless the president of P’yŏngwŏn Rubber came to her and rescinded the wage cut order. If he refused to do so, she continued, “I would consider death as an honor, as a representative of the working masses (kŭllo taejung).”6

Newspapers tried to capture and sensationalize her unprecedented demonstration tactic by calling her “oksang yŏ(ja)” (a woman on the roof), or “Ŭlmiltae ŭi yŏin” (a woman of Ŭlmiltae), or “yŏ(ja) t’usa” (a female fighter).7 Poet Kim Ch’angsul called Kang “Ŭlmiltae sang ŭi t’usa” (a fighter on the Ŭlmiltae) and “Sŏbu chŏnsŏn ŭi yŏt’usa” (a female fighter of the Western Front) who charted a “new tactic in aji-p’ŭro ” (agitation-propaganda).8 Some admired her as “yŏjangbu” (a female changbu [manly man]).9 What became the defining moniker for her, however, was “ch’egongnyŏ” (a woman-in-the-sky), a strange nickname initially given in a Dong-A ilbo article from May 30 in its sensational headline, “A Woman-in-the-Sky Suddenly Appeared on Pyongyang’s Ŭlmiltae.”

In this way a new type of female political actor was born. Conditions that allowed a factory woman to steer national attention had been in the making since the early 1920s. The labor movement in colonial Korea had developed into a mature stage by the early 1930s, and women workers actively participated in these developments. By the early 1930s socialist labor activism had grown in strength, and industrial workers were being called on to form the foundation of a revolution. By the time P’yŏngwŏn Rubber workers went on strike in May 1931, women workers, textile and rubber workers in particular, were already veterans of many brutal strikes. At the peak of this extraordinary wave of female worker militancy, Kang Churyong added a new tactic of high-altitude sit-in to the rich repertoire of resistance in the workers’ arsenal and brilliantly succeeded in attracting the attention of the larger society. Equally important was the fact that a segment of elite society, forced by the reality of intensifying class conflict in a society seriously hit by the effects of worldwide depression, was ready to be drawn to her story. Kang sat on the roof of the Ŭlmiltae at a particular moment when the labor question was painfully touching a nerve in the Korean bourgeois nationalist movement. Of all the labor disputes in the country, rubber and knitwear workers’ challenge in Pyongyang was especially agonizing to Pyongyang’s business elite because the majority of factory owners in these industries were Koreans, and this local elite maintained deep ties to the region’s Protestant nationalist movement. Kang Churyong’s action was spotlighted in the national media in this context, and the stakes were high in terms of the legitimacy of the bourgeois Christian leadership of the city. How society responded to the cries of Pyongyang rubber workers at this politically critical juncture in colonial Korean history thus reveals both the potentials and the limitations of the bourgeois nationalist movement on questions of class and gender.

A socially active woman was not a novelty in Korea in the early 1930s. Colonial Korean media had carried “heated” debates on “New Woman” (sinyŏsŏng) figures since the 1920s, and stories of women actively engaging in social and political movements were not unfamiliar to Korean readers by the time Kang appeared on the roof of the Ŭlmiltae. By 1931 the women’s movement had been a noticeable force in the Korean social and anticolonial movements for a decade. A women-only united-front organization, the Kŭnuhoe (Rose of Sharon Society), was jointly created by socialist and nonsocialist women activists in May 1927, as the sister organization of the national united-front organization Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society, also established in 1927). The Kŭnuhoe had established over sixty chapters across the country and overseas, engaging thousands of members, by the time it collapsed in 1931 (see chapter 2).10 The presence of women as active political agents was thus not a novel phenomenon by the late 1920s.11 Kang’s case, however, was especially jarring because she was not a typical “new woman” actor, conventionally understood as a product of modern education.12 She was a rubber factory worker who lacked formal education, yet she was making the bold move of appearing in public and representing her fellow workers. Her public action of a solitary high-altitude sit-in was the first of its kind in Korean labor history and as such generated significant interest across society. At the end of 1931 Chungang ilbo recalled Kang’s action as “a new record in the history of labor-capital relations in Korea.”13 Her action is today being acknowledged as the first instance of the mind-boggling phenomenon of widespread high-altitude sit-ins in the South Korean labor movement since the 1990s. This phenomenon has become a highly visible marker of the unresolved labor question and the continuing militancy of South Korean workers today, a question discussed in detail in chapter 6.

