High heels, lace and purses. Over the past few many years, the role of North Korean women and the alternatives they’ll make – including the garments they wear – have modified enormously.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we hear recent research about how North Korean women are driving a brand new type of grassroots capitalism and remodeling the country in the method.
“It is a salutary lesson for all patriarchies. “You shouldn’t lose sight of women,” says Bronwen Dalton. She is head of the management department on the University of Technology Sydney Business School in Australia and, together along with her colleague Kyungja Jung, the writer of a brand new book concerning the role of ladies in North Korea.
Her research was based on interviews with 52 North Korean refugees living in South Korea and China, in addition to findings from three trips Dalton took to North Korea.
North Korea is a deeply patriarchal society, and girls are traditionally defined by two words: mother and wife. But when famine hit the country within the Nineteen Nineties and the general public food distribution system collapsed, women were left to earn money to support their families. And the state, obsessive about controlling men's lives, largely ignored what women did.
Many began working in markets, some legal, some illegal, selling what they might to complement the meager wages of their husbands' factory jobs.
With this shift got here a completely recent lexicon that treated men pejoratively as economic power had shifted. Women are the breadwinners in a really tough economic time, and men were an added treat.
Jung was intrigued when North Korean defectors she interviewed used the word matriarchy. She talked a couple of conversation with a lady in her 50s.
She explained that ladies often say that patriarchy has fallen in favor of matriarchy… And if women were once under the thumb of their husbands, men now fear being thrown out of their homes by their wives.
At the identical time, the number of women's fashion has modified towards being more hyper-feminine. Dalton says North Korean women “will do anything to get a pair of high heels,” they usually wear a lot of jewelry, lace and embroidered parasols.
Lesley Parker
Listen The weekly conversation Podcast during which Bronwen Dalton and Kyungja Jung discuss their research on North Korea, plus an introduction from Justin Bergman, international affairs editor at The Conversation in Australia.
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