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Girl
servants were a hidden part of women labor forces during the
industrialization period of 1960s and 1970s. / Korea Times File Photo |
By Adrei Lankov
When we talk about the life of the privileged few in bygone eras, be it
Victorian England or the Joseon Kingdom in Korea, we often forget that
living in style would be impossible without the persistent efforts of
the domestic servants who were present in any affluent household.
Korea was no exception. In 1932 a Seoul magazine conducted a survey
among Koreans who had graduated from the junior colleges of specialized
high schools. In those days, when Korea had almost no regular
university graduates, those people could be seen as the closest
approximation to university degree holders and were identical to what
we would describe as ``middle class’’ nowadays. The survey indicated
that merely 7.7 percent of them carried on without any domestics.
Another 44 percent employed one servant in their household, another 44
percent, had two servants. For all practical purposes this means that
nearly every middle class household in the 1930s had one or two
servants.
The servants’ presence was made necessary due to the great amount of
time domestic chores required in a low technology household. At the
same time, their presence would be impossible without a very large
difference in income levels between the underprivileged and uneducated
majority and the small ruling-class minority.
Until the spread of new timesaving devices, which began in the
developed world of the early 1900s (and did not really reach Korea
until the 1960s), housekeeping was both difficult and time-consuming.
It was a hard full-time job, which left women no time for anything
else. Nowadays, cooking rice has boiled down to putting rice into a
cooker and switching it on _ an operation, which takes but a few
minutes at most. A hundred years ago a housewife would have to go to
the well to bring water, fire the hearth, wash the rice and then keep
the fire in the hearth _ taking about an hour, perhaps, all this
activity was dedicated to making a few bowls of `bap,’ (rice). Thus, it
was only natural that women wanted to buy their time off if they (or
rather their families) could afford to do so.
At the same time, the vast majority of the people lived in the
countryside, and they were very poor compared to the privileged and
semi-privileged minorities. Many women from the ``low orders’’ were
ready to become servants for meager salaries, or even for accommodation
and food only. The domestic chores were sometimes the only thing they
knew how to do, and this kept supply abundant and wages low.
In Korea until the late 19th century most landlord households had no
need to pay their domestics. There were `nobi,’ dependent people, whose
position was sometimes described by the contemporary Western observers
as ``slaves.’’ The nobi were actually more similar to the ``serfs’’ of
medieval Europe, but at any rate they could be ordered to do unpaid
work at rich people’s homes. So, every mansion in old Korea was
complete with these unpaid workers of both sexes.
However, in the 1890s the old hereditary distinctions were abolished,
and people were not willing to work for free any more. Thus, paid
domestic service was born in Korea.
In 1927 research was conducted on the situation of the women who looked
for a job in the domestic service industry in Seoul. The survey found
that 80 percent of them were younger than 30. The remaining 20 percent
were largely widows who came to the city in order to support their
children, and sometimes parents-in-law, who had been left behind. There
were men in ``service’’ as well, but if a household could afford only
one domestic, they would choose a woman.
The vast presence of the domestics is hardly a mystery. Back in the
1930s educated people were few and far between, and their education
commanded good salaries. In colonial times a Korean school teacher
would normally make 40-60 won a month, while an ongoing rate for a
live-in servant would be 2-10 won a month. Therefore, every
middle-class household could easily afford a permanent servant, thus
saving a wife from boring and hard household duties. As we have seen,
only a fraction of college graduates did without a servant back in
1932.
The girls usually preferred to go to Japanese households, since the
Japanese had higher incomes and usually paid better wages to their
servants. Around 1930 a servant girl would make 2-6 won if employed by
a Korean family, but 5-10 won if the employers happened to be Japanese.
Since girls were trained to do this type of work from their early
childhood, the employment came naturally and was seen as preferable to
work in the emerging modern industries. In 1930, 27,000 women were
employed in Korean factories, but three times that much, or 88,000
Korean women, were domestics.
It seems that the Korean `servant industry’ reached its height around
1940, and then it began a steady decline. First, World War II and the
Korean War undermined the economic standing of the middle class. In the
1950s there were many countryside girls who would work for meager
salaries, but they could find fewer employers capable of paying even
this amount. When the middle-class was reborn around 1960, the income
difference between its members and humble commoners was smaller and
kept diminishing. Finally, from the 1960s the economic boom produced a
number of new jobs for the young women who, by that time, preferred
factory work to domestic employment. All these factors combined brought
about the near demise of the industry, at least in its classical form.
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul.
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