Korean Culture

“Home is a Place to Rest”:
Constructing the Meaning of Work, Family and Gender in the Korean Middle Class*
Yi Eunhee Kim

I. Introduction Feminist scholarship since the eighties (e.g. Yanagisako 1979; Yanagisako and Collier 1987; Rapp 1987; Scott 1988; Yi E. K. 1986; Ginsburg and Tsing 1990; Peletz 1994; 1995; Thorne 1992; Weston 1990) has widely criticized the conceptual oppositions of family and work, production and reproduction, domestic and public, as long used in Western social science. According to the feminist critique of “androcentric” Western social theory, the analytic dichotomies of work/ family or production/reproduction have led to a lack of attention to women’s political and productive activities in Western social science. As Scott points out, women have not been treated as historical subjects because of these conceptual oppositions. Because gender is seen as relevant only to the private sphere of family, the discussion of labor or work in industrial society has been “production-centered,” overlooking the workers’ family and gender identities (Joyce 1987, 9; Bielby 1992, 283; Scott 1988; Yanagisako and Collier 1987, 24). Family or “domestic” life also has been treated as if it is set apart from the wider social, economic and political spheres. Insulated from the wider society, it has been viewed as the hold of tradition, “the focal point of all sorts of reproduction” (Yanagisako and Collier 1987, 22). In this analytic division, “universal” gender inequality has been ultimately explained in terms of the woman’s reproductive role in the family.
* Part of the present analysis was published in Korean in 1993. See Yi E. K. (1993b).

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The feminist critique of male-centered Western social theory further points out that the conceptual dichotomies of domestic and public, family and work, production and reproduction are cultural and historical constructs of Western industrial society. It has emphasized that work, family and gender are culturally and historically constructed and inseparable from each other (Scott 1988; Ginsburg and Tsing 1990). Work, for example, is not just an economic activity but also a cultural one, and its meanings are constructed within the social milieu. Therefore, in order to understand the nature of work in the economic sphere, we need to overcome the production-centered approach by looking beyond it (Joyce 1987, 9; Ong 1991, 280; Calagione and Nugent 1992, 5). In the same vein, family is not an unchanging biological entity but a cultural and ideological construct, which cannot be adequately understood in isolation from wider social, economic and political systems (Collier, Rosaldo and Yanagisako 1992; Peletz 1994; 1995). Utilizing this feminist insight, the present article will examine how in the Korean middle class the cultural construct of home as “a place to rest” is articulated by the work ideology in the public sphere of “production,” and how this interface between work and family is shaped by gender.1 The decades of rapid industrial growth in South Korea brought with it the rise of an affluent urban white-collar middle class who works for large industrial and bureaucratic organizations. Along with the rise of this middle class, everyday family life has undergone profound changes. Ancestral rituals and parental authority has declined, leading to the nuclearization of families. The ideals of equality, freedom and democracy are now well established not only as political ideals, but also as part of a new family ideology. This ideological change is most evident in the emergence of a new conception of home as a place to rest. Gender roles are no longer constructed in terms of a traditional hierarchy where man is viewed

1. The term “ideology” here is used in the widest sense to refer to the cultural symbols, meanings, and “common sense” understanding which order our everyday life.

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as “heaven” or “outside,” and woman as “earth” or “inside.” Instead, the concept of the division of labor is used in order to rationalize gendered segregation between family and work: the husband should be “recharged” at home before going back to work and society at large, and it is the wife’s job to help the husband rest and feel “comfortable” at home. This new conception in South Korea of the home as “a place to rest” clearly presents problems for the analytic division of domestic and public as found in Western social theory. The previous discussion of the urban family in Korea, without considering the cultural and historical specificity of Korean capitalism, invariably equated this new conception of the home with the Western ideal of the family as a “haven in a heartless world” (e.g. Cho Hy¡ng 1975; 1991, 174; Yi Hyo-jae 1990; Son S£ng-y¡ng 1995, 45; Yi Kwang-gyu 1975; Ch¡ng ¢n-h£i 1995). This perspective viewed non-working housewives in the middle class simply as consumers and biological reproducers. It understood the role of housewives in terms of an “affective” feminine role which is supposed to be “universal” to industrial societies (e.g. Cho Hye-j¡ng 1988; Cho Oakla 1988). Yet, it is well known that capitalistic development in Korea has little to do with the development of Western-style democracy and individualism. Needless to say, the rapid industrial growth in Korea, like Taiwan and Japan, has been largely directed by the state, which heavily intervened in the private sector (cf. Woo Jung-en 1991; Amsden 1989). Also, strong work ethics, as in Japan, express the primacy of “community” over “personal” life: commitment to work organization is given priority over family life. Because of this distinct public/private relationship, some scholars (e.g. Lodge 1987; 1991, 15-16; Vogel 1987; 1991) have called capitalism in East Asia “communitarian,” or “Confucian” in order to distinguish it from the more “individualistic” capitalism of the West. It is my argument that the view of home as a place to rest in industrial Korea is a cultural ideology produced and reproduced in the public sphere of “work,” where a man’s work commitment is considered more important than his family life. In the present article

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I first introduce the “traditional” pattern of gender segregation between “inside” and “outside” spheres and proceed to show that a “communitarian” work ideology in the middle class hinges on the Confucian conception of man’s commitment to “outside” activities and that the work ideology reinforces the male headship of the family and consequently the conception of family as a collective. Then, I examine the case of working women and show how the middleclass ideology of women’s self-development reaffirms gender hierarchy underlying the cultural conception of home as a place to rest. The mutual construction of work, family and gender in Korea as explored here sheds new light on the relationship among production, kinship/family, and gender in capitalistic society. In Western social theory, the development of large-scale industrial and bureaucratic organizations in modern industrial societies has always been viewed in opposition to the corporate functions of a family. In modern society, the theory goes, the nation-state and industrial organizations take over many of the corporate functions of family in precapitalistic society. As the importance of kinship as an organizing principle declines in industrial society, the man’s patriarchal authority in the family also becomes weak (Demos 1986; Stearns 1991). At the same time, the family becomes idealized as a “private” sphere, or “nuturant haven” where emotions and feelings are important (Collier, Rosaldo and Yanagisako 1992, 42). Also, it is generally agreed that it is the middleclass families rather than the lower- or upper-class families that conform to the model of the “privatized” nuclear family (Rapp 1987; Kanter 1977b). Even the feminist critique of Western social theory, which has stressed that conceptual oppositions of work/family, public/private, production/reproduction in social theory are in fact ideological constructs, has viewed those ideological constructs as the inevitable outcome of the separation of production and kinship in modern industrial economy (e.g. Yanagisako 1987; Frykman and Löfgren 1987; Rapp 1975; 1987; Ginsburg and Tsing 1990). At the same time, the subject and ideological products of modern formal organizations have been generally neglected in anthropological literature dealing with kinship and family.

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In this theoretical framework, strong familism or kinship is viewed as a hindrance to economic development. Hence, scholars once explained why China failed in modernization in terms of strong Confucian familism. In Korea, despite the tradition of strong Confucian familism, however, the rapid growth of large business groups has been a major characteristic of economic development.2 This raises the issue of what has become of the traditional family ideology, which emphasized the permanence of the family as a collective. Discussions of “Confucian capitalism” or collectivistic work ideology have supposed that loyalty to family has been transferred to the work group (Brandt 1987; Vogel 1987; 1991; Lodge 1987; 1991, 15-16). Yet, this interpretation contradicts comments made by the middle-class workers, who claim that they work hard for the family. Moreover, it does not adequately account for the competitive drive or strong motivation for success among them in this “Confucian” or “collectivistic” capitalism. The present analysis shows that even in the middle class, where work and family are separated, corporate organizations and families are not mutually constraining. In Korea, modern business and bureaucratic organizations have appropriated the traditional conceptions of family and gender and transformed them into a holistic conception of work, which reproduces the notion of family as a collective entity. More importantly, this mutual construction of work, family and gender reveals that the communitarian work ideology, which appears gender-neutral on the surface, perpetuates the secondary status of women in the labor market and in the family. This shows the critical importance of the cultural constitution of capitalism in understanding the issue of gender inequality, calling for the reconsideration of the feminist theory that assigns causal priority to “patriarchy” in explaining gender inequality in capitalistic society (Deyo 1984; Greenhalgh
2. Large business groups, called chaeb¡l in Korean, consist of a wide variety of companies engaged in diverse businesses, such as manufacturing, transportation, construction, services, and so forth. They are managed under the centralized supervision of the founding entrepreneur or his successor. Although diversified business groups are common to late-industrializing countries, according to scholars (e.g. Amsden 1989, 9), business conglomerates are larger than those in other countries.

