Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014. xi, 152 pp. (B&W photo.) US$70.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-5013-1.
When I read Jesook Song’s acknowledgement of the sixteen women whose experiences form the core of her study I knew that this would not be a happy story. Song describes the women as “so strong, genuine, and grounded, despite the ruptures they have experienced between their social consciousness and their individual happiness, between their ideal of autonomy and the realities of financial and moral pressures, and between their loss of social networks and their hope to create new kinds of social support” (ix). She presents the life circumstances of thirty-five South Korean women, all in their late twenties to late thirties at the time of her study, all living on their own, and all of whom describe themselves as “pihon yŏsŏng,” “unassociated with marriage,” in effect single by choice. Most had been student activists in their college days and carried a sense of social commitment into subsequent involvement with the women’s movement or poorly remunerated work for NGOs. They also experienced, with a great deal of ambivalence, a liberal market ideology of consumerism and self-improvement. Although all of the women were college educated, their own earned income relegates them to the category of “new poor.” With limited personal resources, they precariously inhabit a self-defining “room of one’s own” in a real estate market that is skewed against single women. Many are haunted by the prospect of an impoverished and lonely old age.
Well-educated and precariously employed young South Koreans are part of a national and global trend where neoliberal economics favour flexible irregular or part-time employment with only a minimum of social support. In South Korea women are more likely to fall into this pattern than men. Song attributes her subjects’ thirst for independent living to the popularization of liberal ideas, desires, and practices, including feminist consciousness-raising and expanded exposure to Western media in the 1990s. Many women describe solitary living as an escape from family pressure, in particular pressure to marry, and yet, Song notes, most of the women in her study could not sustain an independent lifestyle without the help of their families. Parents, some women claim, are actually relieved to have a fractious or embarrassingly unwed daughter leave home.
South Korean real estate arrangements, combined with irregular or poorly remunerated employment, are at the crux of the problem. Most rental space in South Korea requires an up- front lump sum cash payment, unmarried people under the age of 35 cannot apply for bank loans, and even when they reach the requisite age, single women are required to provide guarantors where unmarried men might not be so asked. Many single women are further hampered by their inability to show a consistent employment record, a consequence of gendered employment patterns in South Korea where women are more likely than men to be partially employed. Song sees the lump-sum deposit system as discriminatory against women and the poor but she recognizes that it is so engrained in South Korean practice that most of her interviewees attribute their own difficulties to personal or generational failure rather than systemic constraints.
Reading of their struggles, I found myself wondering what had attracted these women to their singular lives in the first instance and caused them to persist. Song sees her subjects as caught in a paradox. They have been influenced by a liberal ethos that encourages them to seek happiness in the pursuit of individual freedom, including social experimentation, salsa dancing, aerobics, and foreign travel. At the same time, they are limited by the economic constraints of flexible employment that works in tandem with their idealized flexible lifestyles. In brief, the women seem far from happy. Song describes them as caught between the weighty sense of duty that they carried in the 1980s and the new imperative to enjoy life that they embraced in the 1990s, initially as an escape from doctrinaire and ultimately patriarchal anti-state activism. Politically left and socially liberal, these women are anxious for a new politics which they can engage as individuals, the sort of mellow political expression found in the candlelight vigils and in the public mourning for former president Roh Moo-hyun. But the women find little traction in the contemporary moment; even those who work for NGOs devoted to women’s issues are not able to articulate their own needs as single women, possibly because the dominant South Korean social ethos views them as selfish. Song leaves her subjects in a “place of suspicion and suspension” (95).
This is an account of some members of a pivotal generation of South Korean women and it gains poignancy from the author’s own deep identification with her subjects. Song has a clear sense of her terrain and tells her story concisely and effectively. She offers a reasoned argument about life under neoliberalism in South Korea, a project Song initiated with her first book, South Korea in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society (Duke University Press, 2009). She also contributes a fresh chapter to the unfolding story of South Korean women and begs reflection on the global phenomenon of under-employed educated young adults. What I missed was ethnography. The women’s voices were present but I never felt that I had a clear picture of any one of them, how they lived day-to-day, or why, apart from the few admitted lesbians in the sample, they had so adamantly rejected marriage. Some had recoiled from the “patriarchal” ethos of anti-state activism and from the familial pressures to embark upon a season of arranged meetings leading to possible matrimony, but a more sustained discussion would have been appreciated. Even so, Song made me care—even worry—about her subjects and this is a measure of the ultimate success of her project, requisite reading for anyone interested in the current state of South Korean society and the place of women within it.
Laurel Kendall
American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA
pp. 721-723