In addition to the legislation pertaining to marriage, divorce, and gender equality, the Labour Law, promulgated on 24 June 1946, was also premised on the importance of protecting the integrity of the family. This law includes special stipulations for the protection of children and mothers, prohibiting them from ‘toilsome or harmful labour’, in addition to the basic clauses for an eight-hour workday, paid vacations, and equal pay for equal work. The clauses specific to women provide paid maternity leave for 35 days before and 42 days after delivery, extended to 60 days before and 90 days after delivery in 1986 (Jung and Dalton 2006: 750); lighter work for expectant mothers beginning in the sixth month of pregnancy; and nursing breaks for 30 minutes twice a day for women with children under a year old (Pak 1989: 416—18). The law also prohibits pregnant and nursing women from working overtime at night. Maternity was carefully protected and indeed fostered, since women were expected to work while also embracing motherhood. For instance, the government grants ‘special favours’ to families with twins, triplets, and quadruplets, supplying them with free clothes, blankets, milk goods, and other necessities until they reach school age (CEDAW 2002: 26).
While a number of studies have conflated North Korea’s authoritarian politics with patriarchy, a closer look at family dynamics in contemporary North Korean society challenges any easy equation between familism (that is, family centrism) and patriarchy, no matter how hierarchical relations are between family members. Patriarchy can be defined as men’s domination over women and the older generations’ domination over the younger generations in a hierarchy of age and gender for the purposes of maintaining family lineage through the male line of descent. North Korea, however, does not entirely fit this model, despite its hierarchical organisation of society. Extended family and kinship networks do not play a significant social role; the head of household need not be male; and gender roles are not as rigid since women have come to occupy positions that were traditionally reserved for men, even in the military. In fact, a high proportion of households were headed by women in the aftermath of the Korean War as many women were widowed (Lee 1976: 79).
Much of the changes in North Korean family structure and marriage practices can be attributed to the incorporation of socialist principles, which in many instances directly challenged the core principles of patriarchy as shown in Table 8.1.
Certainly, reality on the ground is far from the ideal principles embodied by socialism. Multigenerational households still make up 20 per cent of North Korean society (Pak 2003: 62). In the predominant conceptualisation of the family, the male head of household is still seen as the ‘master’ of the family, whom wives obey as they perform fixed gender roles — taking on most, if not all, childcare and household chores (Pak 2003: 122). Despite the principle of freedom of divorce, it is prohibitively difficult. Moreover, the expectation that the eldest son will take care
Table 8Л Comparison of features in patriarchal family and socialist family structures
Patriarchal family Socialist family
Hierarchy Extended family Familism
Marriage as union of two families; thus, no divorce Family as unit of production Male domination over women Father-son relations
of his parents in old age reportedly continues to some degree since men generally earn more than women. The practice of performing ancestral rites also seems to have been maintained, although in simpler fashion.
Despite the continuities in some aspects of the patriarchal family, the turn toward nuclear families freed women from serving multiple generations in one family as they were encouraged to work outside the home in service of the nation rather than the extended family. The hojok (household registry system), which required a male head of household, was eliminated with the introduction of the citizen registration card on 9 August 1946, thereby breaking down patriarchal kinship ties (Yun 1991: 76). South Korea did not abolish the household head system until 2005 (see Choi in this volume). While the roles of mother and wife are still considered important, these roles are not meant to be limited to individual domestic concerns but expanded to take care of society in the spirit of collectivism (S. Kim 2010). Although filial piety is still lauded as a ‘beautiful custom’ to be preserved as part of a distinctly Korean cultural heritage, in the socialist revolution youth were urged to stop blindly obeying their elders. The generational hierarchies that once existed in traditional patriarchal households, especially manifested in the conflict between the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, have been replaced by an emphasis on the importance of a harmonious collective life, fostered through pressure exerted by groups such as the Women’s Union. Mothers-in-law in multi-generational families have been reported to be helpful with household chores and childcare while their daughters-in-law work outside the home (Lee 1976: 83). Moreover, families often have closer relationships with the maternal side than the paternal side of the family (Pak 2003: 259). While relations with the paternal side involve material and practical support when they are in close proximity, relations with the maternal side of the family involve both material and emotional support, regardless of geographical distance, thus challenging the patriarchal emphasis on father-son relations (Pak 2003: 259).
Most importantly, the national collective takes precedence over the family, and familism is frowned upon as selfish. The kind of familism that was pervasive in traditional patriarchal families was made obsolete with the elimination of property inheritance, which had formed the economic basis for maintaining large extended families. The strong kinship networks sustained by members of the landholding yangban (scholar-official) elite were dispersed early on since such families were tainted as former landlords. Many of them fled to the South shortly after the land reform in 1946 or were relocated to other villages to sever them from their power base. The peasants who took up leadership positions, replacing the former landlords and local elites, lacked the yangban custom of maintaining detailed genealogical records or holding elaborate ancestor-worship rituals. As a result, immediate family relations may be close and simple ancestral rites for parents or grandparents may be performed, but traditional patriarchy involving extended family clans has been superseded in North Korea.
Nonetheless, no legislation or political campaign in North Korea ever denounced tradition or Confucianism per se as in other socialist revolutions where the traditional family was branded as
the source of women’s oppression and condemned as counter-revolutionary (as in China). Rather than the family being held responsible for women’s subjugation, the family came to symbolise the Korean nation. As postcolonial studies have shown in other contexts, women in colonial societies were often seen to embody the nation, with special weight placed on family and gender roles in the construction of a national identity (Chatterjee 1993). North Korea’s Marxist-influenced official discourse targeted ‘feudal and colonial remnants’, and ‘feudal relations’ between men and women, but not tradition. The Gender Equality Law, for example, outlawed concubinage, early marriage, and prostitution as feudal and colonial practices, but nowhere was there any reference to Confucian tradition or the family as a source of social ills.
The state maintained and built on the importance of the family as the building block of North Korean communism (Armstrong 2003: 94—98). Article 23 of the first North Korean Constitution of 1948 stipulated that ‘Marriage and the family are under the protection of the state’. Almost a quarter of a century later, the revised 1972 Socialist Constitution again reiterated the importance of the family by stating that ‘The state pays great attention to consolidating the family, the cell (sep’o) of society’ (Yun 1991: 81). In lieu of the patriarchal family, the nuclear family became the basic ‘cell’ of North Korean society, and the leader’s family was exalted as the model family. The founding leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung (1912—94), and his nuclear family, consisting of Kim Jong Suk (1917—49), his wife and comrade-in-arms during the anticolonial struggle of the 1930s, and their son Kim Jong Il (1941—2011), are often referred to as the ‘Three Generals of Mount Baektu’ in reference to the highest mountain on the Korean peninsula bordering China. Long considered a sacred mountain by Koreans as the place of their ancestral origins, North Korea today venerates Mount Baekdu as the heroic site of Kim Il Sung’s anticolonial guerrilla struggle and Kim Jong Il’s birthplace. The dynastic succession of the leader from Kim Il Sung to his son, Kim Jong Il, and most recently to the grandson, Kim Jong Un (b. 1983), presents a markedly patrilineal model of politics. In this regard, practices which were seen to jeopardise the family unit, including the open expression of sexuality, or divorce, were thus strictly limited as a threat to the nation itself.