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1985; Hartmann 1976; Green 1983; Lim 1983). The present analysis further suggests that gender equality can be achieved neither by “equal opportunity” in the economy nor by “equal division of labor” in the household. The first step toward gender equality, I argue, will be to critically reexamine the whole system of cultural meanings of work and family in which gender hierarchy is constituted. The data for the present study were largely collected through indepth interviews of 50 middle-class Koreans who lived in Seoul from 1989 to 1990. All the interviewees except one (widow) were married at the time of research and among them 16 interviewees were male and 34 were female. Although this was not a neighborhood study, the 32 female interviewees were selected largely from two different middle-class neighborhoods: one located in a huge apartment complex south of the Han’gang river, the other in a single-home area. Twenty of the interviewees lived in apartments and the majority of them were females in their thirties or late twenties with pre-school children. Eleven interviewees lived in the single-homes area and were mostly middle-aged women in their forties and early fifties at the time of the interviews. The majority of the female interviewees under 40 were college-educated. Many of the husbands were managers, government officials, professionals, or entrepreneurs. Sixteen male white-collar workers were separately interviewed, since female interviewees were reluctant to introduce their husbands for the study. All of the male interviewees were married and college-educated with the majority being in their thirties and working for business firms. Other occupations included 3 high school teachers, 1 newspaper reporter, and 1 government official.

II. From Inside/Outside to Home/Work Divisions by Gender At the heart of the conception of traditional family (chip), lies a hierarchial division of two gendered spheres of the “outside” which represented the family to larger society, the male sphere, and the “inside,” the female sphere. A Korean word, naewoe referring to a

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marital couple, literally means “inside and outside.” Confucianism, which was the ruling ideology of the last dynasty for 500 years, emphasized very strict segregation between the “inside” and the “outside.” The rigid segregation between men and women is well reflected in the structure of the traditional house. The house of the well-to-do yangban (the elite class of the last dynasty) was physically divided into the “outside” residence (sarang), where the man slept and entertained male guests, and the “inner room” (anpang), occupied by women and children.3 Men in the “outside” represented the family members to the community and the state. The oldest man in the “outside,” was called kajang, the head of the family. He was expected to supervise family members and took legal and moral responsibility for their conduct in the larger society. Transactions and contracts between individuals were not complete without the seal of the kajang. The state gave orders to the kajang, not to individuals (Kim Tu-h¡n 1969, 329). He also attended various community and lineage meetings, weddings, funerals, and other various rites as a representative of the family. Women, on the other hand, were more or less secluded from “outside” life. They could neither participate in politics nor represent the family to the state in the public sphere. Especially in yangban families women were not permitted to appear in the public sphere called “outside.” It has been well observed that until recently women were not present at any public meetings on village affairs. Shopping or going to the market was also the man’s job. The famous “law of the three followings of women” in East Asia was based on the Confucian notion that women cannot be present in the public domain without being represented by men. Women were always to be represented by men: when unmarried, she was represented by her father, when married, by her husband, and when widowed, by her son. This inside/outside distinction hinged on the Confucian theory of procreation that only a man receives his life force from his ancestors
3. The term yangban refers to the dominant social class of the Chos¡n dynasty (13921910), who were also its premier literati.

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and passes it to his male descendants (Deuchler 1987, 31). Hence only a male descendant could officiate at ancestral rituals and represent the family to the wider community. Membership in the “traditional” family was based on the principle that the eldest son succeeds the father’s position in the “outside” and that his wife succeeds the position of her mother-in-law in the “inside.” According to this principle, the eldest son, upon marriage, brings his wife into his family and continues to live with his parents and unmarried siblings. He inherits responsibility for the ancestral rituals and the largest share of family property. The younger son and his wife, on the other hand, remain as “junior” members of the family. They set up a household of their own within a few years after marriage and start a “branch” family line. On the other hand, female descendants did not have the prerogative to perform ancestral rituals nor to represent the family. A daughter was to lose her membership in her parent’s family upon marriage and become an “inside” member of her husband’s family. She had to devote herself to her husband’s family and become an ancestress of her husband’s family after her death. This Confucian principle was more strictly practiced in Korea than in China or Japan (Kim Kwang-Ok 1986, 111).4 In Korea, there was neither the concept of “heiress” as found in preindustrial Europe nor the idea of adopting a son-in-law as found in premodern Japan. Also, paramount emphasis was placed upon the continuation of the patrilineal family line through the unceasing performance of ancestral rituals. The family was conceptualized as a permanent entity that existed from generation to generation through endless links between father and son. Hence, the practice of adoption as a device to continue the family line was extremely widespread from the middle of the Chos¡n dynasty period (1392-1910) to the end of the colonial period (Peterson 1983, 34).5
4. According to Kim Kwang-Ok (1986, 112), it has been reported that in Hong Kong and Taiwan married daughters’ ancestral tablets are found in their natal families ancestral halls. 5. If a successor died without a son, the wife was expected to take over the position temporarily until a male heir was adopted from agnates (Kim Tu-h¡n 1969, 273).

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Men in the “outside” were formally responsible for the prosperity of the family and the general well-being of its members by being “successful” (ch’ulse) in society.6 Being successful in society, however, did not necessarily mean material success. In the gentry class a man’s moral reputation in the wider community was considered more important than his economic success for the upward mobility of the family (cf. Janelli 1978; Song Sunhee 1982). More concretely, the male members were expected to raise the status of the family by being recognized in the community for contributions to the larger society as a Confucian scholar or a bureaucrat (see Yi Eunhee Kim 1993a). Neo-Confucianism stressed the scholar-official’s responsibility for the political and cultural leadership of the wider community. As a political leader and educator, the scholar-official was obliged to serve the general welfare rather than private interests (see De Bary 1991, 1-17). Being “private” was equal to being “selfish.” He was expected to engage in “big affairs” in the larger society and to have higher-order interests at heart. He was not expected to be distracted from wider social concerns nor concerned with the “little” matters going on in the “inside” of the house. Therefore, men’s “outside” role in the “traditional” gender hierarchy placed a strong emphasis on the maintenance of community ties. According to a popular image of the yangban man, he spent most of his time in the “outside” and knew nothing about practical everyday-life matters such as household management (sallim) (also see Cho Hye-j¡ng 1988, 253). While the man’s “outside” role was to bring honor to the family by having an active community life in the public sphere, the practical responsibilities involved in managing the household economy on a day-to-day basis fell upon the women in the “inside.” A woman’s “inside” role was not simply “domestic” or “reproductive” (cf. S¡ S¡n-h£i 1997, 39). It was well recognized in Confucianism that the

Also, it was a custom to adopt a son from the “little house” when the “bit house” did not have one. When a close agnate was not available, a distant one was adopted as the heir. 6. Also see Ch¡ng Py¡ng-ho (1996, 45).

