Chained by the Shackles of Culture by Yunseo Park
“Honey, can you get me a coffee?” “Mom! Where is my shirt?” “Mom come on! I need you to take me to my academy!” “Mom, what are you cooking tonight?” “Sweetie, you’re almost thirty already – when are you going to have a baby?”
Even now, the roles that women are asked to play in Korean society are often rigid and oppressive. Women are asked to simultaneously fulfill the part of driver, chef, homemaker, manager, scheduler, mom, daughter, and wife each and every day.
Over the past two decades, Korea has made many progressive changes to enact policies that support women, but the customs and traditions of a deeply-patriarchal past are still rooted throughout Korean society.
Like other nations that have been heavily influenced by the cultural tenets of Neo-Confucianism, Korea has adopted a restrictive view of its women as inferior to men and thus necessarily dependent and obedient. This perspective has shaped the treatment of women in Korea for centuries and has resulted in the relegation of generations of women to a second-class status. While some may believe that this rigid hierarchy has all but melted away, I disagree. My grandmother, like many Korean daughters, spent most of her life earning money in support of her brother’s education. Similarly, my mother – an intellectually and academically-talented woman – gave up an opportunity to attend Korea’s top universities so that her brother could have a better education. Women like my mother and grandmother were taught from youth that the only outlet for success as a woman was through marriage and that the ideal path involved marrying a wealthy man, managing a stable household, and providing educational opportunities for the sons she must bear. This attitude – while expressed more subtly than in the past – continues to project itself onto the newest generations of Korean women as well.
Despite the political changes and attempts to initiate progressive policies towards women, Korea remains a profoundly unequal society when it comes to gender. Korea has some of the highest rates of sexual discrimination, and its glass ceiling index (showing the wage gap between sexes) is among the worst in the OECD. But it is the cultural attitude that continues to be the starkest offender. Success for women is still defined in terms of their husbands and sons. Korean mothers feel pressured to provide a route to elite colleges and academic accolades for their sons. They are judged by others – and, sadly, by themselves – based on their support for the men in their lives, often living only vicariously through the successes of others.
This pressure is even greater on working moms, who are tasked with fulfilling both the role of a housewife and that of an earner. Working women are so stigmatized in Korean society that even other women have internalized a common Korean phrase: “Working women can’t succeed if they get married.”
It is clear that while progressive policies help, such changes alone are not enough to challenge centuries of discrimination. Changing an entire culture is a monumental task, but it is adversity that must be confronted, and such change must be brought by educating and challenging existing norms whenever possible. The road to shifting public perception is bumpy and wild though. After the emancipation of the slaves, many policies were laid down during the Reconstruction Era to promote further equality, but they faced consistent threats from a population that hadn’t yet changed its attitude. In Korea, generations of families didn’t stop bearing children until they’d had a boy, resulting in an almost collective historical bias in favor of the male gender. It has only been a handful of years since the government attempted to rectify the gender gap, and teens today are still normalized to a culture in which mothers exist to “serve.” Challenging the perception must begin with a challenge to history then.
And this challenge is about finding the balance between past and present that allows us, as Koreans, to preserve what is best about our culture while removing what is worst, including a long and tragic history of discrimination against women. By opening a national conversation on equality, hopefully, we can move towards justice – transitioning from wrongs against women to rights for women.