“A Woman-in-the-Sky Suddenly Appeared” in Pyongyang

The first report of Kang’s Ŭlmiltae sit-in in Dong-A ilbo on May 30 that starts with the sensational headline, “On Pyongyang’s Ŭlmiltae, A Woman-in-the-Sky Suddenly Appeared,” ends with an observation that provides a clue to why Kang earned her nickname. It reads: “Juxtaposed to the Chimney Man [yŏndol-nam; entotsu-otoko in Japanese] in labor disputes in Japan, a woman factory worker in a Pyongyang labor dispute staying in the air on the roof of the Ŭlmiltae makes a very good comparison point [hodaejo].”14 “Chimney Man” was the nickname originally given to Japanese labor activist Tanabe Kiyoshi, whose sensational high-altitude sit-in on a factory chimney the previous year during a strike at the Kawasaki factory of Fuji Gas Cotton Spinning had garnered much attention in Japan.15 A labor dispute there over wage cuts and layoffs had hit an impasse, and on November 16, 1930, a young activist from the Japan Labor-Farmer Party climbed up a tall chimney and refused to come down. A train carrying the Shōwa emperor was scheduled to pass by the area on the 21st, and the police were fearful of the emperor seeing the red flag flown high on the chimney by Tanabe. Frantic negotiations ensued, mediated by the police and Labor and Farmer Party delegates, while thousands of onlookers on the ground watched the drama. In the end, thanks to Tanabe’s attention-grabbing act, an agreement favorable to the workers was reached, and Tanabe came down from the chimney after 130 hours and 22 minutes.

Tanabe’s feat was duly reported in Korean news media, and other “chimney man” events that followed during the early 1930s in Japan were also reported in the Korean press.16 Considering the fact that the Japanese newspaper Asahi shinbun, which reported on Tanabe’s chimney man incident closely, was widely circulating in colonial Korea, as were major Japanese magazines, including Kaizō, whose January 1931 issue featured an article titled “What Is Chimney Man?” it is certain that the term “chimney man” was well known among Korean news reporters by May 1931.17 And at least one newspaper account called Kang “a chimney woman” (yŏndol-nyŏ) in a 1933 article reporting on her death.18 But it was the term coined by Dong-A ilbo, “Woman-in-the-Sky,” that was used much more often for Kang.

The strike at the P’yŏngwŏn Rubber factory started on May 17, provoked by the announcement of wage cuts.19 Wages for rubber shoe workers in Pyongyang had already been lowered significantly in the previous year, in spite of a massive solidarity strike in the city by over 1,800 workers at ten rubber factories. Then in early 1931, management at P’yŏngwŏn Rubber, a small Korean-owned company employing forty-nine workers, spearheaded a new round of even deeper pay cuts from 4.5 chŏn (a chŏn is one one-hundredth of a Korean wŏn), 3.6 chŏn, and 2.7 chŏn per pair in different categories of rubber shoes to 4, 3, and 2 chŏn, respectively.20 When the workers went on strike, the company began to hire new employees and fired all striking workers. Women workers then responded by organizing a hunger alliance (tansik tongmaeng) and occupied the factory on May 28. The “new tactic” of a factory sit-in was thwarted by the police, however, who evicted the strikers and began to patrol the factory grounds and arrest workers. Driven out of the factory by the police and watching fellow women workers crying, Kang Churyong later told Muhojŏngin, the interviewer from journal Tonggwang, that she contemplated committing suicide in protest but instead decided to perform a risky high-altitude sit-in on the Ŭlmiltae Pavilion. That way at least she could speak to her heart’s content to the public about the injustices the company had inflicted on workers. Kang Churyong had lasted close to nine hours on the roof until about 8:40 a.m., when three firefighters snuck up from behind her and pushed her down into a net that had been installed underneath before the operation. Kang lost consciousness after the fall and was subsequently arrested on May 29. After her arrest, fifteen female workers again stormed the factory, but the police dispersed them a second time.21

After the initial shock of a public sit-in, Kang Churyong surprised the public once more by starting a hunger strike in the police station, which lasted seventy-six hours “without drinking even a single drop of water.”22 Women strikers participating in the hunger strike grew to more than thirty with support pouring in from factory workers in the area and several labor organizations.23 But management remained adamant. Still, a group of thirty-plus workers continued to gather in front of the factory gate, and police were deployed there to prevent another worker “attack” on the factory. Kang Churyong was released on May 31, just before midnight, but the police arrested four other colleagues of Kang the next day. Those four also started a hunger strike, which lasted fifty-seven hours until they were released on June 3. The Dong-A ilbo news report of June 5 emphasized that the women “shocked society” by refusing to take “even a drop of water or a spoonful of rice” for so many hours.24

As the company brought in more strikebreakers, striking women workers set out to harass and discourage newly hired workers. Because striking workers waited outside the building, scab hires had difficulty moving in and out of the factory. At one point when newly hired workers tried to get away from the strikers by boarding a streetcar, more than a dozen women workers lay down on the tracks. When others attempted to get away in automobiles, women workers threw stones and, according to the Japanese-language newspaper Chōsen shin-bun, even feces, at the cars that carried the new hires.25 On one occasion a rock shattered a car window. Physical altercations between new hires and strikers occurred often, and at one point eight scab workers were captured and taken to the strike headquarters, where they had to “apologize” to strikers after receiving what one newspaper termed “various persuasions.”26 By June 4, thanks to these militant anti-scab tactics, the number of new hires working at the factory dropped from thirty-one to nineteen, and the following day workers rushed to the factory again, confronted the president of the company, and demanded, while leaving the issue of fired workers aside, that the company pay the new hires the original, pre-cut, wage rates if it wished to resolve the strike.

As soon as she was released from police custody, “far from being demoralized,” Kang “immediately went back t...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Translation
• 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
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index