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woman’s “inside” activities and the man’s representative role were mutually dependent upon each other. That is, as the woman was dependent upon the man who represented her in public, the man was viewed as being dependent upon the woman on the “inside” for his public presentation of self. The idea of mutual dependency between the “outside” and “inside” is evident in the concept of naejo , which literally means “inside assistance.” Hence, strong emphasis was placed on in-marrying wives’ contribution to the men’s success in the “outside” and consequently to the upward mobility of the husband’s family. The rise and fall of the family was seen as dependent upon the self-sacrifice of the married-in woman (Shin 1986, 17). This concept is evident in the strong emphasis placed on the young wife’s responsibility for taking care of ancestor worship and for serving male guests in the “outside” residence, which was called sarang. Having many male guests in the sarang symbolized the generosity of the family head and his unselfish “sharing” of family resources with the community. A woman’s economic and productive role was also important. Work such as weaving, sericulture, dry farming and raising domestic animals was considered women’s “inside” work. Besides, the inside “master” was responsible for the management of the household. Particularly, among the gentry, a woman’s managerial and economic role in the “inside” was marked against the scholar-husband’s non-productive life on the “outside.” Historical data shows that it was not uncommon for the wife in a gentry family to lend money, grain, or cloth (linen and silk) with interest as she saw fit without informing her husband (Shin 1986). As the status of the family largely depended upon the achievement of its male members as recognized by the larger community, much emphasis was placed upon family headship which represented the family to the wider society. Men in the “outside” were considered superior to women in the “inside.” As a representative of the family, the head was paid utmost respect by other members of the family ( chip). Absolute obedience to the kajang was demanded. He was served with the best food at a separate table and everyone in the family used the most honorific language toward him. Man was as high as

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“heaven” and woman was as low as “earth.” When a husband and wife walked together, it was customary for a woman to carry a heavy bag, walking a few steps behind her husband, who strolled emptyhanded. Also, household work for men was almost tabooed. It was a sign that he was dominated by his wife. When the wife was sick or away, another woman was called upon to do the “inside” work. Any expressions of sexual love and intimacy between husband and wife was extremely repressed. Confucianism viewed intimacy and affection based on sexual love as potentially dangerous to the man’s public role. It was thought that intimacy and romantic love between the husband and wife might allow the wife to look down upon and dominate her husband (Pak Yong-ok 1988, 20). It was further believed that the husband might be distracted from the performance of his public duties if he were to indulge in selfish desires (Pak Yong-ok 1988). The man’s pursuit of a woman’s beauty, along with that of material wealth, was considered the enemy of moral politics in the state. Therefore, in pre-industrial Korea, interaction between men and women was very limited: it was ideal for boys and girls to be separated from the age of seven. The man was not expected to frequent the “inside” residence nor women the “outside” residence. Husband and wife, particularly in the gentry class, usually slept and ate separately. This pattern of avoidance between men and women was called naeoehada (men and women keep away from each other; literally, “doing inside and outside”). This gender hierarchy was a product of the particular historical period. The concept of family headship was not well established even in the legal system until the early eighteenth century (Pak Py¡ng-ho 1988, 160). Relationships between the father and other family members had been first conceived of as genealogical relationships, not as relationships between the family head and his dependents. That is, a man had been viewed as father, husband, or son rather than as the head of the family or the successor. Various historical data show that Confucian family rituals and gender ideology began to take root among the elite class from the mid-Chos¡n dynasty onward, when the Neo-Confucian literati began to consolidate their leadership in local

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communities through private academies and village codes. With the establishment of local Confucian society, the practice of Confucian family manners and rituals became prerequisite for the acquisition of status (Song Sunhee 1982, 443-445; Song Chun-ho 1987, 136-285). The continuation of ancestral rituals through generations was the most important agenda for the maintenance of a family’s class standing. Hence, in Korea, unlike in China and Japan, succession to family headship was equal to the inheritance of ancestral rituals (Kim Tu-h¡n 1969, 273; Kim Kwang-Ok 1986, 112; Yi Kwang-gyu 1975, 126). Also, social recognition by the community became essential for upward mobility of the family. Not associating with members of local Confucian society was tantamount to downward mobility (Song Sunhee 1982). Hence the distinction between the man’s “outside” role and the woman’s “inside” work was made more rigidly in the status-conscious gentry family than in the non-gentry family (Song Sunhee 1982, 326). This system persisted into the colonial period from 1910 to 1945. Industrial development and urbanization in Korea, however, destroyed the political and material basis of local Confucian society. Performing ancestral rituals is no longer an important symbol of social status of a family. Nor is Confucian scholarship and expertise in Confucian rituals any longer important for measuring family status. Along with the weakening importance of ancestral rituals, parental authority has been also considerably weakened. These days, young adults choose their own marriage partners and usually set up their own nuclear households upon marriage. Gender roles in the family have also changed. Most of the interviewees, in their thirties and forties, reject the hierarchical model of gender division between “inside” and “outside” in Korea. Using the language of “sexual equality” or “the democratic family,” interviewees are opposed to an arbitrary exercise of authority by the husband. The traditional idea that the husband is as high as “heaven” is not accepted by most young married women. Young wives do not think that they should obey their husbands and resist being ordered around by them. Many of the female interviewees recall that their fathers as being “kinglike” and say they feel relieved when their husbands turn out differently. They believe a husband

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should not be like a “king.” For them, the notion of a husband as “heaven” is “anachronistic,” “feudal,” and “backward.” Instead of the heaven/earth relationship, interviewees stress companionship between husband and wife: “a husband should be like a friend.” Also, men’s work at home is no longer tabooed. Men who live in nuclear families feel freer in doing some housework. Although female interviewees often mention that husbands are reluctant to participate in any chores when their parents are around, the younger generation of men nevertheless expect to do some minor domestic chores which require physical strength such as nailing or lifting heavy things. There are of course various extents to which husbands do housework. Still many do only the minimum or nothing at all. Most interviewees reject the old notion that women should carry things and walk behind men. Nowadays, it is common to see, on the street, husbands carrying diaper bags and babies while wives walk freely. Likewise, the ideology of democracy and gender equality in the middle class legitimizes women’s participation in a public life outside the family. Most interviewees, both male and female, value women’s social and economic activities outside the family. Although most wives do not have any paying jobs, many of them have “work” experience before and express wishes for having “one’s own work.” Even mothers with school children are often engaged in activities such as learning sports, art, and religion. Yet, the segregation of gender roles in the middle-class family is still rigid when compared with the Western counterpart. Men go out to work in “society” while women do most of the housework and raise the children at home.7 The extreme segregation of a husband’s and wife’s social lives in the urban middle class is also striking to most Western observers. Men spend their time in male company to relieve tension from work, women meet their friends separately from their husbands and get out their frustration arising from their family

7. According to recent statistics, married men in Korea spend an average of 22 minutes a day for housework such as washing, cooking or caring for the child (Dong-A Ilbo, 2 July 1997).

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responsibilities. This gender segregation in the middle class is rationalized by a new conception of home. Interviewees often justify a husband’s minimal participation in housework and family life by emphasizing that “home (chip) is a place to rest after work” or “he is tired from work.” A female interviewee’s explanation for getting up to hold her crying baby at night is as follows:
When the baby cries at night, my husband continues to sleep with his back turned against me. At first, I thought he was cold but now I understand that since he must be very tired from work.

It is important to note that she does not say that she picked up the baby because her husband is superior to her or because it is inherently the woman’s “inside” job. That is, the new social division between men and women is now formulated in terms of a work/ home distinction rather than an inside/outside one.

