The Prospect and Meaning of Marriage among Unmarried Women in Korea: Heterogeneity across Educational Attainment Groups
Lee, Jae Kyung & Bo Hwa Kim. 2015. Journal of Korean Women’s Studies 31(4): 41-85.
This study examines the prospect and meaning of marriage among Korean unmarried women by focusing on educational differences. In-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-two unmarried Korean women in their twenties and thirties. The results show that there are both similarities and differences between groups according to educational attainment. On the one hand, regardless of educational level, most interviewees expect emotional stability and economic security from marriage. They also generally want to pursue their career after marriage. On the other hand, there are group differences when it comes to the prospect of marriage. Highly educated women are more likely to be dependent on their parents, who have enough socioeconomic resources, and thus they are more likely to view marriage as a family project. In contrast, less educated women are more likely to be independent of their parents who lack the resources to support their child`s marriage. These findings indicate that marriage is not a matter of individual choice, rather being constructed as the result of a complex intersection of family background, labor experiences, and socioeconomic structure, implying that marriage plays a significant role in the inter-generational persistence of inequality in the contemporary Korean society. This study extends the discussions on the link between marriage and the reproduction of social class by analyzing prospects for marriage. Furthermore, this study contributes to dismantling prevailing discourses that blame Korean unmarried women for the current low birth rate and delayed marriage phenomenon.
Failure of the Patrilineal Stem Family System?: Familialism and Individualization Among the Generation of Economic Crisis of Korea in 1998
Kim, Hye-Kyung. 2013. Korean Journal of Sociology 47(2): 101-141.
This paper tackles the individualization thesis focusing the change of the familialism among the 50 people who were hit by the East Asian financial crisis in 1998 when they started to enter the labor market completing the college education. The research subjects born in 1975, now in their age of 38, were chosen and analysed based on the in-depth interviews. In Korean they were also called as the generation X who enjoyed the individualism in the former part of the 1990s. The results showed that the familialism as the patrilineal stem family system has become very much weakened. The the stubborn familialist norm with the family strategy of son-centered educational support could not have been properly realized not only among the subjects who couldn’t get married and remained single, but also among the married ones. The married couples could barely make ends meet in their nuclear families with the women working outside homes and the control of child birth. The patrilineal kinship relationship with their birth families tend to be maintained instrumentally when the parents gave them the helping hands for taking care of babies. Meanwhile the unmarried men’s individualization seemed to be mainly caused by their economic instability in the labor market. It was intersected with the education, and so the marriage condition of the men with less education was worse. Even so, some male subjects still showed some kind of the “traditional” familialism as the son of a family. On the other hand the unmarriedness of women subjects had the complexity. Many of them with college education who had been grown as the daughters in the peripheral status in the family could paradoxically have the chances of making the lives of their own, which were a kind of the unintended consequences of the son-centeredness of the Korean family system. Daughters were free in double meanings. They had been given the less educational supports by the parents compared to their brothers, and the more freedom from the expectation of the parents towards the sons as the family successors. Some of them had even the experiences of learning the global world by travel abroad. But their sexual lives seemed to be very limited, and their emotional ties were deeply connected with their mothers. So we can call the recent changes among the unmarried cases as ‘the family-oriented individualization’.
Employment Status and Gender Division of Labour at Home among Dual Earner Couples in South Korea
An, Mi Young. 2016. Economy and Society 112: 13-40.
This article examines employment status and gender division of labour at home among dual earner couples in South Korea. We drew a sample of married couples aged between 20 and 59 who are in paid employment from Korea Time Use Survey. Findings show that in families where a couple has same employment status, husbands employed irregularly spent less time on housework than those with regular employment. In addition, in families where a couple has different employment status, wives with regular employment spent more time on care work than those with irregular employment. This article suggests relative employment status between husbands and wives is important to gender division of labour at home.
