Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea

In her book Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea, Hwasook Nam provides a masterful portrayal of women factory workers’ century-long activism from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Case studies of two remarkable women activists who staged historical landmark “aerial” protests in 1931 and 2011 inform the book’s title and guide the readers throughout the book. Nam starts with the story of Kang Churyong, who staged a sit-in protest on the roof of the Ulmildae lookout pavilion during the Pyongyang rubber workers’ general strike and ends with the story of Kim Jin-Sook, who climbed a tower crane 115 feet aboveground to protest Hanjin Shipyard’s plan to lay off hundreds of workers. Their stories are as captivating as the key historic moments the book captures: the 1950s factory women workers—yŏgong—in textile production fighting anti-communist repression; the 1970s women...