III. A “Communitarian” Work Ideology: “Work Is More Important than the Family” The conception of home as a place to rest cannot be understood without reference to a “communitarian” work ideology. Since the “Democratization” of the late eighties, there has been a growing sense of crisis regarding the erosion of strong work ethics. Nonetheless, the image of white-collar workers in Korea as workaholics is comparable to that of the workaholic Japanese salaried man. Although the importance of work has somewhat decreased the last few years, according to recent statistics, most workers in Korea still rate work as more important than family, whereas those in Japan and Western industrial countries rate the family as more important than work (Maeil Business Newspaper, 16 Oct. 1997, p. 38). White-collar workers in Korea officially work 8 hours a day Monday through Friday and 4 hours until mid-afternoon on Saturday. But interviewees put in much longer hours. When a company is busy, it is common to

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work until past ten or midnight. Even when there is not much work to do, most male interviewees confess, they usually linger around in the workplace about an hour after quitting time, until after 7 or 8. They often spend their after-work hours with co-workers or workrelated people in bars or restaurants. Group trips, parties of various kinds, and other activities sponsored and organized by the company (or small unit of the company) are also frequent. Among the fortytwo men who were in their 30s or 40s, twenty-eight husbands come home after 10 or 11 p.m. more than twice a week and fourteen husbands come home very late at night at least once a week. Underlying the men’s long work hours and extensive after-work socializing with co-workers or work-related people is the holistic view of the wider collectivity outside the family as something transcending individual elements of which the family is comprised. Most male interviewees identify work as an expression of collective teamwork or as membership in a firm.8 A business firm is not viewed as a market society where individuals aim at maximizing profits according to impersonal rules and contracts. Rather, it is viewed as a web of human connections. That is, individual members of the organization are seen as mutually dependent upon each other and one man’s work is not viewed as something isolated from other people’s work. According to interviewees, the functional division of labor in the workplace is not specific and the clear-cut division of “my” work and “your” work is considered somewhat selfish. As a male interviewee puts it, “there is a division of work in principle, but nothing that can be divided into my work and your work in a clear-cut way.” Most male interviewees say that they try to finish their assignments before going home even if it means working late, otherwise other people will have to finish the job. They often use the concept of “organization” (chojik) to express the idea of mutual dependency among people in the workplace. Because of this holistic view of work, it is somewhat taken for granted that the demands of the organization take precedence over
8. A statistical survey by sociologists (e.g. Yi and Ham 1992) also shows that the sense of belonging to a firm is strong among white-collar workers.

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those of family and “private” life. Therefore, even the male interviewees who complains about the marginal time left for family life view some “sacrifice” by the individual family as necessary for the functioning of the larger collectivity. Organization life, in their view, cannot function without the subordination of private life. The historical context of industrialization in Korea in which the ideology of national development has been a driving force tends to strengthen a communitarian view of work. Sahlins (1989) points out that national disgrace is a stage of economic development in nonWestern countries. That is, Western technology and science have different cultural meanings in non-Western countries. In Korea a similar process began when the state took up the task of economic development. The development of commerce and industry acquired a new symbolic meaning as an expression of national strength. After Korea was forced to open its ports around the end of the nineteenth century, the Confucian state’s suppression of commerce and industry was transformed into the ideology of national development in which economic activities were viewed as a means to achieve national strength. The state began to foster the development of technology, industry and commerce, although in the end the state’s attempts to boost the national economy failed to resist the penetration of more advanced capitalism from Japan, China, or Russia (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 296). Early industrialization during the period of Japanese colonial rule was also engineered by the colonial state. The economic development after the 1960s was modeled on this prewar Japanese experience. The Korean state fostered the growth of the private industrial sector based in the rhetoric of national development, which emphasized the sacrifice or subordination of private interests for the wider community, the nation in particular. Business tycoons therefore tend to stress nationalistic, patriotic and community goals to justify their business activities: “Our firm exists for the people and the nation.” Kim U-jung, the president of a leading chaeb¡l, stresses the patriotic meaning of entrepreneurial activities:
We have worked like crazy and we have come to live like this. But

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it was not because we wanted individual reward that we worked. It was the sense of achievement and patriotism that we are contributing to national development (Kim U-jung 1989).

Capitalists’ attempts to invoke nationalistic sentiments is not unique to Korea. But nationalism is an ideology which has repeatedly been expressed by Korean capitalists in order to justify their business activities (Janelli 1993, 109).9 Most male interviewees attach the patriotic meaning to their work, too. They often claim that the rapid growth of the national economy was made possible by those employees who did not go home until after 10 o’clock at night. They frequently complain that younger people are getting more “selfish” by putting family life before work. This collectivistic conception of work is imbued with the Confucian emphasis on men’s moral commitment to the wider community outside the family. The interviewees express the widespread moral sentiment that it is not a good thing for a man to care only about his own family. It is well recognized that a man works in order to support his family, yet it is also believed that a man should not be bound to his family affairs. In their view, a man at work who calls his wife at home everyday just to chat with her is considered to be somewhat “overly concerned about small matters” (tchetchehada) by his colleagues. It is also considered so for a man to miss after-hour social gatherings, unless one has an urgent reason to go home. If one is not finished with his assignment, it is “selfish” to go home at quitting time. However, the man who comes home late from work and neglects his family responsibilities in order to pursue his ambitions is not considered “selfish.” He is viewed as sacrificing his personal life to perform his social duty outside the family.10 Deep involvement in

9. Janelli’s study on Korean conglomerates (1993, 109-115) shows in detail how large companies systematically use various devices to advance the idea that they are devoted to furthering the welfare of the nation. 10. By contrast, in an American company, staying behind in the office, working visibly long hours, could mean incompetence on the part of someone who needs to work much longer than others at the same job (Kanter 1997a, 64).

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family life is considered more or less incompatible with a commitment to the wider community outside the family. The concept of work as an expression of male identity and membership in a wider community manifests itself in that working women are not expected to put work commitments before family life. Married women working in white-collar occupations are to some extent allowed to put their family responsibilities before their work commitments and are not considered “selfish” for doing so. Some of the female interviewees with work experience say that they have been excused to go home after work or even earlier than the quitting time for a sick child or for the preparation of an ancestral rite. But, at the same time, married women are perceived as being less committed to their jobs in the workplace than male employees and discriminated against for this reason. Extremely low representation of women in administrative and managerial positions is a major characteristic of women’s employment in Korea. A high proportion of working women are self-employed or family enterprise workers because such positions give them more flexible working hours. Also, more than half (53.8%) of female employees are employed in occupations where long-term employment policies do not apply (Kim T’ae-hong 1997, 30-31). Female workers in white-collar occupations are concentrated in low-status and low-wage clerical work. Most of them are high school graduates and are expected to quit upon marriage. Only beginning in the 1990s did large business groups start to recruit female college graduates into career-track positions. Still only 3-5% of all managers are women. This figure is even lower than the Japanese counterpart (about 8%) and 70-80% of the female college graduates who are recruited quit their jobs within three years of employment (Chosun Ilbo, 3 October 1995, p. 10).11 The holistic and gendered conception of work leads to the development of strong community ties among male workers in the work-

11. According to the Yearbook of Labor Statistics published in 1988 by the International Labor Organization, 8 percent of managers in Japan are women. This is a very low representation in comparison with Western industrial countries.

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place. Almost every interviewee stresses the importance of human relationships in getting work done in a large corporate organization. According to the interviewees, a boss will not obtain good results if his inferiors do not follow him from their hearts. In other words, work relationships are not viewed as separate from more generalized personal relationships. Interviewees often use the word ch¡ng, which means affectionate feelings among people, to emphasize the human relationships developed with others at work. Family provides a model for community solidarity based on ch¡ng among male workers. Interviewees do not think that the work group should be fundamentally different from the family. In their view, the organization is simply more complex: “the group is more advanced than the family unit.” Co-workers should be like family members. For example, the hierarchical structure of the “traditional” family is viewed as a model for the organization. The relationship between a superior and his inferior is often likened to the relationship between the head of the family and other dependent members (naege ttallin shikku-d£l) (Also see Kim Choong Sun 1992, 193, 213). As a male interviewee puts it, the ideal boss is someone who seems like an “elder brother” (hy¡ngnim) figure:
He [the boss] should be understanding. He should lead his inferiors (araet saram) in informal as well as formal respects. The pragmatic type (shilmuja) can lead in business but he only manages practical [business-related] things. The superior in Korean business should be like “the elder brother” in the Korean family.12

Smooth and solidary (yudae) relationships or “harmony” within an organization, imbued with ch¡ng, are seen as more critical for the success of an organization than the strict application of impersonal

12. This notion of hierarchy contrasts with that of legal authority, which, according to Weber (1946, 295-299), is a major characteristic of modern social organizations. Weber argues that the hierarchy in modern social organizations is founded on the legal system in which “orders are given in the name of the impersonal norm, rather than in the name of a personal authority” (p. 295).

