Everyday Economies of Survival: Gender in Cold War South Korea (Remote)

Speaker: Eunhee Park, Postdoctoral Instructor, Department of History, University of Chicago

Moderator: Jungwon Kim, King Sejong Associate Professor of Korean Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

Eunhee Park is a historian of modern Korea and gender and a Postdoctoral Instructor in the History Department at the University of Chicago. Her research examines women’s everyday economic practices and domestic life in the context of Cold War capitalism. Her work has appeared in Gender & History and is forthcoming in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She is currently completing a book manuscript on housewives’ financial authority and everyday economic governance in postwar South Korea.

Dr. Park will deliver her lecture, Everyday Economies of Survival: Gender in Cold War South Korea on Monday, April 20, 2026 at 4PM.

This talk examines how South Korean housewives built everyday economies of survival amid the volatility of Cold War developmentalism. During the 1960s–1980s, rapid industrialization and authoritarian developmental regimes transformed national economic structures while leaving many urban households facing chronic instability and recurring “extra-money need.” Drawing on women’s magazines, financial archives, film, and oral histories, I argue that housewives developed adaptive financial tactics that operated as a parallel infrastructure of credit, liquidity, and capital formation.

Through rotating credit associations (kye), covert money management, household purse authority, and monetized side work, women translated economic uncertainty into calibrated sequences of payment, strategic delay, concealment, and circulation. These practices were neither merely informal nor secondary to state-led development; they operated as what I call “purse capitalism”—a grounded form of household capital formation embedded in domestic life.

By tracing shifts from collective credit networks to the 1968 source-of-funds investigations and the 1993 Real-Name Financial Transaction System, this talk reconsiders economic transformation from the household outward. Rather than portraying housewives as passive dependents or speculative actors, it foregrounds their role in making credit, governing liquidity, and sustaining family survival under constraint.

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Host or Publisher Center for Korean Research