The Triple Exploitation of Rural Women in Korea

Abstract

The labour experience of rural Korean women contains elements that are very distinctive, in regard both to other sectors in the Korean national economy and women’s labour in core economies. I argue that rural women in Korea are subject to a special model of ‘triple exploitation’. This model of triple exploitation differs from the ‘double exploitation’ model in a number of respects. In the double exploitation model, female labour is essentially wage labour in the capitalist mode of production. Women are exploited both by capital and by men (usually husbands). They are exploited in the sphere of production as workers, but at the same time they are exploited via the sexual division of labour within the household. This double exploitation model is mainly designed to capture the conditions of urban working women, and is not adequate for understanding the condition of rural women in Korea, or women in much of the global periphery. Many, if not most, rural women in Third World countries are still engaged in family subsistence farming, but within national economies dominated by capitalist relations of production, as in the case of South Korea. A special model is needed to understand the labour experience of these rural women of the Third World.