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rules. Interviewees often stress group solidarity within divisions or sections of a company as the basis of hard work and self-improvement:
In the management department, group consciousness ( tanch’e £ishik) exerts a lot of power… Because of group consciousness, you compete with other management offices ( y¡ng¡pso ) and you achieve self-improvement because of this competition. If management offices do not compete with each other, you are not motivated.

On the other hand, the importance of competition among individual workers is downplayed. Having harmonious relationships with other members is more important than being an outstanding employee:
You must become a person who is needed by the organization. You should have a strong sense of responsibility and try to go along with the members of the organization rather than get ahead of them. The growth of the organization helps the growth of individuals. Smooth solidary (yudae) relationships help the growth of the organization… Promotion itself is not a success. The faster you get promoted, the closer you get to retirement. I want to take a normal course. I do not want to look outstanding. It is not helpful to the organization to place an outstanding person in a certain position. The organization gets stronger when individuals work harmoniously… If you are outstanding and get ahead quickly, you tend to have many enemies. When that person makes a mistake sometime later, it can be fatal. The organization does not want to leave important decisions to that kind of person… Is it a real success to pursue interests without having any ch¡ng (affectionate feelings)?… Success means to become a person who is needed by the organization.

This emphasis on human relationships and harmony in the workplace explains why men spend such considerable time socializing with work-related people. If they have meetings early in the evening, they eat and drink together after the meeting. According to the interviewees, eating and drinking together with colleagues, superiors, or juniors in the workplace allows them to release tensions and improve

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communication with fellow colleagues in the workplace: you can talk more easily and freely while you are under the influence of liquor. People who work together in the same section or division of a company occasionally go on weekend trips together without being accompanied by their families. They also play tennis or go hiking together and have beer afterwards. Indeed, there is no clear distinction between work and social engagements. Rather, socializing with colleagues or work-related people is seen as an extension of work. As a male interviewee puts it, “social gatherings in the evening are not exactly work, but promote solidarity for work.” The male interviewees often rationalize discrimination against women in terms of the importance of after-hour social gatherings.13 Women are not able to join freely in these events due to their family responsibilities. Women can not entertain corporate clients by taking them out in the evening, or work overnight, or overtime. Even in occupations such as teaching, where there is no official discrimination based on gender, male teachers are preferred to female teachers on the grounds that female teachers are not able to devote themselves to work. On the issue of why women are not as devoted to teaching, one male high school teacher emphasizes the importance of after-work socializing with co-workers as the reason:
In the evening there are social gatherings among teachers. Half the teachers go straight home. People who work hard do not go home early. You can talk seriously (with other teachers) while drinking. Work depends on how you think. Women teachers go straight home to do housework. You learn about different ways of using teaching materials and methods through talking to other teachers and counselling students.

Working women themselves take a similar point of view. One female researcher for Korean Women’s Development Institute, where the
13. This is in contrast to the American counterpart that excluded women from managerial positions on the grounds that women are “emotional” and “irrational” (Kanter 1977a, 22-23, 106).

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majority of the research staff are women, compares male employees and female ones as follows:
From my own experience of working in this institute for seven years, I think men work harder than women. Women go straight home when the clock hits six. Though, even here there is a group of people who try to get together in the evening for dinner and drinks. In such cases, work goes well. A zone of common understanding is formed. Such a strict distinction between family time and work time among married working women is seen as a sign of weak commitment to work.

Group solidarity among workers is also systematically promoted by business corporations, which attempt to induce greater work commitment. The corporations’ policies on recruitment, training, promotion, and pay all place heavy emphasis on loyalty to the company rather than on specific skills or experiences (also see Janelli 1993, 134-155). Like Japanese companies, Korean companies recruit fresh college graduates and try to mold them into loyal employees. Experienced managers from outside the group are hired only under special circumstances such as when a business group creates a new company but lacks experienced personnel of their own to staff it (Janelli 1993, 139). Similar to Japanese companies (Rohlen 1974), extensive training programs for new employees focus more on general socialization than on specific job skills. Many company magazines feature stories of hard working male employees who put work before family life. Promotion and pay largely depend on years of service (Janelli 1993, 144). Korean companies, like Japanese ones (Vogel 1967), sponsor occasional weekend group trips. They exclude wives from these trips in an attempt to strengthen the solidarity of the men’s community. According to interviewees, women tend to gossip a lot and, when wives are taken on group trips, they create conflicts and divisions among men. That is, wives are seen as a source of potential conflict among corporate men. In general, paternalism and corporate familism tend to be more stressed in large companies than in small businesses. Interviewees themselves

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feel that men who work for large companies tend to work longer hours and socialize more with work-related people than those who work for small businesses. Yet, the holistic and gendered conception of work is found not only among business men and employees of private corporate organizations but also among professionals and bureaucrats who do not work for private business groups. They also conceptualize work broadly as something that includes human relationships with other people outside the family. Even those who are very critical of big business groups and claim to be concerned with “social” problems, view a man’s commitment to his family life as selfish and even antisocial. One male interviewee, concerned with the “democratization” of society, expresses a conflict between his concern for “society” and his commitment to family:
Until I got married and had children, I was not interested in money. Once you have children, you feel a sense of responsibility. These days I even buy clothes for my wife. This may mean that I am now settling down into my family and away from society. Before I got married, I was interested in the problems of our society and got involved with them. But now, the commitment to family life distracts me from those problems. We should be aware of social, political, economic, and environmental problems and make an effort to make a better society.

Thus, in the middle class, there is a normative sanction for men’s hard work. Regardless of the job a man holds, he is expected to spend most of his time working outside the family. And a man’s work outside the family is seen as the expression of his commitment to a wider collectivity. Indeed, mass media idealizes the man who devotes himself to work, making little time for private family life: he leaves all of the household responsibilities to his wife and works for the company or business from early in the morning until late at night. A man’s active social life with colleagues provides him with an emotional outlet for frustrations experienced at work. Fifteen out of

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sixteen male interviewees say that they release the tension and stress arising from work by talking about their troubles to other co-workers rather than to wives, parents, or other relatives. They often become confidant to each other, discussing even family matters. They all say their colleagues understand their feelings better than their wives because they knew what the men’s work life is like. Most men do not talk with their wives about the details of their work or the daily happenings of the workplace. Wives know little about their husband’s daily life in the workplace. However, the emphasis on “harmony” and extensive social relationships in the workplace should not lead to the conclusion that there is no self-interested motivation in the concept of work. Atsumi (1979), in her study of Japanese white-collar workers, argues that Japanese workers’ participation in after-hours socializing is not motivated by workers’ group solidarity or loyalty to the company but motivated by instrumental or pragmatic interests. She might make the same comments about the Korean workers. As in the case of Japanese white-collar workers, the practical benefits of an active social life outside the family are well recognized. As mentioned earlier, good or smooth human relationships with superiors, colleagues, and subordinates are seen as critical for a successful career. Therefore, in order to maintain a position or get a promotion, it is considered essential for a man to socialize with colleagues and business associates until late at night. Also, these opportunities are necessary for gathering information on the happenings of the company. Interviewees fear alienation from co- workers and disadvantage in the race for success as a result of missing the gatherings. Hence, an active community life of man is often compared to “property” by interviewees. Like the Japanese, Koreans view that the young employees, who go home after work, are not only selfish but also unambitious and uninterested in making money. A thirty-six-year-old reporter complained about young reporters as follows:
These days it has changed a lot. Incoming employees try to go home early. They grew up in well-to-do families and are not interested in

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making money. They already have lots of money in the family and their lives are centered around their families. I’ve canceled vacations because of work, these guys go no matter how much work they have because of promises to their wives and children.

