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Women in the Sky examines Korean women factory workers' century-long activism, from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on gender politics both in the labor movement and in the larger society. It highlights several key moments in colonial and postcolonial Korean history when factory women commanded the attention of the wider public, including the early-1930s rubber shoe workers' general strike in Pyongyang, the early-1950s textile workers' struggle in South Korea, the 1970s democratic union movement led by female factory workers, and women workers' activism against neoliberal restructuring in recent decades. Hwasook Nam asks why women workers in South Korea have been relegated to the periphery in activist and mainstream narratives despite a century of persistent militant struggle and indisputable contributions to the labor movement and successful democracy movement. Women in the Sky opens and closes with stories of high-altitude sit-ins-a phenomenon unique to South Korea-beginning with the rubber shoe worker Kang Churyong's sit-in in 1931 and ending with numerous others in today's South Korean labor movement, including that of Kim Jin-Sook. In Women in the Sky , Nam seeks to understand and rectify the vast gap between the crucial roles women industrial workers played in the process of Korea's modernization and their relative invisibility as key players in social and historical narratives. By using gender and class as analytical categories, Nam presents a comprehensive study and rethinking of the twentieth-century nation-building history of Korea through the lens of female industrial worker activism.

Winner of the 2023 John K. Fairbank Prize and the 2023 James B. Palais Prize. Women in the Sky examines Korean women factory workers' century-long activism, from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on gender politics both in the labor movement and in the larger society. It highlights several key moments in colonial and postcolonial Korean history when factory women commanded the attention of the wider public, including the early-1930s rubber shoe workers' general strike in Pyongyang, the early-1950s textile workers' struggle in South Korea, the 1970s democratic union movement led by female factory workers, and women workers' activism against neoliberal restructuring in recent decades. Hwasook Nam asks why women workers in South Korea have been relegated to the periphery in activist and mainstream narratives despite a century of persistent militant struggle and indisputable contributions to the labor movement and successful democracy movement. Women in the Sky opens and closes with stories of high-altitude sit-ins—a phenomenon unique to South Korea—beginning with the rubber shoe worker Kang Churyong's sit-in in 1931 and ending with numerous others in today's South Korean labor movement, including that of Kim Jin-Sook. In Women in the Sky, Nam seeks to understand and rectify the vast gap between the crucial roles women industrial workers played in the process of Korea's modernization and their relative invisibility as key players in social and historical narratives. By using gender and class as analytical categories, Nam presents a comprehensive study and rethinking of the twentieth-century nation-building history of Korea through the lens of female industrial worker activism.

Building Ships, Building a Nation examines the rise and fall, during the rule of Park Chung Hee (1961-79), of the combative labor union at the Korea Shipbuilding and Engineering Corporation (KSEC), which was Korea's largest shipyard until Hyundai appeared on the scene in the early 1970s. Drawing on the union's extraordinary and extensive archive, Hwasook Nam focuses on the perceptions, attitudes, and discourses of the mostly male heavy-industry workers at the shipyard and on the historical and sociopolitical sources of their militancy. Inspired by legacies of labor activism from the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods, KSEC union workers fought for equality, dignity, and a voice for labor as they struggled to secure a living wage that would support families. The standard view of the South Korean labor movement sees little connection between the immediate postwar era and the period since the 1970s and largely denies positive legacies coming from the period of Japanese colonialism in Korea. Contrary to this conventional view, Nam charts the importance of these historical legacies and argues that the massive mobilization of workers in the postwar years, even though it ended in defeat, had a major impact on the labor movement in the following decades.

After the Chobang strike ended in 1952 and the industrial relations system was institutionalized following the passage of the labor laws in 1953, it became rare in the remainder of the 1950s and most of the 1960s to see collective struggle by factory women capture national attention.¹ The yŏgong question, together with the visibility of factory women as important social actors, rapidly receded from public conscience as the organized labor movement, led by men, established its control over industrial relations negotiations. When female industrial workers reappeared in the newspapers as militant subjects of labor struggle, it was at female-dominated, largely

In December 1951, when the Korean War (1950–53) was raging in the middle section of the Korean Peninsula, an unusual and rather strange struggle involving workers, the police, and management was happening at the Pusan factory of Chosŏn Spinning and Weaving (Chosŏn Pangjik; Chobang). The struggle was about wall posters (pyŏkpo) that read “Down with Despot Kang Ilmae!” The trade union at the factory originally posted the slogan against company president Kang on walls in the factory, but the North Pusan police, claiming that the posters “contaminated the building,” arrested the union president and five other union officials.¹ Workers

Korea was at a crucial juncture in history in the early 1930s as deepening economic depression and changing Japanese colonial policies generated diverse sets of opportunities and hardships for different groups of Koreans. The peak of the colonial Korean labor movement between 1929 and 1933 corresponded to the beginning phase of ever-tightening state control over subversive anticolonial and leftist forces in Korea as Japan embarked on the disastrous fifteen-year war phase of its imperialist history. A discourse of paehu (literally meaning “behind the back”), which held that behind-the-scenes maneuvering by subversive forces was provoking women’s struggle, emerged as the dominant

The extraordinary struggle of women factory workers that had “coursed through the 1970s, raising sparks (pulssi),”¹ ended rather abruptly by 1982, but in a few years South Korean workers created another extraordinary moment in Korean history in the form of the Great Workers’ Struggle of July–September 1987, which empowered organized labor to a level unimaginable to even ardent labor activists. The swift turnaround in labor’s fortune generated a strong need in the labor movement and among concerned scholars to make sense of, and allocate credit for, workers’ great success. What happened in this process of review and assessment of

In the previous two chapters we followed the stories of Kang Churyong and other women rubber workers of Pyongyang and their relationships with that city’s business elite, nationalists, and socialist activists. Zooming out one step further, we can now explore the larger society’s relationship with Kang Churyong and her fellow women strikers. Knowledge producers and social movement activists of colonial Korea tried to fix yŏgong identity and narrate their miseries and potentials in particular ways. At the same time voices and actions of women workers themselves pointed to a new kind of yŏgong subjectivity that was developing in tension with