- by Amelia, Canberra Branch
- The Guardian
- Issue #2130
One of the key policy areas of South Korea’s Minjung Party (translated as “Progressive Party”) is fighting for women’s rights, feminism, and the rights of LGBTIQA+ people. This is a hot topic in South Korea given the extreme far-right, anti-feminist conservative government of Yoon Suk Yeol and the People Power Party (PPP). Protests against the now-impeached Yoon were overwhelmingly by women in their 20s and 30s. Teenage women also led the 2008 candlelight protests against US beef imports and unequal trade agreements, and the 2002 protests concerning 2 schoolgirls killed by a US military vehicle. The South is deeply divided over women’s rights. But the status of women in North Korea is rarely discussed; how do women fare in the North?
The story of women in North Korea is an extraordinary one that dates back to the revolution, overcoming Japanese imperialism in the first half of the 20th century, and then US imperialism from the 1950s – the country was carpet-bombed by the US to such an extent that every city in the country, was flattened: 90 per cent of all buildings across the whole country were destroyed. This war crime has not been acknowledged. In the early period of reconstruction after the US atrocities, what was known as the inminban (neighbourhood watch-like form of cooperative local organisation) had women playing a significant role in community leadership.
Then came the Korean Women’s Socialist League, which demanded education, maternity leave and other provisions from the government. The League played an oversized role in the formation of North Korean communist principles. Women also joined the workforce en masse in this period, in many sectors, like journalism, teaching and administration. As Suzy Kim puts it in her fascinating book Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950, women in the revolutionary period went from living a subservient and exploited “family life” to a “socially productive life,” with the right to public office, the vote, and full participation in the everyday life of socialist modernity.
Laws like the Law on Sex Equality in 1946 saw women receive equal rights in all spheres of rights, including free marriage and divorce, equal rights to property and land, and an end to polygamy, arranged marriage, concubinage, and prostitution.
But women’s rights didn’t stop in the revolutionary period up to 1950. The Chollima Movement (“Flying Horse”) which began in the late 1950s saw an upsurge in women’s work as well as the socialisation of housework – the provision of public laundries. In the 1972 constitution women received not just rights but material benefits, including maternity leave without pay, maternity hospitals, free nurseries and kindergartens, and reduced working hours for working mothers. Now, in the Kim Jong-Un era, we are seeing women occupy positions of leadership in the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK). Women workers are glorified in DPRK media.
As feminists in the West, it is easy to overlook the hard work of women in the Third and Second Worlds in women’s social advancement and in fighting for rights that it can be easy for us to take for granted. But in the case of Korea, it is even more inspiring – women engaged in the construction of socialism and communism. The role of ordinary working class women, of Marxist-Leninist women in the socialist countries, is often overlooked. Any discussion of the North is likely to be mocked in the West, where the North stands only for “tyranny” and “evil.” But the contribution of Korean women is real and ongoing. They are the front line of the global class struggle, and we stand with them.