In my view, dichotomizing a relationship as either affective or instrumental is a Western dichotomy. When there is no cultural sanction for the pursuit of self-interest, as Bordieu points out, one cloaks personal interests under the rubric of collective action (Bordieu 1977, 38-43). Ironically, the “communitarian” work ideology in the Korean middle class generates competition in society by emphasizing that a man’s successful career is more important for the family than his actual presence or emotional involvement as a husband and father in the home.

IV. Male Headship of Family and Women’s Family Responsibilities The middle-class men who put work before family do not necessarily think the latter as unimportant. Rather, they emphasize their position as a provider and the head of the family (kajang). Most interviewees who accept the primacy of work over family view the man’s hard work and extensive social life as the fulfillment of their role as the head of the family, husband and father. They often stress that they work hard for the family. Because of this, they reason that women should feel sorry for men who come home late rather than get angry at them:
You get relief from the tension of work by drinking together with your friends or colleagues who understand you. Women should feel sorry for men. Being a man is a poor thing. He has to work hard, like a servant…

That is, “working hard” itself is seen as the performance of men’s family role. Despite the decline of the inside/outside distinction, interviewees

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accept the idea that a husband is superior to his wife, at least, as the head of the family. For interviewees, “equality” or “democracy in the family” means that a husband consults his wife on important family matters. In fact, in most cases, it is rare for a husband to make decisions on family matters as he sees fit. Most wives, when complaining about their husbands, focus on commonplace matters such as budgeting, decision making, mistreatment, infidelity and so on. They do not criticize issues such as men’s sole ownership of family property. As the head of the family, the husband/father represents the family to the wider community and society. A man’s role as a family representative becomes most salient when there are big family rituals such as funerals, weddings, or the celebration of the sixtieth birthday. On those occasions, the head of the family receives guests and attends the relatives’ weddings and other family rites as the representative of the family. The husband also deals with government bureaucracies, which are staffed mostly by men. He owns the house and other important family property. Even when a wife’s family buys a house for a newlywed couple, the house will be registered in the husband’s name. In this concept of male headship, as in traditional Korea, a man’s successful career and extensive social life in the public sphere is seen as critical for the status of the family as a whole in the larger society. His first obligation to his family is to be recognized in society, to rise to a high position and to provide for his family. The male interviewees who put work before family life do not think that they have any practical responsibilities for the family other than being the head of the family. For them, deep involvement in family life is indulgence rather than an important obligation. They often remark, “I have nothing to do in the home,” or “I bring in money, so why do I have to work in the home?” Man’s participation in housework at home is considered “help,” not the sharing of family responsibilities. In several families the husband occasionally launders or cleans, but wives also mention that they do it because they “enjoy” it. Some of the male interviewees say outright, “it is no fun” to be home early in the evening because dinner is not ready:

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It is not fun to be home. If I go straight home by 6:30, my wife is surprised and the rice is not ready. As a man spends most of his time in the workplace, he has more things to talk about with people from the office.

These male interviewees, who put work before family, invariably stress that home is a place to rest: a man should be “recharged” at home to go back to work in “society.” After an extensive workweek of socializing, male interviewees usually stay home on weekends to “rest”: they sleep, watch TV, or read even without being bothered by their children. They demand of their wives a “comfortable” (p’yonanhan) family so that they may better concentrate on work in “society.” When the family is “comfortable,” interviewees often mention, a man can have a good social life outside. Male interviewees therefore proudly mention that they let their wives handle all family affairs (chiban il) as they see fit. In their view, the home or family (chip) is the domain of women. Most male interviewees refer to their wives as chip saram, whose literal meaning is the “house person,” rather than as an saram, meaning “inside person,” the term used by the older generation. The concept of chip as the domain of the woman’s responsibility is succinctly expressed in the comment of one interviewee, “man is bound to social life and woman to the chip.” Wives also accept their husbands’ occasionally coming home late as a fact of life. Although emphasizing the importance of companionship between husband and wife, wives do not complain much when their husbands are late due to work, work-related social gatherings or occasional meetings with friends and colleagues. Men’s busy social lives are viewed as “the way it is in society” and not as a matter of personal choice. Importantly, the wives place particular emphasis on a man’s role as the provider. They often justified the husband’s authority in terms of the money he brings home: it would have been impossible to make a living for the children had it not been for her husband’s work. Some of them served the best food to their husband and worried about their husband’s health. They justified their service on the grounds that the husband was “busy” and should “rest” at

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home. In general, a middle-class wife tries to be home when her husband is there and serve him then without the distractions of other work. When making a phone-call to a friend, she makes sure that the husband of her friend is not at home in order to chat more freely. When women get together, they avoid those times when husbands are home. If he is home, those who happen to drop by speak in a low voice so as not to disturb the man of the house. While complaining that their husbands order them around too much, women set out by themselves to ensure a “restful” environment. For this reason, they do not carry out their complaints to an extreme. They often hold back information regarding the children and relatives on the grounds that men must not be made to worry about family affairs. They go so far as to think that as long as the husband provides well, it is not a problem for the husband not to pay much attention to family matters. Hence, as husbands advance their careers, wives diminish their demands. The wife of a newspaper reporter remarks:
My husband comes home late because of the nature of his occupation. He also plays paduk (go), pingpong, and go-stop (an Asian card game). I do most of the housework. He helped me when I was raising the older child. Since the birth of the younger one, he has been coming home late almost every night. I understand. Chiban il (family affairs) is exclusively my work, as my husband is usually tired.

Younger female interviewees, whose husbands help around the house, anticipate busier schedules and less assistance with the housework in the future. On the other hand, frequent meetings with friends that are not perceived as contributing to career success are resented by most wives. This contention often leads to quarrels between husband and wife. The importance of the husband’s hard work and extensive social life for the family are clearly the reasons for inviting the husband’s colleagues and friends to the house and serving them as the most honored guests on occasions such as first-birthday celebrations. Men usually see their colleagues or friends at bars and restaurants after

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work. However, on special occasions such as the celebration of a child’s first birthday or a housewarming party, colleagues from the workplace and friends are always invited to the house and, more often than not, unaccompanied by their wives. Among the families studied, most of the husband’s friends are not considered joint friends of the couple and the wife’s role is mainly to serve the male guests without entertaining much. The wife’s friends, on the other hand, are rarely invited to those family parties or invited the day after.14 Also, when the husband is busy with work, it is considered acceptable for him to miss important family gatherings such as his parent’s birthday party or ancestral rituals.15 Corporate welfare policies on employees are also based on the assumption that male employees participate in a work community as heads of families. To encourage a communal spirit among employees, corporations emphasize that “company and family are not two different entities” (家社不二). Corporate policies therefore often take the form of assisting a male employee’s role as the head of the family. These policies include the provision of company housing, family allowance, family medical services, children’s educational expenses, monetary assistance with family rites such as funerals and weddings and so on (cf. Kim ¢i-my¡ng 1992). For example, LG, a leading corporation in Korea, pays for the educational expense of employees’ children from kindergarten to college and awards personal computers upon entry into junior high school. One male interviewee comments on this practice as “the company playing the role of father.” Furthermore, Korean companies provide their employees with human and material resources on occasions of big family events. When an employee’s parent passes away, the company provides tents, flower wreaths, and any labor force necessary for the preparation of the funeral, in addition to special economic aid. According to interviewees, it is unthinkable and inhumane for a Korean company to do

14. Recently, parents tend to have children’s first-birthday parties in restaurants outside the home. In this case, the wife’s friends are also invited. 15. Mun (1992, 90) also points out this practice in the middle class.

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otherwise. In a way, the contemporary male community at work functions as the male community did at the pre-industrial agricultural villages (cf. Janelli 1993, 177). This practice reproduces the role of the family head who represents the family to the community. Also, recognizing that wives’ “inside” help has bearing on men’s work performances, many companies invite employee’s wives on site in order to inform them of company policies, to show what their husbands do all day long, and to ask them to support their husbands’ careers. One male interviewee, who worked for a banking and investment company, well articulates this interlocking relationship among work, family and gender as follows:
I occasionally have to work overnight in the company. Also, I often go home late because I meet many people after work. It is the extension of my business, since I deal with customers. So, I do not have time to pay attention to my family. My wife wants me to spend more time at home. As you get promoted, you have to attend more meetings. This is necessary for an “organization society” (chojik sahoe). You have to be more devoted to your organization than to your family. You need to think that it is necessary for the family. The family becomes part of the organization or included in the organization. If you do not get “inside help” (naejo) from the family, you cannot contribute to the organization much. The family members need be part of the organization. The family should be the creative basis of a man’s organizational life as well as its source of vitality. The family needs to make some sacrifices. It is not for my own good. I just try to be a man needed by the organization. On the weekend I try not to make any appointments and spend time with my family.

This concept of male headship means that, despite nuclearization, the family is constructed as a collectivity rather than as a center of social life as found in the middle class of Western industrial society. Most Koreans view the separation of conjugal roles in the middleclass family as a “division of labor” between partners rather than as an expression of hierarchy between men and women. Most intervie-

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wees often stress the different contributions made by husband and wife to the family as a whole. In constructing the meaning of the wife’s “domestic” role, emphasis is placed upon helping the husband and children to succeed in a “competitive” society and consequently on her “instrumental” action for the upward mobility of the family as a whole. Wives constantly worry about cutthroat competition in society and try to maximize any opportunities that would help their husbands and children in succeeding. This becomes clear in the female interviewees’ perspectives on men’s coming home late. While male interviewees tend to stress the noble purpose of their commitments to the wider collectivity, female interviewees assess a self-interested motivation underlying men’s active social lives. Female interviewees often comment that they want their husbands to succeed in society rather than to become social isolates. They point out that in order to survive in the competition, a man must get along well with other people in the workplace.
In the workplace a man should compete with his colleagues. A working woman can give up her career and marry, but he cannot give up his career. He has to provide for his family and cannot find a new job in his forties. He has to compete and should not get behind and should adjust to the organizational structure.

Similarly in child-rearing, wives always worry that their children might lag in the race for success. Female interviewees are one in their view that a mother should not raise the children in the old way and should be more active in helping the child to rise in the world. Maternal preoccupation with the success of their children is manifested in the form of their zeal for education. On the other hand, husbands often criticize their wives’ preoccupation with the children’s education, complaining that their wives do not let the children play enough. The conception of the family as a collective but with separate conjugal roles also has led to the widespread view that sees the children’s academic success, which is a measure of family status in Korea, as more important than family togetherness. When a husband

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is transferred to a branch office of his company in a different city or foreign country, it is not unusual for his wife to stay with the children at “home” instead of accompanying her husband. A wife-husband split often happens when the children attend junior or high schools in Seoul. Sometimes, mother and children may move to Seoul or another metropolitan city where good schools are located while the husband continues working in his backward hometown. A wife’s critical role in the household economy is also well recognized. Although the extent of a wife’s control over the family budget varies, the ideal middle-class husband brings home all the money he makes and leaves most of financial matters to his wife.16 In most families, wives make most of the decisions involving household consumption and savings. They often borrow as they see fit when the household needs more money.17 They also have a considerable say in the management of family property, though ownership rights belong to the husband. In a way, husband and wife in the Korean middle-class family are like business partners. Female interviewees themselves often compared being a wife to holding a full-time “job.” If she has to travel, the wife makes sure that her absence will not inconvenience her husband and children. When a wife cannot carry out some of her family responsibilities such as cooking, childcare and so on, another woman outside the nuclear family takes them over. For example, if she becomes ill and needs someone to babysit for her child, it is not her husband but a female relative who is called upon to help. Sometimes the husband is asked to help when there is no one else. But there is a sense that it is regrettable to make men do more than his share. The self-sufficiency of the nuclear family and the sharing of responsibilities between husband and wife, as found in the American middle class (Schneider and Smith 1978, 48; Schneider 1968) are not much emphasized in the Korean middle class. Even women who sup16. This practice is also found in the working class of European households (Tilly and Scott 1978, 205-210). 17. Also see Cho Hy¡ng (1975), Kim Myong-hye (1992), and Mun (1992) for the economic role of middle-class housewives.

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port the cause of gender equality are not different from others in this respect. One female interviewee, who argues for equality between the sexes, comments that the proper performance of a wife’s role is the basis of her self-respect.
I try to do chiban il well since I do not hold any other job… If I were not good at it, it would hurt my sense of pride… You have to do your job before you demand something from your husband.

On the other hand, many female interviewees do not count on their husbands much for emotional support. Although they complain about their husbands’ absence from home, wives often mention sarcastically that it is good not to have their husbands around. Having a husband around means more work for a wife. Wives have their own social network consisting of neighbors, relatives, friends from high school or college, or mothers of children’s schoolmates. These wives exchange useful information on shopping, child-rearing, schools, after-school study groups for children, real estate investments, stocks, and so on. As the children grow up, wives enjoy greater freedom from the daily responsibilities of household management. They occasionally go on group tours together with their friends for a few days. Going on a trip with women only, they say, is more fun than going with their husbands, for they don’t have to serve their husbands.

V. How About Working Women? The cultural discourse that the home is a place to rest in the middle class becomes problematic when the wife also has a full-time job. If a man should rest in the home because he works in society, then, by the same token, the working wife also should be able to rest in the home. Yet, this is not the case. Male headship underlying the conception of home as a place to rest manifests itself in the case of middleclass working women, whose paid work is idealized in terms of “selfdevelopment.”

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Although most Koreans support women’s employment outside the family, the majority of middle-class wives in my sample did not work outside the family. Only 19.1% (nine wives) among the married women, compared to 47.2% on the national scale as of 1990 (Korean Women’s Development Institute, Statistical Yearbook on Women, 1996, 127), were employed full-time at the time. This does not mean that the rest of the married women never worked. Many of them had work experience but quit work upon marriage or at some point in their married lives for one reason or another. Among the working wives were one 50 year-old saleswoman, two high school teachers in their early thirties, one secretary, government employee, nurse, self-employed pharmacist, producer and researcher. The low rate of married women’s economic participation in the middle class is closely related to the marginalization of women’s labor force in the economy, which reflects male-centered work ideology. Many of the female informants who worked before marriage but quit soon afterwards explain their own resignation in terms of not being interested in “working for money.” Most of them held lowerpaying and low-status jobs: seven clerical workers, four secretaries, three saleswomen, two librarians, one nurse and one pharmacist. They did not find their work experience rewarding. It is well acknowledged that women employees are neither paid well nor treated well in the workplace unless they are professionals. Therefore they quit when they marry or have a child. When a husband brings in enough to maintain a middle-class living standard, there is no longer any point in working. This shows that most middle-class women prefer staying home to working out of necessity.18 Given that only the low-status and low-paying jobs are available for married women, “working for money” is not considered a wife’s foremost responsibility, but a temporary engagement which can be discontinued whenever she finds it unnecessary.

18. Other studies (Kim Myong-hye 1992, 162; Mun 1992; Cho ¢n 1985, 156; Kim Chuh£i 1985) on middle-class housewives show that they view wives’ working for money as a stigma to family status.

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On the other hand, middle-class housewives are not satisfied with merely staying home. They feel somewhat empty about their roles as a wife and mother. In particular, women with pre-school children tend to feel a strong tension between family duties and what they would like to do as “individuals.” Many female informants did not want to have many children on the grounds that children hinder their social activities. They expressed strong wishes for their “own work” and missed the “freedom” that they had before marriage. The feeling of emptiness and the loss of “freedom” are further associated with an impression of “getting behind others.” This troubles the more ambitious women who have attained high educational degrees. These women articulate their discontent using the language of “personal development” or “personal growth.” For them, marriage has brought a sudden discontinuation in the social life they had in school or in the workplace, which means discontinuation in “personal growth.” They feel they are getting behind in “personal development,” being wrapped up in child-rearing, while their husbands are getting ahead in society. In their view, a housewife does not have her “own world” (chagi segye ) or her “own work.” Many female informants with young children say that they do not have time for “themselves” and feel depressed when they have to do laundry and other kinds of housework. Women’s social activities for “personal development” range from taking adult education classes such as flower arrangement, pottery, or calligraphy, to getting involved in volunteer activities, to having a full-time job or running a small business. Holding a professional job is seen as the most desirable and prestigious way to achieve “self-development.” Many of female interviewees express no interest in having a job unless it was a professional one. Like wives, most middle-class husbands are not in favor of their wives’ “working for money.” They tend to minimize the economic value of women’s work. Knowing that a married woman can not earn much by working in low-status and low-paying occupations, male informants always asked: “How much money can a wife bring home by working outside?” They stress that they bring in enough money to support their families. Male informants, however, are not

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opposed to their wives’ working if the occupation is professional. For them, a woman’s professional career is not for money but for “selfdevelopment.” The male interviewees whose wives work outside the family often point out the importance of a woman having her “own work” or her “own world.” One interviewee, whose wife ran a pharmacy, told me that his wife’s work helped the household economy. But he also quickly points out the importance of a woman’s having her “own work” (chagi il): “As the children grow up, the wife thinks it is good for her to work. Regardless of her economic contribution to the household, it is a waste (of her talent) to stay home.” For some husbands, “self-development” which matches men’s occupational status, is another virtue of womanhood. These men say that a woman who is just a housewife is not attractive. If a husband engages in extra-marital affairs, the wife might be to blame for neglecting her “self-development.” It is frequently said that a husband becomes bored with a wife who cannot hold a meaningful conversation because she does not know about society outside the family. Women’s “self-development” has now become a wifely duty and a new status symbol in the middle class. Women’s work for self-development, however, is trivialized in the last instance precisely because it is a “personal” matter and not a matter of the family as a whole. Work is considered part of a man’s role as the head of the family. A wife’s career, on the other hand, is viewed as a matter of “personal” interest and subordinate to family interests. That is, unlike her husband, the wife has family duties to discharge, on top of her career development efforts. The comments of the male interviewees in dual career families clearly show how the husband retains authority as the head of the family and demands the wife’s continuing commitment to her family roles as wife and mother by defining the wife’s work in terms of “self-development”:
It is not economic independence that motivates my wife to work. I have enough income to support the family… She wants to work to get a personal sense of self-achievement… Women’s social activities such as studying, or having a job and her sense of personal

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achievement may be a consolation to the individual. But there are things that should be done when the wife is back in the family. Cooking, helping children with homework, cleaning the house, and so on.

Hence, in dual career families studied, the ultimate responsibility for household management and child-rearing falls on the working wife; wives make most decisions on family matters; the husband brings his pay check to his wife, who manages the family budget; if a child is sick for consecutive days, the wife misses work or other female relatives are called in. Priority is given to the husband’s work. The success of the husband who represents the family comes before the wife’s “self-development.” The ideology of women’s “self-development” further works against the employment of middle-class women professionals. Because women are seen as working for personal satisfaction while men are seen as working for the family, men are given priority in hiring: women have husbands to support them while men have to support their families. The solution to the problem of working women, therefore, is to find another woman outside the nuclear family who will take over some of the wife’s family responsibilities. Among fifteen families where wives were or had been employed at one point or another, only three wives received some help from their husbands. The others sought help from the husband’s or the wife’s extended family. It should be noted that the couples who shared housework did so in an early phase of married life. Upon having children, all the working women got help from the extended family for some period of time. Most of them did not delay having children in order to establish their careers, as the mother or mother-in-law took care of the children. Women’s work for self-development ironically leads to the strengthening of women’s dependency upon extended family relationships.

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VI. Conclusion On the surface, the division of gender roles which is rationalized by the conception of the home as a place to rest in industrial Korea appears to be close to a distinction between public and domestic spheres in Western industrial societies. Also, it is not in itself considered the expression of gender hierarchy by most middle-class Koreans themselves. Yet, it is closely tied to a cultural notion of work in Korea, which is rooted in the Confucian conception of a man’s “outside” role. Above all, in premodern Korea, the man who pursued a successful career as a bureaucrat or as a “scholar” outside the family was simultaneously fulfilling his role as the head of the family. More than in China and Japan, pursuing a career in state bureaucracy was the most prestigious way to move up the class ladder while running a family enterprise was despised. Also, as mentioned earlier in this article, men’s community relationships outside the family were critical for the maintenance of family status. Similarly, in modern Korea the conception of work as the expression of man’s commitment to the community outside his family supports the male headship of the family and a strict role segregation between husband and wife. In a way, a man is pushed by the family to compete and to succeed in the “public” sphere. That is, family provides a man with a strong motivation for participation in the wider collectivity outside the family and at the same time fuels competition in the public sphere. Here, as one male interviewee put it, “wives and families become part of the work organization.” Thus, in Korea strict separation between work and family is not pronounced on the level of ideology. Just as men’s “public” role is at the same time “domestic,” a housewife’s “family” role is also dual in nature. It is “public” or “economic” in that it centers on helping the husband and the children to compete in the public world. Middle-class men’s work commitment based on men’s “outside” role is premised on the assumption that they have “nonworking” wives whose family role is clearly defined as helping her husband and children compete well in the

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public sphere of work and education. Cultural emphasis on the wife’s practical contributions to the prosperity of the family as a collective further leads to the construction of gender differences in which the woman actively engages in competition among families for social mobility. As Kendall (1996, 218) points out, the cultural image of a Korean woman is almost the opposite of the Victorian ideal of the lady: whereas the former is competitive and self-interested, the latter is purer and morally superior to men, sheltered against ugly realities of public life. Thus, on the one hand, the Korean case reveals the critical importance of family and gender in constructing the meanings of middle-class “work” in large organizations, which are physically separated from households. This suggests the reconsideration of the popular theory of the emergence of the cultural ideal in capitalistic society which emphasizes a rigid separation between the private and public spheres in the middle class (Rapp 1987; Kanter 1977a). On the other hand, the present study also shows the central role of middleclass work ideology in reproducing the patriarchal structure of the family and gender inequality in society at large. That is, the male headship of family is not simply a survival from “tradition”: it is constituted and reconstituted by work ideology in modern industrial Korea. This raises an issue with the widely accepted view among feminists that the “patriarchal” family, which, in their view, existed prior to capitalism, is the more fundamental source of women’s subordination in capitalistic society. Greenhalgh (1985), for example, argues that gender stratification in the Taiwanese economy originates in the patriarchal family system, which, in her view, has persisted for nearly 2,000 years in China. According to Greenhalgh, parents discriminate against daughters in favor of sons in allocating resources such as education and job training and this discrimination results in increased inequality between sons and daughters in the economy. In Korea, however, well-educated women are subject to discrimination on the grounds that they are unable to satisfy the demands of longterm commitment and loyalty to work community, necessary to organization life. This emphasis on loyalty to the wider collectivity exist-

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